Wow. I can barely make a rectangle in Blender.
This person, especially given their age, is extremely talented!
This person, especially given their age, is extremely talented!
There's your problem, try making a cuboid instead.
Of course a rectangle only exists in 2D space :)
Genetics is different: You're 6'7" tall, giving you a physical advantage at basketball. When you say someone is "talented" at a sport or intellectual pursuit, are you talking about the same physical (or mental) advantages?
Exceptional aptitude only makes sense measured against the median performance. So yes, of course you'd observe or otherwise measure the subject somehow. But from there, if you come up with some concrete measure of ability (easier in some fields than others), you can work backwards to try to identify and isolate biological and environmental components.
Some random examples from a quick google: chess correlations with different intelligences (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...), genetic factors helping chess and science ability (https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4425/14/1/204), music and genes plus practice (https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-014-0671-9).
There is a much bigger discussion on this exact topic here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10519-009-9260-5
Or a Wikipedia summary of an opposing viewpoint, that talent is NOT involved at all, only practice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practice_(learning_method)#Del...
TLDR aptitude at something is usually a combination of many things, from genes to hormones to upbringing to deliberate practice.
Yes, we have vague concepts like "talent" and "intelligence" that are often hard to nail down, and used lazily in day-to-day life to mean whatever the speakers wants it to mean. But you can still reframe it in a more precise way, like "Is ability at X activity partially heritable/genetic?" or "Given a group of people practicing Y similarly for Z duration, do they arrive at roughly similar outcomes?"
There's nothing mystical about any of this. It's the same sort of work as trying to trace the genetic components of anything we experience, whether that's aptitude or disease or personality or behavior. At the extreme ends, it's easy to see this across species; why are some so much faster, or able to solve certain kinds of problems, or can navigate by starlight, or can sleep half-awake, whatever.
I think the counter view -- that humans alone, of all the animals, are created absolutely equal and environment alone shapes our outcomes -- is far more mystical. That requires the belief that the brain and mind is some sort of super-natural device not subject to normal biological evolution, replication mistakes, natural selection, etc. If talent didn't have a biological component, we should be able to train everything from apes to whales to do exactly what we do, given enough practice.
"Talent" is the genetic component of the advantage. What's so hard to understand?
it may well be that there are genetic differences. but until we have proof and the ability to measure the difference, i also think that believing in talent being genetic is dangerous as it holds back people who are perceived to be untalented. if i believe that the talent of my kids is genetic then i will be less likely to try to foster them to do better. this is especially dangerous for teachers.
our society suffers a lot from believing that people are poor because they have no talent to do better. and worse some apply this based on race. we can talk about talent being genetic when we no longer have poor people and have abolished all racism, but until we have done everything we can to allow everyone to develop their talent, we risk misusing this belief as an excuse not to support people to do better because we lack the believe that they even could do better.
https://www.teds.ac.uk/about-teds
I think it can be simultaneously true that we suffer from believing ability is partly inherited, and also that we live in a world where that's actually the case. Though I also think it's cruel to tell a man with an IQ of 87 who's working as a chicken processor that the only reason he's not a Harvard professor is a bad education, bad parents, and his own failings.
how would telling them that the reason they are not a harvard professor is because they don't have the talent for it be any better?
what's cruel is that we tell them that they have no hope because their circumstances are beyond their control instead of supporting them with the resources they would need to develop the potential that they do have.
all that statement is doing is looking down on them, quite regardless of what factors determine their potential.
the problem is that people look for evidence of talent when we still don't know how to measure it. we simply have no idea whether the work in this competition is the result of talent or other factors. but we decide that these kid have talent and that other kids don't, when it's possible that others could create a similar work if they just had been given the opportunity.
the discussion about talent gets in the way of helping people to develop.
see also the discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38287294
btw: i am skeptical about twin studies being enough to give us the answer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_study#Criticism
Yes, some older studies used odd statistical modelling. Yes, the specific number they put on heritability might be biased by a few factors. Yes, people lie on self-report surveys. Yes, adoption studies are biased by who agrees to sign up. Yes, in utero conditions falsely appear as heritability in twin studies. These are all valid criticisms in that they affect the precision of the measurement, but they're not enough to fully write off heritability as a whole. We've identified SNPs that correlate with IQ and education attainment, too, so there's an obvious mechanism.
I think it's better to tell people the truth: achievement is a murky blend of nature and nurture interacting together, the factors seem to be important in different proportions for different people, and we only understand it imprecisely and at a population level. Further complicating the matter, ability at birth can be broken down into heritability and environmental factors before birth. Our chicken processor probably tried his hardest and can feel good. His daughter can do better if she's lucky and works hard. There's no need to take an extreme view where "talent" (meaning something like potential at birth) must be 0% or 100% of achievement, or to tell that to people, because from what we know it's somewhere in the middle.
Neither am I arguing for total genetic determinism, just that the statement "it may well be that there are genetic differences. but until we have proof..." is ignoring the very real proof that cognitive traits (IQ and Big 5) are heritable to some extent. Even Turkheimer grudgingly admits that if you grab a bunch of IQ-correlated SNPs they can "predict about 10 percent of the variance".
Weighing in on the 0% genetic side is an oddly strong position to hold, just as 100% would be.
Talent does exist, even though effort is certainly a major contributor to the result. If you task two people, with and without talent, with accomplishing the same project, one will complete it better than the other, given both place reasonable effort into it.
Motivation and drive
Time and resources
You can pick one of those, and that alone can yield decent results. But when you combine them all, that's when you get truly exceptional results.
I cannot fathom that you genueinely believe every single human being is as good as each other at everything and it's just down to the amount of work you put in. Absolutely ridiculous position.
That’s an opinion, not a scientifically-asserted fact.
> I cannot fathom that you genueinely believe every single human being is as good as each other at everything and it's just down to the amount of work you put in. Absolutely ridiculous position.
It’s good to admit you aren’t capable of understanding something, but then you have to work on yourself to understand it. Once you do, then you can juge it.
I think imagination is like language you see stories of children abandoned and who never learn to speak when they are adults they lose the ability. With imagination I think you can develop it as a child but it has to grow as you do. If you don't do that whatever it is that generates imagination doesn't develop in you.
Also ChatGPT writes pretty good instructions for you to get started.