Child prodigies rarely become elite performers | Hacker News Reader

Child prodigies rarely become elite performers

economist.com

143 points_bypa151 comments

> Around 90% of superstar adults had not been superstars as children, while only 10% of top-level kids had gone on to become exceptional adults (see chart 1). It is not just that exceptional performance in childhood did not predict exceptional performance as an adult. The two were actually negatively correlated, says Dr Güllich.

Even if "only" 10% of elite kids go on to become elite adults, 10% is orders of magnitude larger than the base percentage of adults who are elite athletes, musicians, etc. This doesn't sound "uncorrelated" to me so much as "not as strongly correlated as one might expect."

And describing something that happens 10% of the time as "rare" sounds a bit weird, like referring to left-handedness (also about 1 in 10) as rare.

Being smart isn’t enough need resources and need to deal with people

It's like those articles that say super high IQ people are not always successful.

So I think human brain development is like some kind of optimization algorithm, like simulated annealing or gradient descent. I think this because there is way more complexity in the brain than there is in human DNA, which has pretty low information by comparison. Anyway, child prodigies occur when the algorithm happens to find a good minimum early on.

Prodigies almost always spend vastly more time doing their thing than the average kid. So it’s not just some random outcome.

That relative advantage goes away as people age and specialize.

Around puberty brain drops loads of connections to become an adult brain.

More than 40% of all synapses are eliminated.

Source? Why would the organism build all those synapses for 14 years just to drop half of them?

LMGTFY:

https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/the-adolescent-...

This is an excellent point! People often forget that something uncommon out of a much larger pool is still larger than anything that comes from a smaller pool (base rate neglect).

https://www.simplypsychology.org/base-rate-fallacy.html

> For example, given a choice of the two categories, people might categorize a woman as a politician rather than a banker if they heard that she enjoyed social activism at school—even if they knew that she was drawn from a population consisting of 90% bankers and 10% politicians (APA).

The general population is much larger than the population of child prodigies.

> The general population is much larger than the population of child prodigies.

have we forgotten Lake Wobegon?

You also need to know the percentage of children that become prodigies before you can calculate exactly how much more likely they are to become elite adults.

e.g. If 1% of children are prodigies, prodigies are around 10x as likely to become elite as non-prodigies.

If 0.1% of children are prodigies, prodigies are around 100x as likely to become elite as non-prodigies.

Or in the rather unlikely case that 10% of children are prodigies, non-prodigies become elite at exactly the same rate as prodigies - 10%.

In addition, there is a vast difference between say tennis, a sport, and chess, a purely mental activity.

A child prodigy in tennis may find that their body didn't grow in such a way to be a pro as an adult. If your opponents are taller, stronger, have better VO2Max, etc. than you as an adult, it doesn't matter how good you were as a child--they're going to beat you as an adult.

Chess, of course, now provides the stark reverse contrast. If you weren't a child prodigy in chess, you simply will not excel against the competition as an adult.

There's a saying about golf that probably applies to chess: The best way to improve is to go back in time and learn it at an earlier age.

This is a story of how one became better golf player by increasing his strength: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr2pgBTRpK4

One can enhance cognitive functions by strength training: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8534220/

Aside from time travel, the best way to improve in very important things is through strength training.

The saying isn't "The only way..." but "The best way...". Of course one may improve with all the things you mention, and it's a tongue-in-cheek statement anyway, but there's a grain of truth to it. I saw it quoted by one of the greatest teachers in golf, Harvey Penick.

Similarly, it's probably not a coincidence that the best F1 driver happens to be the one who started driving karts the earliest (4 years old) and spent the most time doing it out of even all those elite ones.

Instead of tennis I would use basketball.

You can be the #1 rated player up to your last year of high school but if you don't hit the growth spurt required for your position your career will take a completely different turn. Conversely, it is the only sport I am aware of where you have people playing at the highest level who picked up their first basketball at 16

This sounds like Berkson’s paradox.

You are fundamentally misunderstanding the statistics. 10% of top level adults is a smaller percentage of elite performers than should have been represented by the class of hothoused kids. I.e. it should have been 12% or 15%.

I don't think so? If 0.01% of kids are prodigies then the fact that 10% of them go on to become elite adults means that a prodigy has a far better chance at becoming elite than someone taken at random from the general population of kids.

I don't think you would be using the general population as the control group.

You're not going to take elite chess kids and then random kids and compare in 10 years and see anything interesting. Elite chess kids will be better considering most people don't even play chess...

Anyway, I understand being skeptical, and I'm not a fan of pop economics stuff like this, but I still imagine the researchers thought of this.

yeah. child prodigies may just change interest after a while

--Even if "only" 10% of elite kids go on to become elite adults, 10% is orders of magnitude larger than the base percentage of adults who are elite athletes, musicians, etc. This doesn't sound "uncorrelated" to me so much as "not as strongly correlated as one might expect."

The way that I read the original study was that only 10% of elite adults were also elite youth.

Not that 10% of elite youth become elite adults.

That distinction is the key and surprising. Elite level talent and training and dollar spending in the youth is not then well correlated with elite level practice in adults across many disciplines.

As in your country's elite youth training centers (science, music, futbol, Olympic sports, etc) are mostly wasting money.

sort of reminds me of telling kids "You're smart!" vs "good work!"

success for #1 is because of something innate, while for #2 is hard work.

meanwhile failure for #1 has no clear path to success, but #2 is more effort.

As someone who was not a child prodigy, but still closer to one than to normies, I can say that achieving results easily in childhood leads to not developing good discipline and persistence that are crucial in the adult world.

There are more factors that are not easily accessible for both ends of the spectrum, like access to good, personalized education, amount of trauma, and proper psychological support. But the 'discipline' part is what affected me most.

On the other side, maybe those who are more disciplined become real prodigies, and burn brightly because of the lack of social knowledge on how to support them and help to become highly developed adults.

This observation about discipline is perceptive but I have also seen variations of it dozens and dozens of times on HN.

Tons of former gifted kids on here. The gap between assumed potential and actual reality apparently has to get blamed on someone, and that person is the kid themselves.

FWIW I do it too.

All parts seem true to me. Most kids think they were more gifted than they were. Learning to work hard and be persistent was actually more important. A lot of talk about being gifted was an obstacle to that.

We try to praise hard work and downplay the yer so smart talk. I still had get excited when they are lazy smart though.

That resonates with me. Both in the lack of discipline as the adults in my world basically defaulted to, "You're so smart, keep it up!" And -- very much related -- the fixed mindset I developed not knowing until later how to actually study, learn, and practice. It lasted quite long unfortunately as I was a functioning undisciplined, fixed mindset person who could still one-shot stuff reasonably well.

I'd add that in addition to lack of discipline, other factors that might develop are fear of failure, lack of risk-taking, etc

I recall being told by an English teacher in high school once that because it was so easy for me to write something passable, I wasn't trying hard enough to write something excellent. Wish he pushed me harder on that.

Discipline is not the most correct word. Motivation is a better description for the behavior.

As the smartest child in the room you live in a world where the answers always came easy, at least the answers to questions and expectations on above average terms. This sets the elite children up to try less hard on everything because they know in advance they are always going to cross the finish line well before everyone else without effort or preparation.

I can remember being one of these kids myself. My motivation was just wanting to be productively employed and not bored in class, for example employed in a minimum wage high labor job instead of sleeping through honors advanced chemistry. At least then I was challenged.

I also remember leaving visible signs of accomplishment to the attention starved sociopaths. That attention seeking behavior always felt beneath me, infantile even.

I do remember occasionally, very rarely, encountering other elite children who were also not interested in attention seeking behavior. The greatest commonality was excessively low neuroticism. You had no fear, even in very physical terms, which resulted in thrill seeking activities. Many of these people would end up joining the military even after attaining access to elite universities.

These people were never without extended focus or discipline but about half the time were poor performing at academics, as is the case with certain learning disorders like dyslexia.

As someone like you, this isn't the case, because it _entirely_ depends on environment/culture. Not just for you and me, though it's more extreme for us.

I admit I haven't read the full study, but I'm extremely skeptical that the takeaway as given in the article is valid.

Take violinists, for example. Essentially every single world renowned soloist was "some sort" of child prodigy. Now, I've heard some soloists argue that they were not, in fact, child prodigies. For example, may favorite violinist, Hilary Hahn, has said this. She still debuted with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra when she was 12, and here she is performing as a soloist at 15: https://youtu.be/upkP46nvqVI. Nathan Milstein, one of the greatest violinists of all time, said he was "not very good until his teens" - he still started playing at the age of 5, and at the age of 11 Leopold Auer, a great violin teacher, invited him to become one of his students, so he clearly saw his potential.

I have no doubt lots of prodigies burn out. But, at least in the world of violins, essentially every great soloist was playing at an extremely high level by the time they were in middle school.

In contrast, it's rare to find any classical singers who were child prodigies. Whatever skills you may develop as a child there apparently don't transfer well into adulthood. It makes sense to me that there may be fine ear/motorics skills which are far more relevant to violinists, which do transfer.

Upthread someone made the point that adult "physique" for lack of a better word matters more for some pursuits than others. Chess prodigies don't need to grow to 6ft tall, but if a basketball prodigy doesn't get tall enough, he's never making the NBA.

I think the same concept could generalize: for pursuit X, the impact of childhood skill is inversely related to the impact of adult form.

I never got the idea of an art prodigy. It’s like treating violin as a sport but not as a beautiful medium to communicate with fellow humans.

Art still requires technique, and technique takes practice. Words like "prodigy" and "virtuoso" are typically reserved for techniques which take a large amount of practice to get right, like playing a violin. (You would never call someone a kazoo prodigy, for example.)

There are 7 year olds[1] who can play better than I can despite 30+ years of playing piano, and even with fairly dedicated practise the progress is so much slower than someone with actual talent.

I had a friend who could play all the Chopin Etudes at age 9. Some of the best art simply requires a virtuoso to bring it to life.

[1] https://youtu.be/PX57r1l5W3U?si=wiix8NWw_9D4YCCb

why do we never hear of 7 year old bands then? i think there's more to music than just technique and vast majority appreciate the artistic aspect. but i can imagine musicians appreciating the technique.

Are you looking for facts that will contradict your opinion?

Justin Bieber clearly was that. His youtube videos got him discovered at age 13-14.

Vanessa Paradis made her first public appearance as a singer at age 7.

There are several children prodigies I've seen on YouTube (singers, drummers, guitarists). They clearly have such talent that even at young age they do music better than most people would do with infinite amount of practice.

As to your question, the prodigy is, by definition, extremely rare. They clearly exist (Bieber, Paradis) but, by definition, you can't expect to have a lot of them.

And "why aren't 7 year olds headlining for Taylor Swift" is not a fair bar.

There are reasons 7 year olds don't do world wide tours that have to do with things other than musical talent. Like being in school or not being allowed to take a bus by themselves.

you bring a fair point

Michael Jackson is another. And there were child stars in the movies.

One difference is how popular music is produced today. The members of the band are not just performers, and in fact, they're often mediocre instrumentalists and singers. They're expected to create their own material, which probably requires a certain level of social development and experience. The emphasis is on other skills such as creating songs that resonate with the audience, performing on stage, etc.

Did you watch the video? Her expressivity and musicianship is far beyond many adults.. She had also just finished a concerto playing with an orchestra

EDIT Also with band music or non-classical music so much of it is to do with platform and distribution, and 7 year old prodigies don't get much interest outside of talent shows or Youtube. Justin Bieber (as mentioned in another reply) though is a good example of someone who did at age 12

Classical music and popular music are two completely different fields, and there is almost no way to evaluate them interchangeably.

I am a believer that in popular music there is an element of the "X factor" which is something intangible but to do with charisma/stage presence/force of character and that is probably exceptionally rare to find in pre-pubescent individuals and then to commercially market them beyond just a novelty factor - the real problem is distribution if anything

In classical music there is a slightly more "objective" character to performance given the high technical requirement and the audience culturally is more willing to earnestly listen to a child prodigy.

Most, if not all, musicians in any professional symphony orchestra was at one point an unusually talented 7yo.

It just takes many years worth of practice to get from being good by 7 years old standards to being good enough that people buy tickets to see your performance, especially in the classical music culture where skill, or "virtuoso", is everything.

Playing a musical instrument is far more athletic than sports, requires more scientific practice, and is more "competitive." The only difference is the scoring method. Music doesn't test "who can finish playing in the shortest time," but during practice, speeds faster or slower than the original tempo have already been practiced. Sports are about "who can push their limits"; in musical instrument playing, the very act of "practicing a complete, challenging piece" is already a limit. The difference is that it doesn't require pushing further limits.

There might just not be enough spots on top to have every prodigy there

There are no child prodigies yes or no in musical instrument playing. Because regardless of whether one is a prodigy or not, to become a basic,only basic, fundamental performer, one already needs to practice diligently from a childhood.Sometimes it's just a difference in the pieces they practice. Some children played musical pieces when they were young, while others only played etudes. The former might make people think they are child prodigies, while the latter might make people think they are not, but in fact they are the same.

I'm not quite a "child prodigy", but I did skip two grades in math in school. It made me feel very special when it was a kid but as a thirty-something software person I don't think I'm smarter than most of my coworkers now.

I think I was better than most kids at math, particularly algebra, but those kids grew up and caught up and I suspect many of them are as good or better at math than I am. I know nothing about child psychology or anything adjacent, but I honestly think a lot of "advanced child" stuff is just maturity.

> I know nothing about child psychology or anything adjacent, but I honestly think a lot of "advanced child" stuff is just maturity.

That makes me think back to my elementary school, where a lot of the kids who got into the "gifted" program just happened to be, surprise surprise, some of the oldest kids in their grade.

At that age the better part of a year in brain development can be exactly the "edge" one needs to excel. And then it can become self-reinforcing when kids gravitate toward the areas in which they dominate their peers.

FWIW, the test for the gifted program at my elementary school normalized their entrytest results for age.

This doesn't match my experience with that term.

My son is diagnosed with ADHD and high IQ and labeled "gifted". He's very immature, has absolutely no method, is very impulsive and can't maintain focus for more than 20 minutes. He seems very much less mature than his peers in anything.

Yet, he just understands and remembers every single thing at school much better and faster than his peers. So I guess technically that makes him "gifted" but it's not a very useful gift. It just creates problems at school because he gets bored quickly but cannot be given more work to do because he gets exhausted quickly too!

I read recently a title of an article that said "gifted children are special needs children" and that marched my experience.

You should consider medication. I used to be against medication, but after talking with a few of my friends who have gifted children, things like ADHD are extremely common. Avoiding medication and letting them spin in the wind is not a good strategy and it destroys their self esteem. Get as small a dose as possible and then wean him off as he gets older and hopefully his prefrontal cortex will catch up and help regulate him.

Piggybacking here: also consider alternative forms of education. Montessori, Waldorf, home schooling, etc.

Many are more expensive in time and money, but you may find fairly cheap alternatives.

Worth a shot at least.

I think he meant physically mature. Like the brain is more well developed.

As a former gifted child who was emotionally immature and gifted, I hope your kid gets the guidance I never did both to understand his adhd and how it impacts him, but also emotional compassion for himself and from parents about how hard adhd can be

It's a complicated journey but we're getting there. It's not like you immediately figure out the diagnosis and understand what's the best way to treat it.

And every child is different because it's often not just ADHD but also other things.

But we're in a much better position now to help him.

My main point is that from my experience "gifted children" very often come with all other sorts of problems that put them in the category of special needs children and it's not just that they are mentally one step ahead of their peers.

Thinking back to my experiences in the program, there was a huge, readily apparent difference in the IQ of kids in the program versus "gen pop". In a regular class, the teacher would need to spend hours drilling the same concept, and still most kids would hardly grasp it. This wasn't a difference in maturity that could be explained by an 11 month age gap, but a literal IQ diff that persisted for the many years where I saw these peers.

To be fair, in my journey through public school, there was no difference in the math level from one grade to the next. Ok, there was a little, but the teacher was still going through the times tables in grade 7.

I was actually bumped to ninth grade math from seventh grade, so I would have been twelve.

ETA:

Should add that this carried on through high school, and since I finished my math two years early, I took college-level courses for math the last two years.

I missed 3 months of 4th grade. When I came back, the teacher told my mom that I could not continue, because I'd missed 3 months of education. I'd have to finish out the year in 3rd grade.

My mom would have none of that, and demanded I be put back in 4th grade.

And so I was, and it was like I wasn't gone for a single day. The class had not advanced at all.

This was quite unlike university, where I didn't dare miss a single lecture.

I think there’s a significant difference between fourth grade and high school level math, especially the more advanced courses. I got the flu in 9th grade and missed a week of trigonometry. I was able to catch up and it wasn’t the end of the world, but it wasn’t trivial, there absolutely was a “catch up” period.

Agreed university is much harder though.

You were fortunate in attending a better school.

I was an air force brat, and so attended many diverse public schools.

I took 2 years of honors physics in high school. College freshman physics blew through that in 2 weeks. And then I was in deep doo-doo.

I am eternally grateful to Prof Ricardo Gomez, who kindly took the time to coach me one on one. I never thanked him for that, one of my many regrets.

I’m a good bit younger than you (not assuming, I recognize the username :), and I think they have gotten considerably better at putting more advanced kids into classes that challenge them. I grew up in Orlando which historically has pretty poorly rated schools, but I think they were active in making sure the children are put into the right courses. I also think that there’s just more granularity now.

When I went to college, it was definitely tougher, but I was able to pass the freshman physics and multi variable calculus courses first time around, without significant tutoring.

Are you sure about that? Most people don't remember all the math they went through in middle school, typically you go through a ton of concepts including probability and statistics and angles and shapes and so on.

You should have learned roughly what is in this book at grade 7, it includes algebraic expressions, angles, ratios, unit conversions, statistical concepts like mean, mode, bar graphs, probability of dice and coins and so on.

https://archive.org/details/newenjoyingmathe0000jose/page/4/...

Then in grade 8 you'd go on to do those kind of things but a bit more advanced. Most people just forget how much math they learned and think they learned all that in high school.

> Are you sure about that?

I remember it very well. I thought it was crazy they were still doing the times tables.

> this book at grade 7

I don't recall any of the grades going all the way through the book. My high school had an impressive course catalog. It looked pretty rigorous! But taking the classes, how sad they were. The textbook is not a reliable indicator of what was taught - it's more like wishful thinking.

I remember taking sophomore geometry. The teacher gave out a test at the beginning of the year, to measure where the kids were. Apparently I got it all right. The teacher asked me if I'd taken geometry before? I said no, the test was just obvious. It was really sad.

Now, before you think I am some kind of genius, nope. When I arrived at college it was a full on disaster for me. I had no idea how to study. I was way, way, way behind my peers. I needed a lot of help, bad. My roommate sighed at how ill-prepared I was, and coached me through a lot of classes, otherwise I would have been flunked out.

Have things gotten any better? I doubt it. Even Harvard was forced to add a bonehead math class to try to get their incoming freshmen up to speed.

Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed going to school. My friends were there, and we had a great time. Especially in high school, when we worked on each others' cars. I'm still a motorhead.

I don’t want to be too much of a jerk, but I think you might have just gone to terrible schools, or maybe courses have gotten more advanced in later generations.

No.

My friend's child is profoundly gifted (160+ IQ). He is 12 years old and finishing Calculus and next year will be taking college math courses. His friends are a year younger than him and have qualified for AIME since they were 8 years old.

Giftedness is very real, and it's not just "maturity". Their brains are different. Seeing them squabble over math problems, it's like watching people talk a different language.

What do you see as their edge? Is it how easily they memorize things?

They understand things the first time. I remember taking calculus in university and hitting my head against the wall because I couldn't understand the concepts.

This kid and his cohorts, they hear a concept for the first time, and they just get it. Then when it comes to doing the problems, he might struggle a little but then he gets it. He is getting 95% in calculus and the only reason he lost marks is because he made sloppy mistakes.

I took an IQ test about twelve years ago and I also got 160 on the Stanford–Binet [1], so if we are going to use that as the metric I was a “prodigy” as well (though no one ever called me that). I didn’t take calc when I was twelve though, that would have been cool. I had to wait until I was fifteen.

Anyway, if that’s the scale, it still can fit with the “doesn’t lead to exceptional outcomes”. I am a perfectly competent software person, and maybe I even understand some of the mathematics behind it better than the average programmer, but I am still basically just an “adequate” worker, and honestly I am afraid that I have more or less peaked career-wise. I am sure that some prodigies do great but the article seems to indicate that they’re rarely exceptional at adulthood.

[1] honestly I think that IQ is stupid and that it’s dumb to try and distill something as complicated and multi-faceted as intelligence to a single dimension or even a couple dimensions is pretty reductive.

You, my friend, are profoundly gifted, especially if you scored that high as an adult. That said, it only describes how your brain works, it doesn't describe how high achieving you will be. That is an amalgamation of all your life experiences and things like opportunity, perseverance, etc. The tools you have to understand complex things are much wider than a regular person, but it doesn't mean a regular person can't outhustle you. I don't know how old you are, but it's never to late to dust off your tools and give it a go at something more aspirational, if that's something you've always wanted to do. If you're happy as you are, then there's no point because happiness is what really matters in the end.

To be fair, I knew I would be taking the test well in advance, so I took dozens and dozens of practice tests over the course of two weeks. They like to say you can’t study for an IQ test but you can.

I like to think I’m pretty clever, but I almost certainly would not have gotten 160 if I hadn’t gotten the practice test.

Sorry, I meant to add more but got distracted and I can't edit now.

I'm in my mid 30's. I'm happy enough where I am now; my biggest issue has historically been focus and apathy more than understanding concepts, much to the frustration of my teachers in high school. I was that frustrating kid who clearly understood the concepts perfectly fine, and was even fairly active during class, but I wouldn't do my homework so the teachers would be forced to give me bad grades.

I obviously don't blame the teachers for this, they're doing what they have to, but I do sometimes think that the system is a bit too one-size-fits-all, even still. I took advanced classes in high school, I got very high ACT scores (36 in English, 34 in math), but I still have always had middling academic performance because the teachers would be stuck giving me crappy grades.

For reasons slightly involving skill but mostly involving luck, I managed to cobble together a successful software career even after dropping out of college the first time around, worked without a degree for almost a decade, and eventually worked as a practicing software engineer at the senior level at BigCos. I have a bachelors now, and even a masters, and some graduate PhD work (though I didn't finish that, too time consuming while working full time), but these all came after I had established a decent career.

I think that being a little clever [1] certainly helped me through this, but what I think helped me more than anything was the fact that a) I had a geeky hobby of learning how to program when I was fourteen or fifteen that never really went away and that I was able to fall back on and b) dropping out in 2012, which just happened to be the year that pretty much everyone got a smartphone and consequently there was a huge demand for programmers and they were willing to overlook a lack of credentials.

My life has turned out fine; not perfect but certainly better than most people on this planet or even this country so it's hardly worth complaining over. I do wish I had taken school more seriously as a teenager because then I would likely be able to have move into a more mathy-theory-based role, which I seem to be unable to do as of right now [2]; it feels like I'm playing a game of catchup, which isn't impossible but it definitely is harder than if I were able to focus on school full time.

Dunno why I decided to dump my life story at you. Just one of those days I guess.

[1] Though as I said in the sibling comment, probably not nearly as clever as the tested IQ suggests.

[2] No matter how many I apply to, it seems. It doesn't help that every researchey role now is for AI/ML theory which is cool but pretty far from my expertise or the kinds of math I've studied or have any expertise on.

Or perhaps you moved to a professional environment where people are on average much better at math than the average person.

It is not uncommon to hear objectively bright and hard working young people wonder if they have become dumber or if they have been a fraud the entire time, after they leave their high school where they enjoyed being a star student and move to a nice university where they compete with the brightest mind of the entire world. They are not dumb, just not mentally adjusted to an environment where they don't get to be the number one no matter how hard they try.

I have a friend who was a grade school teacher and she said grades K-2 kids are all over the map but somehow by grade 3 they're mostly all at the same level.

Nothing to do with prodigies of course.

Natural ability (physical or mental) is not strongly correlated with the personality traits that enable a person to "perform", "succeed", or "achieve" in society the way it is structured. In fact, they may be inversely correlated (consider how often people in leadership positions are not apparently exceptional).

There's a story about, I think, the kickboxer/fighter Alistair Overeem that he was playing Connect 4, and lost, and kept demanding rematches until he had the winning record. Just a refusal to be the loser. That matches every story I've ever heard about Michael Jordan.

Miserable way to live, if you ask me.

Everybody playing forced games of connect4 is the loser.

The only winning move is not to play.

At the same time, I can refuse to be a loser in chess and I'll still have 0% chance of beating Magnus Carlsen.

I'm very much a proponent of hard work to the best of your ability but I'm also a realist.

I'm pretty good at programming. I doubt Usain Bolt would ever be as good as I am at programming, even if he tried, and I certainly wouldn't be even close to be as good as Usain Bolt in running no matter how hard I tried.

I know how fast I was running in high school compared to 30 of my peers (my class) and there was never a path from there to a world class athlete.

I always think of a kid who was a friend of my daughters. He just really liked winning. I mean, when I was a kid and our team won a soccer game I was happy enough. This kid - if his team was playing a tomato can of a team and the score was 12-0 he was just as ecstatic about making the score 13-0 as was with that first goal. I honestly think he was happier about that kind of game then a struggle to beat a reasonable opponent. Heaven forbid they should lose.

Oddly he drifted away from sports (physically he was too small and honestly fragile - 2 or 3 broken bones before he was 12) and into the arts.

I think there are 0 people in NBA that don't have natural ability placing them in 1% of general pop.

Your statement might be applicable to jobs that can be performed more than adequately by 20% percentile talent but not to most sports or music, which have brutal odds due to "winner takes most" dynamics.

There are 540 NBA players. There are ~40 million men aged 18-35 in US.

To beat those odds you have to supremely talented and supremely hard working.

Contrast this with estimated 1.6-4.4 million software engineers.

You can be mid but hard working programmer and beat brilliant but otherwise flawed programmer (not as hard working, oblivious to politics etc.), for some definition of "beat" (like better pay or higher position in company).

As to people in leadership position: consider that to succeed as a manager / leader is more about being good at politics than at solving complex equations.

Then again, the outsized successes were created by competent leaders: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos.

This article is taking some liberties with the word "prodigy" that I disagree with.

If the way you nurture a talented student is via "intense drilling", I would argue that the student is not a prodigy in the traditional sense, but a talented and determined student who may or may not be dealing with parental pressure.

The actual prodigies I've known absorb information and gain skills without significant effort - I knew someone who enrolled in a calculus class, skimmed through the book in a week or so, and then would only show up to class for tests (which they would ace).

So the article conclusion doesn't surprise me - inflict relentless training on a young talented person and yeah maybe they won't want to do that as an adult.

But as far as actual "prodigies"? There is no burn-out because there is no (or minimal) effort. The choice of whether to stick with an area of interest through adulthood is more of a personal preference than anything ingrained.

As I see it, reaching meaningful progress is a very complex, uncertain and non-deterministic process of which being a high capacity individual is only one of the inputs.

A very intelligent individual can spend decades working on a product doomed to fail. Many bright mathematician might be working right now on a proof of a problem that in the future may be shown to be undecidable. Einstein, according to himself, was almost never the brightest mathematician in the room and yet gave the world a super-extraordinary contribution.

In my opinion, the humbling lesson that child prodigies give us is that we should value as much as possible all the humans involved in the often ungrateful task of trying to advance science. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be the case and society seems obsessed with trying to discard and disqualify the human factor.

Fantastic book called Range that talks about this phenomenon. Surprisingly, the child prodigy to adult superstar pipeline is less common than the generalist to adult superstar pipeline.

Tiger Woods is the classic example of a child prodigy, but it turns out his path is unusual for superstars. Roger Federer’s (who played a wide range of sports growing up until he specialized in tennis as a teen) is more common.

https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/review-range

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41795733

It's not really surprising when it's a few thousand child prodigies competing against 7 billion people for a small handful of slots 10 years in the future. Everyday stuff like depression, changing interests, financial pressures, lack of desire to compete, will knock out more than half of the child prodigies, making room for the other 7 billion people.

It depends on the field, afaik. I know someone who was an exceptional classical pianist, but they told me they knew they'd never make it in that field: They started at age 15, which was much too late to acquire the skills needed. Professional musicians I spoke to agreed.

I thought it was supposedly way easier to develop perfect pitch at a young age, compared to people who learned music later. Between things like that and the "10,000 hours" idea, I think some part of being exceptional is a function of: starting young, natural talent, and parents who can push/enable that skill.

Range goes into this. Epstein talks about Kind and Unkind learning environments.

In Kind environments, the feedback is quick and ranking is easy to know. So the evidence says that the optimal strategy is drill ans kill.

In Unkind learning environments, the feedback is slow and ranking is difficult and untimely. So the optimal strategy is to learn as much as you can in as many very different disciplines as possible.

The paper that the Economist talks about extends this and (paraphrasing) says that the very top elite level, even Kind learning environments turn back into Unkind ones again as you try to push the field more.

I saw an interview with an all-time great NBA basketball player. He was a top high school player and described his childhood like this: When you were at the movies, I was practicing. When you were on dates or hanging out with your buddies, I was practicing. When my family went on a cruise, I was dribbling up and down the hallways. ...

Now imagine the prodigy athlete who goes the movies, hangs out, and relaxes on the cruise. How could they hope to compete?

I recently read an interview Jadeveon Clowney, who was the country's top high school American football player and then the number one pick in the NFL draft. He was widely called a 'freak' athlete. Clowney said he didn't really learn how to understand and play the game until the NFL; until then he could dominate with his physical ability, even playing against elite college players.

He's played 11 years so far in the NFL, which is a long career in an extremely competitive job. We can call him truly 'good'; he was chosen for the Pro Bowl three times, in those years making him > ~85th percentile for his position, but nobody thinks he's an all-time great.

There's not such a clear story about where these people come from. Maybe the basketball player just wasn't as athletic (relative to the population of elite athletes) as Clowney and had to make up for it. Maybe Clowney would have been an all-time great with more work. Maybe there are many other inputs besides work and talent.

The main under appreciated influence in all this is how much talent can reinforce work. There are outliers on either side (pure talent, pure work) if you squint, but ultimately the best of the best are the ones who are extraordinarily talented but put in an incredible amount of work (and are intelligent enough / discerning enough to find the right coaches to work on the right things). From the outside we look at the work as superhuman, but for many "common" people, we all spend ridiculous amounts of time on things we enjoy. The academic finding that I always found the most illustrative of this was that the correlation of IQ to outcome increases after age 18. The environmental influence of your parents goes away, both the overeager parents who push their kids when the kids don't care and the dreadful parents who drag down their kids success.

That’s exactly what Vladimir Feltsman said about me when I was like 8 LOL. He is on video here saying it… “I want him to start playing concerts 3-4 years later but be in business 40 years longer!”

https://youtu.be/lf2DWzQ-5zk

Spoiler: I got into computers as a teenager and my piano career took a nosedive, from Carnegie Hall and Juilliard to like… playing for friends at a house party :)

Crazy stuff, I've been playing for 40 years since I was 3 and I could maybe just about play some of those pieces with a lot of practice!

I hope you can still get some joy from playing, that's probably way more important than whether you made a career out of it or not.

Tiger woods. I can't think of any tennis player who has been in the top 100 for the past few decades who didn't commit to it totally as a young child. Start tennis at 10? Too old. Swimmers. Has anyone stumbled into sporting greatness from being outside the top 5%? Or 1% when they hit adulthood?

So what is being said? A huge amount of elite success is in the hardware, i.e. the body &/or brain. These go through rather large changes between ages 10 an 18. Puberty. This shakes up the ordering among those who showed enough promise to have already committed to becoming elite.

What am I missing here? Seems like this research is nothing more than "Kids change through puberty, the nature and sizes of the changes are a bit of a lottery for each kid." Much like the the genetic factors are also a lottery so you can't reliably predict who is going to be great from the results of their parents. (But if your parents are both 5ft, the NBA seems an unlikely destination for you).

What is being said is not simply that people who engaged in a certain activity since childhood do not become top performing adults. Obviously that happens a lot. But rather that the top child or youth performers are not reliably the ones that turn into top adult performers.

Let me express it another way.

Think of 5 relevant attributes of your body for playing something well.

Guesstimate where they were on the population bell curve when you were 10.

Guesstimate if these would have been on a different spot on the population bell curve for that attribute when you were an adult. Would you have guessed it when you wee 10? Would others have guessed it about you at that age?

Puberty changes you in unpredictable ways. Do we need a study to know that?

Everyone committing to tennis before they are 10 are elite, you wouldn't do it otherwise. Who is the best player of that elite set changes given the great puberty shake up.

You missed the second word in the title, "prodigies".

That was covered just fine IMO. The reaction seems to be "so what?" I think that's a valid reaction. It's a long article to state something obvious, that the important thing about being on your way to greatness is having great talent and training to win starting at an early age, not winning before reaching a certain age.

I had an LLM first pick five figure skaters, and in the follow up query tell me which had wild success before age 12, and only two of the five fit that category, but each started learning at 6 years old or earlier. The other three seem like child prodigies in retrospect to me.

Definitely uncommon, but not unprecedented:

Hakeem Olajuwon - didn't start basketball until 15 or 16.

Kurt Warner - undrafted, returned to NFL at 28.

Francis Ngannou - started MMA at 26.

Dennis Rodman grew up overshadowed by his sisters' basketball skills, and then had some unheard of growth spurt of 8" after finishing high school. He hadn't even played much high school ball.

Both Dennis Rodman and Hakeem Olajuwon are not 5ft, they are very tall and athletic. That combination is more important than basketball skill attained at 18 years of age. These attributes differs from tennis, or chess. Being elite at being both tall and athletic probably changes the most over puberty?

Sure, and if we keep going back in time to perhaps the greatest American athlete of all time, Jim Thorpe - he'd handily be beaten by elite high schoolers today.

Basketball is a general purpose sport. The Claude of it can win. Some other sports such as gymnastics would need something more like the AlphaZero of it to win.

Both of these sports select for different type of body types - what do you mean? Gymnasts are shorter than the average population.

> Basketball is a general purpose sport. The Claude of it can win.

There aren't too many pro-ballers shorter than 5'10" (177cm), and definitely no dominant ones.

If we're defining "general purpose sport" as a sport in which people of all shapes and sizes are able to achieve greatness, then I would say soccer or golf fit that definition better.

Men's soccer in the 2010s was dominated by 2 of the best players in history: Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. There's a 7 inch height difference between the two. Ronaldo is powerful and muscled, Messi is lithe and graceful. Both played in approximately the same position on the field, in the same era. Both were brilliant.

Basketball is probably not a great example since just being enormous gives you a huge chance of making it to the NBA, which I guess is just another form of being a prodigy.

This is a tautology. Child prodigies that are identified often become academics who are railroaded into uselsss irrelevance.

Actual child prodigies like tiger woods or Justin Bieber who were genuinely insanely brilliant at a young age at non academic things went on to be wildly successful.

I think the reality is, if you're too smart than you're going to be easily disinterested in the things that you've been trained for during your entire childhood. Because, you're going to be bored of it eventually!

I remember an interview from current #1 chess grandmaster Magnus Carsen about why John Nunn never became World Champion because he is too intelligent:

> SPIEGEL: Mr Carlsen, what is your IQ?

> Carlsen: I have no idea. I wouldn’t want to know it anyway. It might turn out to be a nasty surprise.

> SPIEGEL: Why? You are 19 years old and ranked the number one chess player in the world. You must be incredibly clever.

> Carlsen: And that’s precisely what would be terrible. Of course it is important for a chess player to be able to concentrate well, but being too intelligent can also be a burden. It can get in your way. I am convinced that the reason the Englishman John Nunn never became world champion is that he is too intelligent for that.

> SPIEGEL: How that?

> Carlsen: At the age of 15, Nunn started studying mathematics in Oxford; he was the youngest student in the last 500 years, and at 23 he did a PhD in algebraic topology. He has so incredibly much in his head. Simply too much. His enormous powers of understanding and his constant thirst for knowledge distracted him from chess.

> SPIEGEL: Things are different in your case?

> Carlsen: Right. I am a totally normal guy. My father is considerably more intelligent than I am.

https://archive.is/dhAJl

Unsafe archive site, as it's still DDoSing gyrovague.com. Don't use archive.is until they resolve it. (Not sure if it's really ever safe now, after this shitshow).

what even is this rabbit hole

See the other comment in this thread. Very disturbing.

Bizarre.

https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-...

There are a lot of off ramps to comfort on the road to greatness. The hypothetical man who is genetically sufficient for the job (a short man will not succeed in many sports nor will a man with a bad voice be a good singer, a creative mind will not excel at the analytical and an analytical mind will not succeed at the creative), and mentally "just gets" the volumes of understanding it takes to be a once in a generation performer of some craft by mid teens or so will in starting down that path will necessarily achieve the intelligence to determine that there are other, orders of magnitude more sure paths to a comfortable life.

OTOH, https://www.newscientist.com/article/2509261-high-achieving-...

Previously discussed (and criticized) at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46722853

Prodigy, even just above normal, children don't own the experience to handle their powers, besides the low motivation that is mentioned. They rarely form a valid, concrete plan to success and let themselves progress only in small steps. They make a few career mistakes early that kill their end result. And some non productive activity will absorb their powers and time (usually a low level job or some form of screen addiction)

Regardless of the basic conceptual point being made (merits of tiger parenting vs. holistic "participation trophy" style parenting), this research doesn't look that convincing.

There's the graphic: "Top 1% cognition aged 12 and top 5% salary mid-30s" which is supposed to be the most dramatic one. So apparently we suddenly just take at face value the criticism "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich"?

Isn't this just Berkson's paradox? If you filter for either exceptional childhood or exceptional adulthood they will appear negatively correlated.

I always think of the Little League World Series when I read about stuff like this; these kids are often peaking early and so rarely make it to the highest levels as an adult. This is either because they quit advancing at the same rate or they've destroyed their bodies before they get to high school.

I think there's been like a handful LLWS winners who have done anything in the MLB and even fewer who have reached the top of pros.

It’s also the case that the LLWS kids aren’t elite prospects because it’s a geographic lottery of affiliated leagues. Its more about keeping people watching ESPN5 than actual talent scouting.

> I think there's been like a handful LLWS winners who have done anything in the MLB and even fewer who have reached the top of pros.

If the LLWS winners are a sample of N kids, then your statement is even more true for any random sample of N kids. Which is to say, LLWS may give you a big advantage, but not the truly massive advantage that would be required to make you a shoe-in.

In the past 50 years, not a single chess world champion started playing chess after the age of 10.

I suspect the article is playing some games with statistics, and in any case I hope people don't come away from this article with the idea that "you can become a chess world champion even if you never touched chess as a child!"

That has very simple answer - they are not used on persistent work since childhood, everything comes easy when they are young and smarter than everyone else. When things will start getting harder, lack of discipline and lack of coping mechanism for ventilation of mental stress will catch up with them.

For the super-prodigy category, someone like Mozart or Chopin, who could compose symphonies or polonaises at the age of 8, it's almost certain to maintain their elite status in adulthood (as opposed to someone who just plays the piano well or skipped a class or two in elementary school).

Maybe this can be explained by drift in what it means to be a "superstar" at different stages in life. In the beginning it's maybe mostly about the skill, later things get more complicated (media, money, negotiations etc) and what made the prodigy becomes relatively less important.

I’ll do you one better - elite performers rarely become child prodigies

Isn't it just plainly that the "top" doesn't have enough space, even if every single one of them would be exceptional ?

"Child prodigies are more likely to become elite performers" is an equally accurate and less misleading title.

far more likely

Equally imprecise.

“Child prodigies are more likely to become elite performers than they are to become non-elite performers”

“Child prodigies are more likely than non-child prodigies to become elite performers"

Which is it?

Neither. That's what reading the article is for.

My comment was on the attempted retitling of the article. Agree that neither represent the actual article.

10% seems like an incredibly high rate when it comes to becoming elite at something.

The article is a paradigmatic example of innumeracy.

10% of prodigies becomes 10% of elite, whereas (whoknows)% of (general_population - prodigies) becomes 90% of elite.

How big is elite? How big is prodigies?

Well, for a start, I guess we can assume that size of elite == size of prodigies, because 10% == 10%.

But what is that size compared to general population?

If it's 1%, then 99% of muggles compete for slots in 0.9% of the population, so, hey, a prodigy is 11 times more likely to become an elite than a muggle.

If it's 0.1%, then a prodigy is 111 times more likely to become an elite than a muggle.

If it's 10% -- well, that's kind of stretching the definition of both prodigy and elite, isn't it?

tl;dr -- article is crap; research probably is, as well.

At least for chess the article mentions that they considered the top 10 players in children and senior categories. This would indicate that prodigy chess players are millions of time more likely to become elite compared to the general population.

Exactly. If their metric implies that 1 of the top 10 prodigy chess players became 1 of the top 10 adult chess players, and that holds down the line, then a prodigy has a 1 in 10 chance of becoming a top player, but a muggle has a 1 in 889 million chance.

To be a top child player, you need talent, recognition of that talent, and investment of time and energy.

So, who's to say that the time and involvement didn't make them better as adults than they would have been?

ISTM that if you groom 10 children and even one of them outperforms a billion other potential players, you've done well, even if they had some latent talent to start with.

They claim to "prove" that catering to young talent is counterproductive, but this certainly doesn't prove it.

And part of their "proof" is that generalist sportsmen in youth do better as adults than specialist sportsmen in youth. This is beyond stupid -- to be a generalist youth sportsman typically means that the parents have invested significantly more time, energy, and money, and it's pretty obvious that effort in related fields usually pays off well, and most sports don't run all year, and it's useful in physical endeavors to make your body move in different ways.

It is trivially accurate for them to mention that the possibility of burnout is a real thing, but it is also risible to discount the positive benefits of sustained attention and effort.

What is the ratio of child prodigies to elite performers?

I mean it makes sense. Keep in mind that:

1. There's a lot of competition in many elite fields, and a decent percentage in both groups aren't going to make it anyway.

2. Being good at something as a child doesn't mean that's your passion or the thing you want to devote your life to. Plenty of these prodigies may want to get into different fields they're not naturally gifted at instead.

3. Being really good at something as a kid can make it hard to learn the discipline needed to stay on top when things get tougher. I'm not a prodigy, but many of the things I did well at in school/college are things I did worse than expected at in unversity, since I wasn't motivated/disciplined enough to get everything done on time.

4. Some fields require physical capabilities that a child prodigy may not grow up to have, like certain sports.

Is this just a failure in our school system?

Partially. Being gifted is special needs education. And the average K-12 in the US is not equipped to provide that for that special need, especially in a post No Child Left Behind era.

A lot of adults conflate giftedness with maturity and expect the kid to act like an adult, combined with the pressure to perform and an identity built around being gifted...it fucks with development.

There is a reason why depression and suicide in adults can be correlated with formerly gifted children.

Not only are they not equipped to provide for gifted students, they're scarcely equipped to educate basic students to the already-low bar of grade-level expectations.

Depending on the year and test, four in ten struggle with basic reading or basic math. That's not even the pressure of high expectations, but just the pathetic state of US culture around educational attainment, expected behaviors, etc.

Because most societies and cultures are optimized to snuff that out.

Being smart is not good enough. Being motivated and willing to work at it makes the difference.

I once knew a fellow who was exceptionally smart. He tried all kinds of schemes to make a go of his life, but when the going got tough he'd always quit.

Ted Kaczynki was a child prodigy.

He was also abused in a psychology study at Harvard when he was 17, which may have been part of the CIA’s MK Ultra drug experiments. Maybe he would have done it all the same or not in the absence of that, who knows.

Why child prodigies rarely become elite performers

I understand this is typical HN auto-edit.

Flagging as article is paywalled with no way around, and there doesn't seem to be any way around the paywall now that archive.is is a DDoSer.

https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-...

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