> 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.
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).
> 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.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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).
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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"?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!”
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Being smart isn’t enough need resources and need to deal with people
This sounds like Berkson’s paradox.
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 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.
I'd add that in addition to lack of discipline, other factors that might develop are fear of failure, lack of risk-taking, etc
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 might just not be enough spots on top to have every prodigy there
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).
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.
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.
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.
Miserable way to live, if you ask me.
Everybody playing forced games of connect4 is the loser.
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.
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.
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.
FWIW, the test for the gifted program at my elementary school normalized their entrytest results for age.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What do you see as their edge? Is it how easily they memorize things?
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.
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.
Isn't this just Berkson's paradox? If you filter for either exceptional childhood or exceptional adulthood they will appear negatively correlated.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Bizarre.
https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-...
what even is this rabbit hole
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.
OTOH, https://www.newscientist.com/article/2509261-high-achieving-...
Previously discussed (and criticized) at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46722853
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"?
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.
> 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.
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.
Isn't it just plainly that the "top" doesn't have enough space, even if every single one of them would be exceptional ?
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 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.
I’ll do you one better - elite performers rarely become child prodigies
"Child prodigies are more likely to become elite performers" is an equally accurate and less misleading title.
Equally imprecise.
“Child prodigies are more likely to become elite performers than they are to become non-elite performers”
Vs
“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.
far more likely
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
What is the ratio of child prodigies to elite performers?
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.
Why child prodigies rarely become elite performers
I understand this is typical HN auto-edit.
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.
Because most societies and cultures are optimized to snuff that out.
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.