

Talent matters - sun123
http://mobile.nytimes.com/article?a=870400&f=28&sub=Sunday

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tokenadult
Previous submission of canonical URL, with comments:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3257339>

Response piece to the two authors of the New York Times opinion piece, by a
leading researcher on the subject, as submitted to HN:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3258576>

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rayiner
One of the things that I hate about journalists is they often don't see that
their commentary has no relation to what the source is saying:

"He adds that intellectual ability - the trait that an I.Q. score reflects -
turns out not to be that important. 'Once someone has reached an I.Q. of
somewhere around 120,' he writes, 'having additional I.Q. points doesn't seem
to translate into any measureable real-world advantage.'"

Yes, IQ isn't that important. Once you're in the top 10% in terms of IQ, it's
really just about hard work!

~~~
gwern
I didn't think these were journalists writing; Hambrick and Meinz were
involved in some of these studies, if you google for them.

> Once you're in the top 10% in terms of IQ, it's really just about hard work!

Did we read the same article? IQ still matters past the top 10%!

> The remarkable finding of their study is that, compared with the
> participants who were “only” in the 99.1 percentile for intellectual ability
> at age 12, those who were in the 99.9 percentile — the profoundly gifted —
> were between _three and five times_ more likely to go on to earn a
> doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or
> publish a literary work.

That is, a 0.8% difference in percentile ranking increased the specified
output by 300-500%. Now what do you think a 10% percentile ranking difference
would imply?

~~~
KeithMajhor
> That is, a 0.8% difference in percentile ranking increased the specified
> output by 300-500%. Now what do you think a 10% percentile ranking
> difference would imply?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation>

The difference in intellectual capacity between the top 10%, 1% and 0.1% (or
90, 99, 99.9 percentile) isn't necessarily proportional to the "percentile
ranking difference".

~~~
gwern
I realize that, but it doesn't matter to the mistaken point the parent was
making. If anything, considering the diminishing returns on IQ points or
percentiles strengthens the point: by the usual argument that each percentile
measures less real difference in intelligence (which I agree with), that means
that the change in output is even more astounding! Going up 0.8% of the
population yields you 3-500% increase in output, and this is in the part of
the population where that IQ change ought to be _least_ important. We ought to
see much larger gains going from, say, 91th to 92nd percentiles, with less
gains for each step upwards - but we don't.

No matter how you cut it, shifting less than a percentile and getting the
measured increase is dramatic. (So dramatic that I can't help but wonder if
there are non-intelligence explanations - could it all be due to Matthew or
network effects?)

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6ren
So, practice accounted for 50% of success; working memory accounted for only
7%. Of course talent matters. Hard work matters more.

A hard worker with less talent will beat a talented slacker [tortoise & hare].
But a talented worker beats everyone. No surprises here.

However... if you work hard, other talents you do have may eventually find an
application/be revealed [ugly duckling], because depending on the situation, a
flaw can be a gift (and vice versa). So in hindsight, it may turn out that you
were the talented one after all.

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kenjackson
i'm curious as to how their "core working memory" theory jibes with work
showing that chess grandmasters could remember complex chess configurations if
they were configurations that could occur in real chess games, but with random
board placement they could do no better than ordinary people.

Is it that certain people who look at numbers more are able to construct
patterns in digits where others wouldn't, but may not be able to do the same
with a sequence of pictures or words.

My point, I don't think they've done enough to disentangle potential
dependences.

~~~
gwern
Remembering board configurations is not a key competency of chess grandmasters
- the board is usually right in front of you, after all. It's perfectly
consistent for chess grandmasters to be both above average in working memory
and also have long-term memory encodings optimized for meaningful board
positions (but not random positions).

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balloot
This seems like a deeply flawed study. Their definition of "talent" is
"performance on tests of working memory"? That just appears to be totally
bunk.

I also think that the "spend 10,000 hours" thing is flawed, in the fact that
you generally only spend 10,000 hours on something you are very interested and
talented in. Basically, it is very hard to separate "hard work" from "talent",
because most people only really work hard at things they're talented at.

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ColinWright
Single page:

[http://mobile.nytimes.com/article;jsessionid=5AD0C1E4FC0A984...](http://mobile.nytimes.com/article;jsessionid=5AD0C1E4FC0A984AE4CCD72DF111DBBC.w5?a=870400&single=1&f=28&sub=Sunday)

