

10,000 hours vs genetics - Xcelerate
http://www.sportsscientists.com/2012/03/10000-hours-vs-training-debate-no.html

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sytelus
After I read Outliers, I actually believed 10,000 hours myth for sometime
until I realized Gladwell is journalist who can convince you with any argument
with series of anecdotes as opposed to scientist who gathers data and
calculates stats. The turning point for me was mountaineering training which
IMO is one of the most demanding "sport". It was very quickly apparent to me
that for same amount of conditioning efforts I was no where close in
performance to people who were "born with it". As I read more books on
mountaineering it was clear that elite or even moderately competent people in
this field has significantly larger lung size, fast lactic acid clearance and
extremely efficient slow burn metabolism. Most of these comes from genes and
with practice you can improve things to some degree and get much better with
it but you simply can't climb 8000m without Oxygen like Ed Viester did or do
North Face under 2.5 hours like Ueli Steck or speed climb 3 major Yosemite
walls in 24 hours like Dean Potter does.

All nature vs nurture debates end in one simple conclusion: It's not neither
nor or either or, it's both.

~~~
clicks
Okay, so I've been meaning to get this off my chest -- I'm a bit peeved by the
fad of deriding Gladwell for a panoply of accounts. All of a sudden it seems
that everybody's hopping on the cool wagon where the new thing is scorning
Malcolm Gladwell. The 10,000 hours model is rather loosely made in the
Outliers book. He does not say '10,000 hours exactly' will give you worldclass
skill in area x -- he says roughly 10,000 hours, with expert instruction,
constantly pushing the boundaries, etc. will get you mastery.

Just like Norvig does not say 10 years exactly will make you a worldclass
programmer. [1] It's said in loose terms. Basically, it's just a more
marketable and fun way of saying 'Practice makes perfect' -- and I applaud
both Gladwell and Norvig for once again saying it again and inspiring people
to really work hard at whatever they want to be good at.

[1] <http://norvig.com/21-days.html>

------
a_bonobo
>Consider this: height is a pretty straightforward characteristic, and it's
known to be highly heritable (tall parents = tall children). In fact, 80% of
the variance in height is known to be genetic

The genetics of human height is much more complicated than he summarises here.
In short, environment has a lot to do with height, and there's regression
towards the mean too, which leads to children of tall parents being smaller
(but still relatively tall). Wikipedia has a good article on it (citing 60-80%
heritability): <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height>

