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She said "talent can be developed" in multiple presentations and interviews. Here's one example[0]:

>Carol Dweck: ", when students had more of a growth mindset, they held the view that talents and abilities could be developed"

An interpretation can be that one can have talent_level=100 which can then be developed into talent_level=200.

In contrast to Dweck, the people emphasizing definition #2 of ranking "talent" are usually talking about the innate aptitude that "can't be taught". Talent is not a "learnable skill" but an unchangeable raw baseline of aptitude.

Dweck is not wrong in how she frames "talent" (hey let's empower people to improve themselves). However, it's worth pointing out that different people attach very different semantics to the word "talent". This makes various books and blog posts look contradictory.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/12/how-pr...




>She said "talent can be developed" in multiple presentations and interviews.

I think she's simply being informal. Right after your quote she says:

>With a growth mindset, kids don’t necessarily think that there’s no such thing as talent or that everyone is the same, but they believe everyone can develop their abilities through hard work, strategies, and lots of help and mentoring from others.

The way I always read her work is: If a person has talent, having a growth mindset is much more likely to realize the talent than a fixed mindset.


>I think she's simply being informal.

No, she explains that talent is not fixed in multiple presentations.[0] To paraphrase one of her examples, "Michael Jordan wasn't particularly talented at basketball; he _became_ talented."

>The way I always read her work is: If a person has talent, having a growth mindset is much more likely to realize the talent than a fixed mindset.

Right and I agree with it but that doesn't change the meta discussion that people leave out about "talent".

She can be "correct" about "developing talent" using that type of framing (which agrees with Gladwell, Coyle, Duckworth, etc) while at the same time she doesn't point out that "talent" is also used by others as a word that describes ranking of innate aptitude which cannot be changed by a growth mindset nor explained by "practice". (For example, an 8-year old child prodigy that has mastered differential calculus even though he didn't have 10000 hours of math practice that the 19-year olds in college still struggling with remedial algebra had.)

[0] https://youtu.be/-71zdXCMU6A?t=2m58s


I'll concede that she plays fast and loose with the term.

The reason I'm pushing back is that as we are talking about talent in the innate sense, there is (AFAIK) no scientifically valid way of measuring it (beyond perhaps a binary measure). So taking a stance either way on whether it can be developed further is a bit problematic. I'd be curious to see how her actual journal papers discuss the matter.




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