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Comment by hnarn | Hacker News Reader

When you say "these guys were in a position to win local and regional powerlifting competitions with basically no training at all", do you have any similar examples for things like chess tournaments? Because if not, you're kind of disproving yourself. Of course genetics can assist you in becoming a good chess player but I have a hard time seeing how a genius who never played chess before just sits down, learns the game and then beats a grand master on the first try through genetics alone.

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I think there should be at least somewhat of a distinction between athletic events and other activities. Not to dismiss the technical complexity of a deadlift (especially at those poundages), but it's fair to assume most people have picked up an object off the ground. Through general human movement they have more experience/practice with the activity as opposed to chess or the piano

There are numerous cases in mathematics. I can't put names on incidents but:

* The schoolboy who realised the algorithm for adding the integers 1 - 100.

* The UC Berkeley Graduate student who solved 2-3 "extra credit" final exam questions ... only to discover they were previously unsolved proofs.

Chess isn't an area I'm closely familiar with, but there absolutely have been prodigies there as well. Many in music.

FYI, the schoolboy is CF Gauss, early 19th century German mathematician who did... tons of stuff. (That's why so much in mathematics and physics is called "Gauss" or "Gaussian.")

The graduate student was George Dantzig. While I think Dantzig is certainly an example of extraordinary natural talent, if your parent comment was looking for examples of talent manifesting itself before any training at all, I don't think this qualifies. As a grad student in math, Dantzig had already spent years studying mathematics by this point.

Thanks, I suspected someone would provide the names.

On Dantzig: there's training, and there's the capability to come on a problem cold, treat it as an ordinary exam question, and find a solution within a day or so, to something which had dogged the rest of the maths world for years or decades.

I'm not denying that Dantzig had had formal training by this point. But he'd also accomplished in small time what others hadn't in big.

Yet he exceeded hit professor and many experts in the field while he was still a student.

> * The schoolboy who realised the algorithm for adding the integers 1 - 100.

Gauss

> * The UC Berkeley Graduate student who solved 2-3 "extra credit" final exam questions ... only to discover they were previously unsolved proofs.

George Bernard Dantzig

Thanks to you as well.

"Because if not, you're kind of disproving yourself. Of course genetics can assist you in becoming a good chess player..."

I don't understand how I'm disproving myself. I was trying to disprove Ericsson's claim that genetics play basically no role in successful performance, and I think my examples adequately illustrate that in at least some cases it actually does play a very large role.

The fact that no one is a great chess player with no practice is irrelevant. As you acknowledge that genetics can help with chess, it seems you actually agree with my point over Ericsson's.

There were some studies on chess that seemed to imply that some people reach a certain level after 3k hours and some don't reach it after 30k.

I don't have the link on hand right now but I could find it tomorrow...

Is this it?

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289616...

Highlights • Gf, Gc, Gsm, and Gs all correlated positively and significantly with chess skill. • The relationship between Gf and chess skill was moderated by age and skill level. • Chess skill correlated positively with numerical, visuospatial, and verbal ability. Abstract Why are some people more skilled in complex domains than other people? Here, we conducted a meta-analysis to evaluate the relationship between cognitive ability and skill in chess. Chess skill correlated positively and significantly with fluid reasoning (Gf) ( = 0.24), comprehension-knowledge (Gc) ( = 0.22), short-term memory (Gsm) ( = 0.25), and processing speed (Gs) ( = 0.24); the meta-analytic average of the correlations was ( = 0.24). Moreover, the correlation between Gf and chess skill was moderated by age ( = 0.32 for youth samples vs. = 0.11 for adult samples), and skill level ( = 0.32 for unranked samples vs. = 0.14 for ranked samples). Interestingly, chess skill correlated more strongly with numerical ability ( = 0.35) than with verbal ability ( = 0.19) or visuospatial ability ( = 0.13). The results suggest that cognitive ability contributes meaningfully to individual differences in chess skill, particularly in young chess players and/or at lower levels of skill.

The names look familiar. Too bad the .pdf is not accessible.

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