Comment by Jimmy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jimmy | Hacker News Reader

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>>Gifted children who have a noticeable head start and whose skill development begins remarkably early _do not_ usually end up being game changing professionals in their respective fields.

>Really now?

Um, yes? Are you challenging the article's claim here? Depending on how strictly we're defining "game changing", only a small handful of people, even those who were "gifted" as children, ever accomplish anything really notable.

You can look at this [1] followup of "mathematically precocious" youth, for example. Around 10% ended up tenured at a top-50 university or became CEO of a Fortune 500 company. It is unlikely that anyone in the other ~90% is doing anything "game changing". Not even everyone in that 10% group is doing something "game changing".

[1] https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/01/Article-PS-Lubi...

I see two problems with this.

1. You're defining "gifted" in a much narrower way than the article's arguments. Being a high achiever in math doesn't really encapsulate the meaning the article assigns when it creates a gifted vs. creative dichotomy.

2. It's pretty pointless to talk about the achievement of one group without comparing it to your control group. Do you think 10% of the general public is tenured at a top-50 university or a CEO of a Fortune 500 company? What about 10% of the creatives the article lauds? You know, without seatbelts there's only around 25 deaths per billion vehicle miles in the US. Nevermind that seatbelts cut that rate in half. . .

I interpreted the parent comment's "Really now?" as being more like "No duh!" In other words, pointing out that, within some fairly large group of people, only a very small percentage end up being "game changing professionals" is pretty obvious. The author's whole line of argument is pretty absurd - if you find a group where "only" 8 out of 2000 people become Nobel Prize winners (nearly half a percent!), where only 870 people ever have won the Nobel Prize, it means that group is leaps and bounds above just about everyone else in doing whatever makes Nobel Prize winners.

Are you joking? Jeff Dean fails by your metric of "game changing", and so do almost everyone at Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple, except for the 6 people at the top of the hierarchy. You think Larry and Sergey ar slept responsible for Google's game changing inventions?

10% is a shit load.

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