Child prodigies rarely become elite performers
economist.comhttps://archive.md/dhAJl > Around 90% of superstar adults had not been superstars as children, while only 10% of top-level kids had gone on to become exceptional adults (see chart 1). It is not just that exceptional performance in childhood did not predict exceptional performance as an adult. The two were actually negatively correlated, says Dr Güllich. Even if "only" 10% of elite kids go on to become elite adults, 10% is orders of magnitude larger than the base percentage of adults who are elite athletes, musicians, etc. This doesn't sound "uncorrelated" to me so much as "not as strongly correlated as one might expect." And describing something that happens 10% of the time as "rare" sounds a bit weird, like referring to left-handedness (also about 1 in 10) as rare. This is an excellent point! People often forget that something uncommon out of a much larger pool is still larger than anything that comes from a smaller pool (base rate neglect). https://www.simplypsychology.org/base-rate-fallacy.html > For example, given a choice of the two categories, people might categorize a woman as a politician rather than a banker if they heard that she enjoyed social activism at school—even if they knew that she was drawn from a population consisting of 90% bankers and 10% politicians (APA). The general population is much larger than the population of child prodigies. "Child prodigies are more likely to become elite performers" is an equally accurate and less misleading title. Equally imprecise. “Child prodigies are more likely to become elite performers than they are to become non-elite performers” Vs “Child prodigies are more likely than non-child prodigies to become elite performers" Which is it? Neither. That's what reading the article is for. far more likely The article wants me to sign up to read it, so forgive me if it already says this, but you also need to know the percentage of children that become prodigies before you can calculate exactly how much more likely they are to become elite adults. e.g. If 1% of children are prodigies, 10% of prodigies become elite, and 0.9% of normies become elite. If 0.1% of children are prodigies, 10% of prodigies become elite, and 0.09% of normies become elite. Or in the rather unlikely case that 10% of children are prodigies, non-prodigies become elite at exactly the same rate as prodigies - 10%. This sounds like Berkson’s paradox. It's like those articles that say super high IQ people are not always successful. So I think human brain development is like some kind of optimization algorithm, like simulated annealing or gradient descent. I think this because there is way more complexity in the brain than there is in human DNA, which has pretty low information by comparison. Anyway, child prodigies occur when the algorithm happens to find a good minimum early on. Prodigies almost always spend vastly more time doing their thing than the average kid. So it’s not just some random outcome. That relative advantage goes away as people age and specialize. In addition, there is a vast difference between say tennis, a sport, and chess, a purely mental activity. A child prodigy in tennis may find that their body didn't grow in such a way to be a pro as an adult. If your opponents are taller, stronger, have better VO2Max, etc. than you as an adult, it doesn't matter how good you were as a child--they're going to beat you as an adult. Chess, of course, now provides the stark reverse contrast. If you weren't a child prodigy in chess, you simply will not excel against the competition as an adult. Being smart isn’t enough need resources and need to deal with people As someone who was not a child prodigy, but still closer to one than to normies, I can say that achieving results easily in childhood leads to not developing good discipline and persistence that are crucial in the adult world. There are more factors that are not easily accessible for both ends of the spectrum, like access to good, personalized education, amount of trauma, and proper psychological support. But the 'discipline' part is what affected me most. On the other side, maybe those who are more disciplined become real prodigies, and burn brightly because of the lack of social knowledge on how to support them and help to become highly developed adults. That resonates with me. Both in the lack of discipline as the adults in my world basically defaulted to, "You're amazing! Keep it up!" And -- very much related -- the fixed mindset I developed not knowing until later how to actually study, learn, and practice. It lasted quite long unfortunately as I was a functioning undisciplined, fixed mindset person who could still one-shot stuff reasonably well. This observation about discipline is perceptive but I have also seen variations of it dozens and dozens of times on HN. Tons of former gifted kids on here. The gap between assumed potential and actual reality apparently has to get blamed on someone, and that person is the kid themselves. FWIW I do it too. Natural ability (physical or mental) is not strongly correlated with the personality traits that enable a person to "perform", "succeed", or "achieve" in society the way it is structured. In fact, they may be inversely correlated (consider how often people in leadership positions are not apparently exceptional). There's a story about, I think, the kickboxer/fighter Alistair Overeem that he was playing Connect 4, and lost, and kept demanding rematches until he had the winning record. Just a refusal to be the loser. That matches every story I've ever heard about Michael Jordan. Miserable way to live, if you ask me. Being smart is not good enough. Being motivated and willing to work at it makes the difference. I once knew a fellow who was exceptionally smart. He tried all kinds of schemes to make a go of his life, but when the going got tough he'd always quit. Fantastic book called Range that talks about this phenomenon. Surprisingly, the child prodigy to adult superstar pipeline is less common than the generalist to adult superstar pipeline. Tiger Woods is the classic example of a child prodigy, but it turns out his path is unusual for superstars. Roger Federer’s (who played a wide range of sports growing up until he specialized in tennis as a teen) is more common. It's not really surprising when it's a few thousand child prodigies competing against 7 billion people for a small handful of slots 10 years in the future. Everyday stuff like depression, changing interests, financial pressures, lack of desire to compete, will knock out more than half of the child prodigies, making room for the other 7 billion people. It depends on the field, afaik. I know someone who was an exceptional classical pianist, but they told me they knew they'd never make it in that field: They started at age 15, which was much too late to acquire the skills needed. Professional musicians I spoke to agreed. I'm not quite a "child prodigy", but I did skip two grades in math in school. It made me feel very special when it was a kid but as a thirty-something software person I don't think I'm smarter than most of my coworkers now. I think I was better than most kids at math, particularly algebra, but those kids grew up and caught up and I suspect many of them are as good or better at math than I am. I know nothing about child psychology or anything adjacent, but I honestly think a lot of "advanced child" stuff is just maturity. > I know nothing about child psychology or anything adjacent, but I honestly think a lot of "advanced child" stuff is just maturity. That makes me think back to my elementary school, where a lot of the kids who got into the "gifted" program just happened to be, surprise surprise, some of the oldest kids in their grade. At that age the better part of a year in brain development can be exactly the "edge" one needs to excel. And then it can become self-reinforcing when kids gravitate toward the areas in which they dominate their peers. To be fair, in my journey through public school, there was no difference in the math level from one grade to the next. Ok, there was a little, but the teacher was still going through the times tables in grade 7. Tiger woods. I can't think of any tennis player who has been in the top 100 for the past few decades who didn't commit to it totally as a young child. Start tennis at 10? Too old. Swimmers. Has anyone stumbled into sporting greatness from being outside the top 5%? Or 1% when they hit adulthood? So what is being said? A huge amount of elite success is in the hardware, i.e. the body &/or brain. These go through rather large changes between ages 10 an 18. Puberty. This shakes up the ordering among those who showed enough promise to have already committed to becoming elite. What am I missing here? Seems like this research is nothing more than "Kids change through puberty, the nature and sizes of the changes are a bit of a lottery for each kid." Much like the the genetic factors are also a lottery so you can't reliably predict who is going to be great from the results of their parents. (But if your parents are both 5ft, the NBA seems an unlikely destination for you). What is being said is not simply that people who engaged in a certain activity since childhood do not become top performing adults. Obviously that happens a lot. But rather that the top child or youth performers are not reliably the ones that turn into top adult performers. Let me express it another way. Think of 5 relevant attributes of your body for playing something well. Guesstimate where they were on the population bell curve when you were 10. Guesstimate if these would have been on a different spot on the population bell curve for that attribute when you were an adult. Would you have guessed it when you wee 10? Would others have guessed it about you at that age? Puberty changes you in unpredictable ways. Do we need a study to know that? Everyone committing to tennis before they are 10 are elite, you wouldn't do it otherwise. Who is the best player of that elite set changes given the great puberty shake up. Definitely uncommon, but not unprecedented: Hakeem Olajuwon - didn't start basketball until 15 or 16. Kurt Warner - undrafted, returned to NFL at 28. Francis Ngannou - started MMA at 26. Sure, and if we keep going back in time to perhaps the greatest American athlete of all time, Jim Thorpe - he'd handily be beaten by elite high schoolers today. Dennis Rodman grew up overshadowed by his sisters' basketball skills, and then had some unheard of growth spurt of 8" after finishing high school. He hadn't even played much high school ball. Both Dennis Rodman and Hakeem Olajuwon are not 5ft, they are very tall and athletic. That combination is more important than basketball skill attained at 18 years of age. These attributes differs from tennis, or chess. Being elite at being both tall and athletic probably changes the most over puberty? Basketball is a general purpose sport. The Claude of it can win. Some other sports such as gymnastics would need something more like the AlphaZero of it to win. You missed the second word in the title, "prodigies". That was covered just fine IMO. The reaction seems to be "so what?" I think that's a valid reaction. It's a long article to state something obvious, that the important thing about being on your way to greatness is having great talent and training to win starting at an early age, not winning before reaching a certain age. I had an LLM first pick five figure skaters, and in the follow up query tell me which had wild success before age 12, and only two of the five fit that category, but each started learning at 6 years old or earlier. The other three seem like child prodigies in retrospect to me. Regardless of the basic conceptual point being made (merits of tiger parenting vs. holistic "participation trophy" style parenting), this research doesn't look that convincing. There's the graphic: "Top 1% cognition aged 12 and top 5% salary mid-30s" which is supposed to be the most dramatic one. So apparently we suddenly just take at face value the criticism "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich"? Unsafe archive site, as it's still DDoSing gyrovague.com. Don't use archive.is until they resolve it. (Not sure if it's really ever safe now, after this shitshow). Maybe this can be explained by drift in what it means to be a "superstar" at different stages in life. In the beginning it's maybe mostly about the skill, later things get more complicated (media, money, negotiations etc) and what made the prodigy becomes relatively less important. I always think of the Little League World Series when I read about stuff like this; these kids are often peaking early and so rarely make it to the highest levels as an adult. This is either because they quit advancing at the same rate or they've destroyed their bodies before they get to high school. I think there's been like a handful LLWS winners who have done anything in the MLB and even fewer who have reached the top of pros. > I think there's been like a handful LLWS winners who have done anything in the MLB and even fewer who have reached the top of pros. If the LLWS winners are a sample of N kids, then your statement is even more true for any random sample of N kids. Which is to say, LLWS may give you a big advantage, but not the truly massive advantage that would be required to make you a shoe-in. It’s also the case that the LLWS kids aren’t elite prospects because it’s a geographic lottery of affiliated leagues. Its more about keeping people watching ESPN5 than actual talent scouting. I’ll do you one better - elite performers rarely become child prodigies To paraphrase Talleyran : societies treatment of gifted children is worse than a crime, it is a mistake. Rather than spending resource which will pay off many times over they are for the most part thrown in the deep end and expected to manage by themselves because they are smart. Is this just a failure in our school system? Partially. Being gifted is special needs education. And the average K-12 in the US is not equipped to provide that for that special need, especially in a post No Child Left Behind era. A lot of adults conflate giftedness with maturity and expect the kid to act like an adult, combined with the pressure to perform and an identity built around being gifted...it fucks with development. There is a reason why depression and suicide in adults can be correlated with formerly gifted children. Flagging as article is paywalled with no way around, and there doesn't seem to be any way around the paywall now that archive.is is a DDoSer. What is the ratio of child prodigies to elite performers? Ted Kaczynki was a child prodigy. The article is a paradigmatic example of innumeracy. 10% of prodigies becomes 10% of elite, whereas (whoknows)% of (general_population - prodigies) becomes 90% of elite. How big is elite? How big is prodigies? Well, for a start, I guess we can assume that size of elite == size of prodigies, because 10% == 10%. But what is that size compared to general population? If it's 1%, then 99% of muggles compete for slots in 0.9% of the population, so, hey, a prodigy is 11 times more likely to become an elite than a muggle. If it's 0.1%, then a prodigy is 111 times more likely to become an elite than a muggle. If it's 10% -- well, that's kind of stretching the definition of both prodigy and elite, isn't it? tl;dr -- article is crap; research probably is, as well.