Are you born with talent or do you adapt it over time? (Split from TOGS' thread)

[Atmosfear]

Being bigger than the other kids is your genetic predisposition. If you're smaller but someone notices that you're fast, that's a genetic predisposition. Clearly, training can make you faster and bigger (not so much height, but muscle mass), but if you start out being 5'4 and very slow, you're just not ever going to do as well as someone who is 6'1 and lightning fast from the get-go. If training brings out exceptional speeds, it doesn't mean it was just the training. It means that the training allowed your natural traits to come out. My whole point is that without the genes, the practice is meaningless. It doesn't mean that anyone who has the genes can succeed without practice. It just means that one is required for the other to have any meaning.

Unfortunately, this isn't the case. Being bigger than the other kids isn't a genetic predisposition as much as it is a product of birthday. Since childhood groups are stratified by grade cutoff ages, those who are closest to the cutoff dates can have as much as a full year advantage of growth over another. If the cutoff is January 1, and you are born on January 2, you are almost a year older than all the kids born in December. By the time this is distilled through continual selection processes, the only kids left are the ones near the cutoff, not because they had any better talent but because they signed up with a good birthday.

Of course it did. If you didn't have the genes, no amount of training would have allowed you to get that proficient. Period. Strip all the opportunity and luck out of it, and it just comes down to work and genes, right? Well, if you were never genetically predisposed to building certain skills, no amount of building will ever get you to the level of someone with those predispositions. Not everyone on earth can be a good basketball player. Even if every single human being worked 10,000 hours for it, there would still be bad players, mediocre players, and exceptional players. That's where the genes show themselves. If everything else is equal, disparity still exists. Genes are responsible for that.

If everyone had 10,000 hours of practice, then they would become average and good would be defined as some larger value.

What disparity exists between Steve Jobs, Bill Joy, and Bill Gates? One of them is going grey.

Being "good enough to get started on the road" IS your natural ability.

Or more likely it's your birthday (or year), your high school's Tech club, or happening to run into a promoter in a bind in a bar.

Genetics probably has more of a role in what you like. If Bill Gates hated fooling with computers, the advantage of his high school's remote terminal would've been lost. But again, it's a low genetic threshold.

[Atmosfear]

Unfortunately, this isn't the case. Being bigger than the other kids isn't a genetic predisposition as much as it is a product of birthday. Since childhood groups are stratified by grade cutoff ages, those who are closest to the cutoff dates can have as much as a full year advantage of growth over another. If the cutoff is January 1, and you are born on January 2, you are almost a year older than all the kids born in December. By the time this is distilled through continual selection processes, the only kids left are the ones near the cutoff, not because they had any better talent but because they signed up with a good birthday.

By the way this has all sorts of implications for the education system and has been a fairly prominent critique of the Ivy selection process. Gifted programs, for example, are naturally biased towards older children.

[coqauvin]

By the way this has all sorts of implications for the education system and has been a fairly prominent critique of the Ivy selection process. Gifted programs, for example, are naturally biased towards older children.

I never really noticed this - I was in a gifted program here, and the birthdays were split pretty evenly across the classroom. There were slightly fewer birthdays later in the year, but close enough to even (probably no more than 3 or 4 kids in a class of 25~) that there wasn't an exceptional difference.

Also, in all the classes I took there, there was no real notable difference in intelligence/capability levels of the olderish kids to the younger ones. I was one of the later ones, being born in late september, but my average was consistently in the top 5 every year.