[ucontrol]

A dull article ridden with blatantly false claims and oversimplification of an otherwise complicated topic.

>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?

>Developing a skill set early on leads to competence in what is learned but stumps creativity and chances of innovation.

So having an deep, innate, intuitive grasp of a certain set of knowledge, made possible by said early exposure and disciplined training, has nothing to do with genius and potential inventive achievement in later life? But rather, it only allows for uncreative competence in what is learned and practiced, that and only that?

Really?

Is this man serious? How does something like this even pass for an article? How much thinking goes into writing something like this? Christ almighty.

I love it because the very things that Mr. Grant here paints as inhibitory to creativity are exactly the essential components of creative genius! His information is not only incorrect, it is the exact opposite of how things do work in real life.

It's not a zero sum game. Both of aspects in question - Disciplined skill development as well as Creativity - are essential for intellectual success and are interdependent.

Structure, discipline, strong parent engagement and emphasis on learning and skill development, AS WELL AS creative undertakings, play, leisurely engagement, passionate tinkering / creation - both aspects are crucial.

In order to be able to create, the child has to imitate first. In order to fall in love with a pursuit, it has to be exposed to it first. And in order to be creatively successful in a pursuit, the child has to be very skilled in it first. And parents' intervention, guidance and support are very important in this regard.

[Jimmy]

>>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...

[hexane360]

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. . .

[hn_throwaway_99]

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.

[fjdlwlv]

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?

[danderino]

10% is a shit load.

[gabrielgoh]

All I see here are your opinions, while the article has numerous citations and data to back up its claims.

The reason why the article is interesting is because it goes against the common wisdom "you need to know the rules to break em", and backs its claim up with peer-reviewed science. And while you may find the findings unpalatable, isn't this how progress is made?

[replicatorblog]

The main data the author cites is a 32-year-old pop psychology book where n=120. The rest is expert opinion. He also avoids making a case for why trying raising a child who is merely hyper-competent is less desirable goal than creating one who remakes a field of inquiry. After all, why would you want your child to become a run-of-the-mill Oncologist if they're not also going to win a Nobel Prize.

For all the author's dressing up a horrid argument with strained "statistics," he misses a key fact. True breakthroughs in most fields come around rarely, in time frames usually measured in decades. In the meantime, the market for high-end practitioners is evergreen.

For every Mozart, there are thousands of musicians to play in world-class orchestras. For every Jonas Salk, there are hundreds of thousands of doctors. On a risk-adjusted scale, shooting for competent if slightly less creative seems like a much wiser bet.