[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.