[coryl]

of course natural talent exists

Well then, what is natural talent, how do you objectify and measure it in a person, if it so obviously exists?

Success is best correlated with time invested in skill development. Natural talent is bullshit, it's like attributing height to a basketball player's success.

[einhverfr]

I disagree with you here.

There are some areas where I am quite frankly talented. Once I get Perl coding on accounting software, there is very little that can stop me and quite frankly I can outperform nearly any programmer I have ever worked with.

On the other hand, there are also things which I cannot do very well no matter how hard I try. When I was in college for example I used to be able to help struggling students in areas like analytical geometry understand the problems and go from getting C's to getting A's. But I couldn't get above a C myself.

[coryl]

That isn't what natural talent is supposed to be though. You're good at programming Perl probably because you've practiced more, or you care more and thus have thought about it more. Software writing is a skill which you have honed by practice, not naturality.

I don't know why you can't score A's at math though. It makes no sense to me as to why you can help others get good grades but can't get good grades yourself. It probably means you lack the hours applying through repetitive practice.

[einhverfr]

One thing is I have ADD. I run into mental blocks sometimes and can't get started on some things. Or I make transposition errors. These occur in times and places that make no logical sense. Analytical geometry, but only to a lesser extent in trig, and not so much in calculus. Similarly in chemistry, subatomic orbitals are fine but molecular orbitals, which are conceptually simpler, are not.

Similarly in chemistry lab, I could help anyone else but I would invariably run all the right tests on all the wrong samples. This made me a great lab partner but a disaster on my own.

As I have gotten older I have learned coping mechanisms but some things I can't do and I pass those onto others.

At the same time I have always been top of my class in many things, while putting in quite a bit less effort than average. These ranged from history to some of the sciences, to some cases of math (calculus, some algebra).

[sanxiyn]

You mean height is not correlated with basketball player's success?

[coryl]

Not sure if you were being sarcastic?

My point was, skill and hours practiced are far better predictors of success than a voodoo attribute like natural talent. In the above case, I tried to use height as an example of a "natural ability" person could be advantaged in.