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by Yunk
4373 days ago
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When I look at a field like sports, I assume the genetic advantages are not so direct to the routine tasks. For example, significant genetic factors may be: healing or failing to heal without permanent damage or being flexible in a way that causes or prevents a frequent injury. For many star players the fact that they can keep playing at all may be the freak of genetics or initial behavior that allowed them to get to their level. For example, football helmet impact data seems to support the direction that many should be dropping out due to traumatic brain injury. Yet some players deteriorate remarkably slower than medical science previously predicted. |
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I think this 10,000 hour idea is a vast oversimplification.
For example, it's often difficult to differentiate rate of progress from final ability.
As someone who has been involved with elite athletics, there are people out there who are simply better at absorbing training, in terms of biomechanics (mostly injury resistance), recovery, and compensation (getting stronger). I've seen lots of folks, new to a sport, with little training, absolutely crush mush more seasoned/conditioned folks. There are many examples of this (see: Chrissie Wellington). For each of them you can contrive some story "well, she lived at altitude", but that's the point, these people exist. And to be clear, I take nothing from Chrissie's worth ethic, etc. She's simply better than a whole host of other elite athletes that have worked hard their whole lives and she went out and clowned them for several years.
The difficult question is, if an average person kept at it for 10,000 hours, would Chrissie plateau and that average person catch up? And here you can substitute math, chess, coding, whatever.
I don't know, but both my sporting and software engineering experience (anecdotally, N=1) says no. Different people are sometimes differently suited to tasks. I'd love to understand the causation.