By now you may have read The New York Times story, How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall? Talent. It’s based on a meta-analysis, Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions. Obviously this finding is a rebuke to the vulgarization of the “10,000 hour rule” which was popularized after Malcolm Gladwell published Outliers: The Story of Success. There has been a veritable industry attacking and tearing down Gladwell. It’s just too easy. But nevertheless Gladwell is laughing all the way to the bank. He sells orders of magnitude more than his critics.
Why? As Steve Sailer notes people want “hard and fast” rules for human accomplishment. There’s two problems here. First, if a rule was hard & fast, and therefore could be implemented on a wide basis, then there wouldn’t be any advantage to any particular person. For example, if you could become a chess master by investing 10,000 hours of training, then you’d have many, many “chess masters.” All of a sudden being a chess master, by definition superior to other players, would not be predicted by the 10,000 hour investment.
Second, rather than getting into the details of what proportion of the variation in outcomes is responsible to genes vs. environment, the reality is that in many traits of interest for humans at the extreme excellent end of the spectrum there are many factors at work. And, much of basis for success is not reproducible, and can be chalked up to randomness (at least from our perspective). When people talking about the “environmental component” of variation one often presumes that this is the malleable/controllable aspect, but often a lot of random variation is collapsed into this fraction. Just because it’s genetic doesn’t mean we know the basis or the sequence of causal events which lead to an outcome.
Consider professional sports. This a field where the individuals are many standard deviations from the norm, and usually success is a combination of many factors, size, strength, speed, work ethic, etc. Even though having a parent who is a professional athlete increases your chance greatly of becoming a professional athlete (by orders of magnitude), most children of professional athletes do not have the talent to become professional athletes themselves. Michael Jordan’s sons were no better than college players of no particular distinction. And this is arguably the greatest basketball player of all time (or one of the greatest along with Wilt Chamberlain). It shows the limitations of prediction on an individual level when you are pushing the threshold of virtuosity to a very high setting.* Of course, that does not mean that grit and hard work can’t make someone a varsity basketball player. All things seem more reasonable when kept in perspective, but that doesn’t sell books or get you a gig at The New Yorker.
* Of course one might argue that Jordan should have selected a suitably athletic spouse. Interestingly Kobe Bryant has professional basketball players on both sides of the family.
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