Seems very Taleb's Ugly Surgeon / Berkson's Paradox to me. It's like how software engineers who are at Google are worse if they're better competitive programmers.
Exponential growth is the path of longsuffering, and one doesn't always make it. It sucks and looks and feels bad for all involved. This is why advice such as, "Ignore the naysayers." is clutch. And other advice once one starts to rocket shoot like "Stay in your lane." is the absolute worst advice of all time. (IYKYK - Rest in peace Scott Adams)
Another thought - Einstein had reviewed thousands of patents when he worked on the train - that's a hell of data set for an LM to start with.
Couldn't this be explained by Berkson's Paradox [0]?
[0] https://xcancel.com/AlexGDimakis/status/2002848594953732521
It seems the criticism is indeed Berkson's Paradox, but the example is different to the canonical example of Berkson's paradox.
In the canonical example, you have uncorrelated attributes, eg skill and attractiveness in actors, forming a round scatter plot with no correlation. Selecting a subpopulation of top actors who are either skilled or attractive, you get a negative correlation. You can visualize this as chopping the top-right of the round scatter plot off: the chopped off piece is oriented in roughly a line of negative correlation.
In this example, if you look in the linked paper inside the post by Dimakis, there is a positively correlated scatter plot: You can tell the shape is correlated positively between youth and adult performance. But in this case, if you condition on the extremes of performance, you end up selecting a cloud of points that has flat to slight negative correlation.
Here's the wikipedia on that one
> For example, world top-10 youth chess players and later world top-10 adult chess players are nearly 90% different individuals across time. Top secondary students and later top university students are also nearly 90% different people. Likewise, international-level youth athletes and later international-level adult athletes are nearly 90% different individuals.
Motivation if you feel like you're young and failing
from sports i know (hockey), generally the next generational player is identified when they're like 12-13 years old (earlier for Gretzky). You look at the top scorers from the Brick Tournament(9-10 year old kids play in that tournament) from 10 years ago (https://www.eliteprospects.com/league/brick-invitational/201...), 3 of the top 5 scorers were drafted in the first round, and the top goalie was Team Canada's goalie at the world juniors.
edit: went back a few more years, lots of NHLers in the top 5 in scoring in the tournament, but some years are more miss than hit.
Gretzky is well-known for saying he thinks kids should play multiple sports and avoid hockey in the summer, like he did (IIRC) - he mentioned soccer, etc.
in contrast: the sport i know best, hoops, a common pattern for generational players is for them to be late bloomers because they grow up short, developing skills and competitive toughness, then get lucky and grow a half-foot late in puberty
who is that? Not Lebron, definitely not Jokic, SGA was 4 star recruit?
The problem being: access to a prestiges career or opportunity is generally predicated on climbing the academics achievement ladder at an increasingly early age. This leaves the more esoteric people out in the cold. If your not a true prodigy whose achievements outshine the highly credentialed you will struggle to get on.
So consider these quotes:
Early exceptional performers and later exceptional performers within a domain are rarely the same individuals but are largely discrete populations over time... and Most top achievers (Nobel laureates and world-class musicians, athletes, and chess players) demonstrated lower performance than many peers during their early years. Together.
A simple explanation: high performance requires quite a bit of specific preparation. But "exceptional" performance is mostly random relative to the larger population of high performers in terms of the underlying training-to-skills-to-achievement "equation". Especially, being at the top tends to get someone more resources than those nearly at the top who don't have visible/certified achievements.
I'd that billing your work "the study of the very best" really gives you strong marketing spin and that makes people tempted to find simplistic markers rather than looking at the often random processes involved in visible success. IE, I haven't touched on reversion to mean (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean).
Hardly a recent discovery. This is basically the entire foreword of David Epstein's book called Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
The strength of analogy is one of the more powerful tools humans have. You take findings/experience from a totally different field and use it to escape the local maxima that other field is caught in.
It's a relatively common theme in sciences that someone comes out of nowhere and solves a long standing problem in a field because they don't have the specialized set of biases that keeps everyone else trapped.
IMHO, it's MUCH more common in sciences though, that someone that is expert-level in one field comes into another and thinks they CAN solve a long standing problem in that field quite easily, and then repeatedly falls into all the pitfalls / traps that others in that field learned long ago to avoid (aka Dunning-Kruger). You know, "chemistry is just applied physics", "biology is applied chemistry", etc.. Sure, it's true in one sense, but... No one calculates the wave function of an elephant, for example.
One of the benefits of generalism / learning multiple fields (IMHO, again) is that you realizes that special abilities / skills don't necessarily translate well from one field to another. For example, learning to play the violin is very different from, say, playing billiards, yet becoming good at either one involves learning subtle manipulations of basically similarly-shaped pieces of wood. By involvement in multiple fields, you learn to be careful NOT to bring your "everything is a nail" mentality with you from one field to the next.
That could simply be explained by early high achievers being worked hard by their parents or something else while people with innate abilities making progress slower (because most people are not overworked). For the first group they sizzle either because the pressure is removed as they grow up or because they hit their ceiling.
This sort of tracks for me. The smartest people I know as adults mostly fucked around a lot and had wide interests that all culminated in them doing a great thing greatly. The smartest people I know as kids spent hours grinding on something and crashed out in college and are mostly average well-to-dos now.
I'm reminded of a meme on Facebook my wife showed me that was a two-dimensional graph of SAT score vs. GPA. The corner with the highest SAT scores but the lowest GPAs was shaded in and labelled "These are the people I want to hang out with."
Graduated with a 1.7 GPA and a 32 on the ACT. My parents were a little dismayed.
I'm not sure we should romanticize ADHD, which is what you call that region. If those people could be high SAT and high GPA they would prefer it. Signed, someone in that region.
Who said anything about ADHD?
What does the reverse imply? High GPA, low SAT?
Probably the stupid-and-diligent bit.
> In 1933, while overseeing the writing of Truppenführung, the manual for leading combined arms formations, Hammerstein-Equord made one of the most historically prescient observations on leadership. During the writing effort, he offered his personal view of officers, classifying them in a way only he could:
> “I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent — their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy — they make up 90% of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent — he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief.”
https://news.clearancejobs.com/2019/10/08/the-four-classes-o...
How many of the children in first group didn’t you meet?
The selection bias might not be relevant if the message is not
"slack around as kid, it will make you great later!"
but
"prodigy youth doesn't guarantee greatness later, as well as non-prodigy youth doesn't prevent you from becoming grat later".
A summary, since the paper isn't open access: https://scientificinquirer.com/2025/12/21/the-counterintuiti...
This source is shit: it doesn't grant open access.