One of the things that I hate about journalists is they often don't see that their commentary has no relation to what the source is saying:
"He adds that intellectual ability - the trait that an I.Q. score reflects - turns out not to be that important. 'Once someone has reached an I.Q. of somewhere around 120,' he writes, 'having additional I.Q. points doesn't seem to translate into any measureable real-world advantage.'"
Yes, IQ isn't that important. Once you're in the top 10% in terms of IQ, it's really just about hard work!
Nitpicking, but the authors aren't actually journalists, they're professors in psychology and cite their own research in the article. Just goes to show it's not always journalists twisting the scientists' work trying to get a juicy piece, sometimes it's the scientists themselves. I don't know if they are twisting the results of their work or not, but it does seem like this piece was a bit fluffy and does as much jumping to conclusions as the stuff that it aims to take down.
The top 10% in terms of IQ is not all that exclusive. It's pretty much everyone you'd consider "smart" in an American suburban public high school. Depending where you go to college or work, it may in fact include everyone you interact with on a daily basis.
Within that range, I've known people who've grown up to be complete failures by any reasonable measure, and those who have become great successes. The work really matters more than anything, for any reasonable, predictable goal.
You can't study/practice yourself into becoming an extraordinary anything (I'm talking like Albert Einstein / Bob Dylan level). But certainly those who reach that level do practice a lot. But they also had raw talent.
I didn't think these were journalists writing; Hambrick and Meinz were involved in some of these studies, if you google for them.
> Once you're in the top 10% in terms of IQ, it's really just about hard work!
Did we read the same article? IQ still matters past the top 10%!
> The remarkable finding of their study is that, compared with the participants who were “only” in the 99.1 percentile for intellectual ability at age 12, those who were in the 99.9 percentile — the profoundly gifted — were between three and five times more likely to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or publish a literary work.
That is, a 0.8% difference in percentile ranking increased the specified output by 300-500%. Now what do you think a 10% percentile ranking difference would imply?
> That is, a 0.8% difference in percentile ranking increased the specified output by 300-500%. Now what do you think a 10% percentile ranking difference would imply?
The difference in intellectual capacity between the top 10%, 1% and 0.1% (or 90, 99, 99.9 percentile) isn't necessarily proportional to the "percentile ranking difference".
I realize that, but it doesn't matter to the mistaken point the parent was making. If anything, considering the diminishing returns on IQ points or percentiles strengthens the point: by the usual argument that each percentile measures less real difference in intelligence (which I agree with), that means that the change in output is even more astounding! Going up 0.8% of the population yields you 3-500% increase in output, and this is in the part of the population where that IQ change ought to be least important. We ought to see much larger gains going from, say, 91th to 92nd percentiles, with less gains for each step upwards - but we don't.
No matter how you cut it, shifting less than a percentile and getting the measured increase is dramatic. (So dramatic that I can't help but wonder if there are non-intelligence explanations - could it all be due to Matthew or network effects?)
So, practice accounted for 50% of success; working memory accounted for only 7%.
Of course talent matters. Hard work matters more.
A hard worker with less talent will beat a talented slacker [tortoise & hare]. But a talented worker beats everyone. No surprises here.
However... if you work hard, other talents you do have may eventually find an application/be revealed [ugly duckling], because depending on the situation, a flaw can be a gift (and vice versa). So in hindsight, it may turn out that you were the talented one after all.
i'm curious as to how their "core working memory" theory jibes with work showing that chess grandmasters could remember complex chess configurations if they were configurations that could occur in real chess games, but with random board placement they could do no better than ordinary people.
Is it that certain people who look at numbers more are able to construct patterns in digits where others wouldn't, but may not be able to do the same with a sequence of pictures or words.
My point, I don't think they've done enough to disentangle potential dependences.
Remembering board configurations is not a key competency of chess grandmasters - the board is usually right in front of you, after all. It's perfectly consistent for chess grandmasters to be both above average in working memory and also have long-term memory encodings optimized for meaningful board positions (but not random positions).
This seems like a deeply flawed study. Their definition of "talent" is "performance on tests of working memory"? That just appears to be totally bunk.
I also think that the "spend 10,000 hours" thing is flawed, in the fact that you generally only spend 10,000 hours on something you are very interested and talented in. Basically, it is very hard to separate "hard work" from "talent", because most people only really work hard at things they're talented at.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3257339
Response piece to the two authors of the New York Times opinion piece, by a leading researcher on the subject, as submitted to HN:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3258576