[0] https://xcancel.com/AlexGDimakis/status/2002848594953732521
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.
Uncorrelated attributes:
y
│ ∙
│ ∙∙ IIIIIII
│ E∙∙IIIIIIII
│ EEEE∙∙IIIIIII
│ EEEEEE∙∙IIIII
│ EEEEEEEE∙∙III
│ EEEEEEEEE∙∙
│ EEEEEEE ∙∙
│ ∙
└───────────────────x
Correlated attributes:
y
│ ∙
│ ∙∙ IIII
│ ∙∙IIIIII
│ E∙∙IIIII
│ EEEE∙III
│ EEEEEE∙∙
│ EEEE ∙∙
│ E ∙∙
│ ∙
└─────────────────x
To put it another way: If selection was restricted to people who performed highly in either their youth or in adulthood (or both), Berkson's Paradox explains the result. If selection was restricted to people who performed highly in their youth, or if selection was restricted to people who performed highly in adulthood, Berkson's doesn't explain it.
100% correct. For traits x and y, selecting for datapoints in the region x + y > z will always yield a spurious negative correlation for sufficiently uncorrelated data, since the boundary of the inequality x + y > z is a negatively sloping line.
>But in TFA, surely the "high performance" selection filter applies only to the adult performance level?
Doesn't seem that way. Reading the full paper [0], they say:
In sports, several predictor effects on early junior performance and on later senior world-class performance are not only different but are opposite. [...] The different pattern of predictor effects observed among adult world-class athletes is also evident in other domains. For example, Nobel laureates in the sciences had slower progress in terms of publication impact during their early years than Nobel nominees. Similarly, senior world top-3 chess players had slower performance progress during their early years than 4th-to 10th-ranked senior players, and fewer world top-3 than 4th- to 10th-ranked senior chess players earned the grandmaster title of the International Chess Federation (FIDE) by age 14.
[0] https://www.kechuang.org/reader/pdf/web/viewer?file=%2Fr%2F3...
Savantism can be pretty damned weird. I've known a few, including a couple who will never have an adult career beyond local gigs because of their mental disabilities in other, non-music areas. The Oliver Sacks book "Musicophelia" has fascinating case stories about it.
Motivation if you feel like you're young and failing
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.
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.
Sounds like they're describing ADHD.
(Side note after the important ADHD joke: there's an old sport textbook called "Periodization" that mentions focusing on breadth rather than depth of sports experience in early life is a better path to olympic-level performance than just going hard in a single sport from a young age.)
ADHD is not correlated with high career performance, sadly, and represents a real obstacle for those struggling with it. The current social media trend of equating ADHD to a superpower which propels people to focus intensely and excel is really unfortunate.
Magnus Carlsen, Lang Lang, Terence Tao all were precocious and achieved elite performance in their youth.
And yet their access restriction not only removes the public from consuming the fruits of their labor, but it also systematically harms less well-resourced institutions, independent scholars and impedes the spread of knowledge (particularly in areas of the world that need it most).
I wish we could reach a point where we wouldn't allow this anymore.
Unintuitively, strength is a general adaptation that applies to all specific movements. A muscle is either strengthened across a range of motion, or it isn't; a muscle cannot be strong swinging a club while not strong lifting a weight, nor can it be strong holding a rock while weak holding a bar. It is optimal for most sports to train for general strength via barbells, and then to practice that strength via the sport. The rock climber should do heavy deadlifts and chinups to train his grip (and everything else), not special rock grip exercises, for the latter are difficult to progress in small increments and are inefficient in a time sense. A man who can do chinups with 150 pounds hanging from his waist, and who can hold a 550 pound barbell, will not have a problem hanging onto the bouldering wall; he need only practice his technique.
To the article's point, you should get "strong" in everything until you decide to practice that strength in one thing.
That was quite a shock to realize that I had to do the exercises and the homeworks if I wanted to pass. And since I was not use to efforts, I was no longer the top performer in classss where you have to do the exercises to really understand the matter.
I was recognized as extremely clever by teachers and other students but let me assure you that over long enough, discipline (witch I don't really have) and consistent efforts beats cleverness.
> 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...
I annihilated the SATs. My grades were only good in high school because I was just "gifted" enough to get As without studying. I do not have and never had ADHD. I also never learned how to study.
I almost failed out of college. I didn't know how to study. I didn't have the habits. I sure had a lot of fun in high school and college though.
"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".
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.
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.
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).