Even if "only" 10% of elite kids go on to become elite adults, 10% is orders of magnitude larger than the base percentage of adults who are elite athletes, musicians, etc. This doesn't sound "uncorrelated" to me so much as "not as strongly correlated as one might expect."
And describing something that happens 10% of the time as "rare" sounds a bit weird, like referring to left-handedness (also about 1 in 10) as rare.
https://www.simplypsychology.org/base-rate-fallacy.html
> For example, given a choice of the two categories, people might categorize a woman as a politician rather than a banker if they heard that she enjoyed social activism at school—even if they knew that she was drawn from a population consisting of 90% bankers and 10% politicians (APA).
The general population is much larger than the population of child prodigies.
e.g. If 1% of children are prodigies, prodigies are around 10x as likely to become elite as non-prodigies.
If 0.1% of children are prodigies, prodigies are around 100x as likely to become elite as non-prodigies.
Or in the rather unlikely case that 10% of children are prodigies, non-prodigies become elite at exactly the same rate as prodigies - 10%.
So I think human brain development is like some kind of optimization algorithm, like simulated annealing or gradient descent. I think this because there is way more complexity in the brain than there is in human DNA, which has pretty low information by comparison. Anyway, child prodigies occur when the algorithm happens to find a good minimum early on.
That relative advantage goes away as people age and specialize.
A child prodigy in tennis may find that their body didn't grow in such a way to be a pro as an adult. If your opponents are taller, stronger, have better VO2Max, etc. than you as an adult, it doesn't matter how good you were as a child--they're going to beat you as an adult.
Chess, of course, now provides the stark reverse contrast. If you weren't a child prodigy in chess, you simply will not excel against the competition as an adult.
One can enhance cognitive functions by strength training: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8534220/
Aside from time travel, the best way to improve in very important things is through strength training.
There are more factors that are not easily accessible for both ends of the spectrum, like access to good, personalized education, amount of trauma, and proper psychological support. But the 'discipline' part is what affected me most.
On the other side, maybe those who are more disciplined become real prodigies, and burn brightly because of the lack of social knowledge on how to support them and help to become highly developed adults.
Tons of former gifted kids on here. The gap between assumed potential and actual reality apparently has to get blamed on someone, and that person is the kid themselves.
FWIW I do it too.
I think I was better than most kids at math, particularly algebra, but those kids grew up and caught up and I suspect many of them are as good or better at math than I am. I know nothing about child psychology or anything adjacent, but I honestly think a lot of "advanced child" stuff is just maturity.
ETA:
Should add that this carried on through high school, and since I finished my math two years early, I took college-level courses for math the last two years.
That makes me think back to my elementary school, where a lot of the kids who got into the "gifted" program just happened to be, surprise surprise, some of the oldest kids in their grade.
At that age the better part of a year in brain development can be exactly the "edge" one needs to excel. And then it can become self-reinforcing when kids gravitate toward the areas in which they dominate their peers.
Take violinists, for example. Essentially every single world renowned soloist was "some sort" of child prodigy. Now, I've heard some soloists argue that they were not, in fact, child prodigies. For example, may favorite violinist, Hilary Hahn, has said this. She still debuted with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra when she was 12, and here she is performing as a soloist at 15: https://youtu.be/upkP46nvqVI. Nathan Milstein, one of the greatest violinists of all time, said he was "not very good until his teens" - he still started playing at the age of 5, and at the age of 11 Leopold Auer, a great violin teacher, invited him to become one of his students, so he clearly saw his potential.
I have no doubt lots of prodigies burn out. But, at least in the world of violins, essentially every great soloist was playing at an extremely high level by the time they were in middle school.
Tiger Woods is the classic example of a child prodigy, but it turns out his path is unusual for superstars. Roger Federer’s (who played a wide range of sports growing up until he specialized in tennis as a teen) is more common.
If the way you nurture a talented student is via "intense drilling", I would argue that the student is not a prodigy in the traditional sense, but a talented and determined student who may or may not be dealing with parental pressure.
The actual prodigies I've known absorb information and gain skills without significant effort - I knew someone who enrolled in a calculus class, skimmed through the book in a week or so, and then would only show up to class for tests (which they would ace).
So the article conclusion doesn't surprise me - inflict relentless training on a young talented person and yeah maybe they won't want to do that as an adult.
But as far as actual "prodigies"? There is no burn-out because there is no (or minimal) effort. The choice of whether to stick with an area of interest through adulthood is more of a personal preference than anything ingrained.
So what is being said? A huge amount of elite success is in the hardware, i.e. the body &/or brain. These go through rather large changes between ages 10 an 18. Puberty. This shakes up the ordering among those who showed enough promise to have already committed to becoming elite.
What am I missing here? Seems like this research is nothing more than "Kids change through puberty, the nature and sizes of the changes are a bit of a lottery for each kid." Much like the the genetic factors are also a lottery so you can't reliably predict who is going to be great from the results of their parents. (But if your parents are both 5ft, the NBA seems an unlikely destination for you).
Hakeem Olajuwon - didn't start basketball until 15 or 16.
Kurt Warner - undrafted, returned to NFL at 28.
Francis Ngannou - started MMA at 26.
Think of 5 relevant attributes of your body for playing something well.
Guesstimate where they were on the population bell curve when you were 10.
Guesstimate if these would have been on a different spot on the population bell curve for that attribute when you were an adult. Would you have guessed it when you wee 10? Would others have guessed it about you at that age?
Puberty changes you in unpredictable ways. Do we need a study to know that?
Everyone committing to tennis before they are 10 are elite, you wouldn't do it otherwise. Who is the best player of that elite set changes given the great puberty shake up.
I had an LLM first pick five figure skaters, and in the follow up query tell me which had wild success before age 12, and only two of the five fit that category, but each started learning at 6 years old or earlier. The other three seem like child prodigies in retrospect to me.
There's the graphic: "Top 1% cognition aged 12 and top 5% salary mid-30s" which is supposed to be the most dramatic one. So apparently we suddenly just take at face value the criticism "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich"?
I think there's been like a handful LLWS winners who have done anything in the MLB and even fewer who have reached the top of pros.
If the LLWS winners are a sample of N kids, then your statement is even more true for any random sample of N kids. Which is to say, LLWS may give you a big advantage, but not the truly massive advantage that would be required to make you a shoe-in.
“Child prodigies are more likely to become elite performers than they are to become non-elite performers”
Vs
“Child prodigies are more likely than non-child prodigies to become elite performers"
Which is it?
Now imagine the prodigy athlete who goes the movies, hangs out, and relaxes on the cruise. How could they hope to compete?
I recently read an interview Jadeveon Clowney, who was the country's top high school American football player and then the number one pick in the NFL draft. He was widely called a 'freak' athlete. Clowney said he didn't really learn how to understand and play the game until the NFL; until then he could dominate with his physical ability, even playing against elite college players.
He's played 11 years so far in the NFL, which is a long career in an extremely competitive job. We can call him truly 'good'; he was chosen for the Pro Bowl three times, in those years making him > ~85th percentile for his position, but nobody thinks he's an all-time great.
There's not such a clear story about where these people come from. Maybe the basketball player just wasn't as athletic (relative to the population of elite athletes) as Clowney and had to make up for it. Maybe Clowney would have been an all-time great with more work. Maybe there are many other inputs besides work and talent.
A lot of adults conflate giftedness with maturity and expect the kid to act like an adult, combined with the pressure to perform and an identity built around being gifted...it fucks with development.
There is a reason why depression and suicide in adults can be correlated with formerly gifted children.
Actual child prodigies like tiger woods or Justin Bieber who were genuinely insanely brilliant at a young age at non academic things went on to be wildly successful.
I once knew a fellow who was exceptionally smart. He tried all kinds of schemes to make a go of his life, but when the going got tough he'd always quit.
Spoiler: I got into computers as a teenager and my piano career took a nosedive, from Carnegie Hall and Juilliard to like… playing for friends at a house party :)
10% of prodigies becomes 10% of elite, whereas (whoknows)% of (general_population - prodigies) becomes 90% of elite.
How big is elite? How big is prodigies?
Well, for a start, I guess we can assume that size of elite == size of prodigies, because 10% == 10%.
But what is that size compared to general population?
If it's 1%, then 99% of muggles compete for slots in 0.9% of the population, so, hey, a prodigy is 11 times more likely to become an elite than a muggle.
If it's 0.1%, then a prodigy is 111 times more likely to become an elite than a muggle.
If it's 10% -- well, that's kind of stretching the definition of both prodigy and elite, isn't it?
tl;dr -- article is crap; research probably is, as well.