Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance

Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance(science.org)

147 points by colincooke 116 days ago | 76 comments

Strilanc 115 days ago |

Wasn't this study immediately debunked due to bad statistical methods? See https://zenodo.org/records/18002186

> Using simple simulations,we show that this pattern arises naturally from collider bias when selection into elitesamples depends on both early and adult performance. Consequently, associationsestimated within elite samples are descriptively accurate for the selected population,but causally misleading, and should not be used to infer developmental mechanisms

Balgair 115 days ago | |

Is that paper in print? I can't seem to find if it was peer reviewed.

If the paper is true, then, yeesh! That's a pretty big miss on the part of Güllich et al.

Reading through the very short paper there, it seems to not have gone through review yet (typos, mispellings, etc). Also, it's not clear that the data in the tables or the figure are from Güllich's work or are simulations meant to illustrate their idea (" True and estimated covariate effects in the presence of simulated collider bias in the full and selected samples"). Being more clear where the data is coming from may help the argument, but I likely just missed some sentence or something.

I'll be interested to see where this goes. That Güllich managed to get the paper into Science in the first place lends credence to them having gone through something as simple as Berkson's Paradox and have accounted for that. It's not everyday you get something as 'soft' as that paper into Science, after all. If not, then wow! standards for review really have slipped!

arjie 116 days ago |

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.

e.g. https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/taleb-surgeon/

jongjong 115 days ago | |

Makes sense. My perspective is that fast learners are fast because they absorb information quickly without the overhead of cross-domain synthesis. They have more logical contradictions in their minds which they haven't resolved or aren't even aware of. Their worldview is not coherent as a whole. In some cases, they don't have a worldview; instead they just rely on expert data to inform their decisions... But the experts themselves are often victim to the same kind of domain-specific tunnel vision. Such people often lack creativity in their work because cross-domain pattern synthesis is precisely how you can solve complex problems that haven't been solved before.

gmadsen 115 days ago | | |

That is a very idealistic perspective. There are certainly fast learners due to the fact they are faster at cross domain synthesis.

gwern 115 days ago | |

> It's like how software engineers who are at Google are worse if they're better competitive programmers.

That's not true. It didn't replicate and Norvig has said as much somewhere on HN, IIRC.

(I also agree with the other criticisms that this 'old vs young' setup in OP is obviously at least partially, and perhaps entirely, regression to the mean and Berkson.)

arjie 115 days ago | | |

Thanks for sharing. I didn't know that.

truted2 116 days ago |

> 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

MontyCarloHall 116 days ago |

Couldn't this be explained by Berkson's Paradox [0]?

[0] https://xcancel.com/AlexGDimakis/status/2002848594953732521

iainctduncan 115 days ago |

One interesting reason this happens, at least in the music field, is the adult disadvantages that often go along with various forms of savantism. I have spoken with a number of fellow music academics about this, and it's not uncommon that the things that make one a young prodigy are the same things that give one real obstacles to making it in the regular world, and this can impose a ceiling on where they get to. For example, many music prodigies have never "really had to work" and once they get to having to shoulder the boring reponsibilities that go with building a career, they instead alienate people, or just can't do things that are hard for them because it's always been easy. Maybe they can't play off charts unless they've heard it, or aren't used to following instructions/cues/being the lead, etc. And unless they are truly, truly rare air, real career gigs have boring work elements too.

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.

atriarch 116 days ago |

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.

drivebyhooting 115 days ago |

This seems to miss the mark in defining “peak performance”.

Magnus Carlsen, Lang Lang, Terence Tao all were precocious and achieved elite performance in their youth.

eudamoniac 116 days ago |

This is somewhat related to the application of strength to various sports and physical endeavors. Most sports utilize strength to a large degree, but it's usually in a narrow application, e.g. a golf swing, a sprinter's run, a rock climber's grip. The naive algorithm to improve at these sports is to practice them, and the slightly less naive method is to train for strength in that narrow application, for example you often see rock climbers training by doing rock climbing specific grip exercises.

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.

KittenInABox 116 days ago |

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.

bitwize 116 days ago | |

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."

sointeresting 116 days ago | | |

Graduated with a 1.7 GPA and a 32 on the ACT. My parents were a little dismayed.

idiotsecant 116 days ago | | |

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.

tayo42 116 days ago | | |

What does the reverse imply? High GPA, low SAT?

contubernio 115 days ago | |

For most people the set "the smartest people I know as adults" inludes no elite performers in any area.

georgeburdell 116 days ago | |

How many of the children in first group didn’t you meet?

nkmnz 116 days ago | | |

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".

joe_the_user 116 days ago |

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).

contubernio 115 days ago |

The abstract seems already highly tendentious. It acts like 90% nonoverlap (whatever that means precisely) between sets A and B is very small overlap, when at a population level it is huge overlap. If the set of yough high performers and the set of adult high performers have 10% overlap, it means that youth high performance is a tremendously good indicator for adult high performance.

lostmsu 116 days ago |

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.

nick__m 116 days ago | |

My experience is almost the inverse of what you describe, I never had to work at all until university, I was a top performer until "physique 1: mécanique newtonienne" it was the first time (and the last) I failed at something academic.

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.

globular-toast 115 days ago | | |

I was similar except it happened a bit earlier. In the UK the last compulsory school exam, GCSE, seemed like a memory test to me. I could often just figure out stuff in the actual exam even if I'd only briefly overheard something mentioned in a lesson. I didn't do a single piece of homework once I realised there were no real consequences and messed around in lessons. Got top marks in all the subjects I cared about and median in everything else (like art, where I didn't even bother to hang up my final piece).

A-level is like the stepping stone to university. It's optional and you only do subjects you like. Suddenly you had to actually understand the stuff. It wasn't just a memory test. The first exams I got B all around. I wasn't happy with this so I started doing homework etc and actually understanding things.

Coincidentally, my breakthrough also came with Newtownian mechanics. I was quite good at integration, but I didn't understand why I was doing it. Suddenly the whole thing started to make sense when I realised it was about rates of change etc.

lostmsu 115 days ago | | |

Not sure how your experience contradicts my point exactly. You're not saying you are in the highest ranks at all, so your experience is irrelevant. If you are, you fit the natural talent with no pressure description.

Selkirk 115 days ago |

Sounds like "Old Masters and Young Geniuses"

https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691133805/ol...

That book used artwork valuation as a performance measure and analyzed it over top artist's lifetimes finding two patterns. The "Young Genius" where an artist has a vision and realizes some innovation and their most valuable works center around that with value tapering off over their life. Picasso. (Who had two peaks but still fit the pattern.) Contrast to the "Old Master." This is someone who keeps refining their craft and their most valuable works and innovations are their late life works. Cézanne.

DataDaoDe 115 days ago |

Clicking on this link just reminded me again that science (like all such restricted access journals) is an operation that relies heavily on publicly funded research and unpaid academic labor.

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.

hockey 116 days ago |

Lower early life performance we with lots of multidisciplinary experience, later life hyperfocus on a specific discipline until world-class levels are reached.

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.)

Aurornis 116 days ago | |

It’s amazing how far the pop-culture definition of ADHD has strayed from the medical definition. “Hyperfocus … until world class performance” is in no way consistent with the medical definition of ADHD. I’m well aware that “hyperfocus” is a prominent part of the Reddit and TikTok-ification of ADHD diagnostics, but being able to focus intensely on your job until you perform it at world class levels is decisively not indicative of ADHD. Hyperfocus is not part of official ADHD diagnostic criteria and the only pseudo-studies that have examined it have taken place as self-reported questionnaires with small sample sizes in the era since it became a popular topic on social media, unfortunately.

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.

zozbot234 115 days ago | | |

Hyperfocus is not about "focusing intensely on your job until you perform it at world-class level". The hyperfocus of ADHD is essentially random and driven by the very same inattentive "monkey mind" that's the defining feature of ADHD itself: it's not necessarily targeted to a productive task.

Those who face this issue can of course try to "gamify" their upcoming tasks to themselves in a way that will hopefully steer that focus in desirable directions, but that's not always easy. The monkey mind also resists ongoing habit formation, which is the tool most non-ADHD folks would generally resort to in order to effectively manage their overall schedule and just be more on-task.

wisty 115 days ago | | |

I suspect it's partly diagnostic creep. Either real actual professional creep, or self diagnosis.

Some mental illnessess are extreme versions of traits that are often useful. It's good have one person in the village who frets about dangerous stuff, for example. Anxiety is useful at times.

But as you start to diagnose the very functional people who just need a few points to get a top uni course (or people self diagnose) ... well ... maybe you're picking up far less extreme and maladaptive versions of the trait.

pessimizer 116 days ago |

A summary, since the paper isn't open access: https://scientificinquirer.com/2025/12/21/the-counterintuiti...

mathfailure 116 days ago | |

This source is shit: it doesn't grant open access.

tbrownaw 115 days ago |

...so some people develop their sills using something like RAD* tooling which lets them develop skills quickly, and some don't and end up taking longer but getting better eventual results?

Also, the ungated part doesn't say how they're measure "top" high-school vs university students. It doesn't match what I've heard about the persistence and consistency of basically all standardized tests; are they using within-school rankings for this? If so, that would fit perfectly with students being sorted during university selection.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_application_development

incognito124 116 days ago |

Hardly a recent discovery. This is basically the entire foreword of David Epstein's book called Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

pixl97 116 days ago | |

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.

hn_acc1 116 days ago | | |

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.

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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.