My observation has nothing to do with my social circle, but rather the general population. Coming back to this thread hours later, the top comment thread has people blathering on all about how talent is genetic and citing works like these as an example, despite the fact that Michelangelo is in fact a very proof of the opposite, of nurture over nature, given that he was training from a young age. The majority of people genuinely believe certain people are born with the skill to move a paintbrash well and that it's somehow not the result of years of disciplined training.

HN specifically selects for a population that leans towards a belief that hard work creates results, and yet even here you can find this nonsensical ideology of genetic paintbrush skill as a mainstream part of the discourse. It is 10x worse in the average population, and this garbage, factually incorrect framing of "first painting" rather than "earliest known published" for something that Michalangelo had spent years of his childhood practicing for contributes to that misunderstanding of the world. Rather than making misleading claims and leaving the reader to "assume the obvious", why not just correctly state the obvious in the first place?