> Around 90% of superstar adults had not been superstars as children, while only 10% of top-level kids had gone on to become exceptional adults (see chart 1). It is not just that exceptional performance in childhood did not predict exceptional performance as an adult. The two were actually negatively correlated, says Dr Güllich.

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.

This is an excellent point! People often forget that something uncommon out of a much larger pool is still larger than anything that comes from a smaller pool (base rate neglect).

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.

You also need to know the percentage of children that become prodigies before you can calculate exactly how much more likely they are to become elite adults.

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%.

--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."

The way that I read the original study was that only 10% of elite adults were also elite youth.

Not that 10% of elite youth become elite adults.

That distinction is the key and surprising. Elite level talent and training and dollar spending in the youth is not then well correlated with elite level practice in adults across many disciplines.

As in your country's elite youth training centers (science, music, futbol, Olympic sports, etc) are mostly wasting money.

You are fundamentally misunderstanding the statistics. 10% of top level adults is a smaller percentage of elite performers than should have been represented by the class of hothoused kids. I.e. it should have been 12% or 15%.

I don't think you would be using the general population as the control group.

You're not going to take elite chess kids and then random kids and compare in 10 years and see anything interesting. Elite chess kids will be better considering most people don't even play chess...

Anyway, I understand being skeptical, and I'm not a fan of pop economics stuff like this, but I still imagine the researchers thought of this.

It's like those articles that say super high IQ people are not always successful.

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.

In addition, there is a vast difference between say tennis, a sport, and chess, a purely mental activity.

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.

Being smart isn’t enough need resources and need to deal with people

This sounds like Berkson’s paradox.

yeah. child prodigies may just change interest after a while