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/

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. But 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.

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

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

> 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

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

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