This is so clownishly wrong and destructive. Aptitude and intelligence/ability just do not work like that.
I’m gonna debunk the hell out of this asinine clownery.
I’ll stress it again below, but it’s annoying how the post sets up a false dichotomy between “natural ability” or “hours of practice.” In reality, elite performance in any realm emerges from ability combined with training, opportunity and luck, with measurable genetic constraints on both baseline ability and how much someone improves and can improve from the same practice. Denying that will give a ton of people false hope and makes the examples seem indicative when they just mean that someone already with genetic gifts still needs to practice a whole lot to get an edge.
But let’s lay it out (And I have to say, why the leftist tards think it necessary to insist all people are identical, I haven’t a clue):
1) False dichotomy of ability vs. practice.
“Not born knowing calculus” is a straw man argument. No one claims people inherit knowledge. They inherit capacities that affect how quickly they learn and how far they can get. Heritable things like working memory, processing speed, spatial ability, etc., matter a ton and they are about 40-60% genetic.
2) Selection and survivorship bias in the sports anecdotes.
Stephen Curry and other people like that are already at the elite level. Everyone in that pool trains an absurd amount. Everyone. However, here in the real world where we’re all forced to live, practice explains surprisingly little of who ends up on top of the heap. Meta-analyses find deliberate practice explains a modest slice of performance variance overall. And, importantly, even less among elites.
3) Reverse causality of “Smart kids do more homework” type nonsense.
Of-fucking-course they do! They are better at it. That’s why they do more. People gravitate to what they’re good at. People who find learning easier get higher returns from studying, so they invest in it more. This isn’t mysterious or unknown. It’s just classic human-capital logic where their genes help them pick and evoke study-rich environments (standard gene–environment correlation).
4) Misunderstanding genetics in athletics.
There are extremely robust genetic influences on traits that underpin sport (height, muscle fiber composition, aerobic capacity, etc.) and on trainability itself. None of this is even controversial. In the HERITAGE study, how much people improved VO2max from the same training program was around 47% heritable. The sad (for leftists) truth is that some bodies adapt far more than others. Things are just easier for them.
5) Folk genetics dipshittiness.
Polygenic traits don’t match parents one-for-one. That’s just a ridiculous oversimplification of how the genetics actually work. Recombination, sex differences, nonlinearities, as well as training mean offspring can exceed both parents on specific phenotypes. Twin and family work shows vertical-leap and explosive strength have meaningful heritability, but genetic expression isn’t a simple average of mom and dad’s maximum capabilities.
6) Mindset matters, but it’s not even close to the whole shebang.
Believing you can improve helps, but large studies and meta-analyses find small average effects on grades with benefits primarily accruing to small, specific subgroups. Also, raising achievement via study hours isn’t the same as changing underlying general ability. The post blurs that distinction (intentionally, I guess).
7) The post ignores basically all the long-run evidence on high ability.
Decades-long tracking of highly-capable youth shows early cognitive differences are real and predictive. That is, with the caveat that when the environment provides appropriate acceleration and enrichment. Denying meaningful variance at the top ends up shortchanging both advanced and struggling learners. So, as is typical, leftist clownery harms just about everyone. I mean, it’s designed to pretend we’re all exactly the same so of course it does.
The post argues that anyone in capable of anything. The actual reality is that talent sets ceilings and slopes, while practice gets you to them in each particular person’s case. Some people have vastly higher ceilings and easier slopes. Denying either half is just extremely-harmful motivational rhetoric dressed up as (poor) explanation. The bottom line and sad truth is that I could shoot 10x as many baskets as Curry and never be 1/10 as good as he is at the three, and I could have spent 10x as long studying physics and never achieved anything like Feynman et al. did. Because in both cases, I just simply do not have the talent.
I know leftists deeply, deeply hate that and wish it weren’t true. But alas we’re all forced to live in the real world as it is, not as we wish it were.