Practice works, but genes work better

I saw this exchange between @DialecticBio and @RiotIQ

So what? Of course, environment can affect outcomes for traits which are also heritable (e.g. children having stunted growth due to severe illness or nutritional deficiencies). Who disputes this. This is another example of a strawman by the anti-hereditarians by creating a false dichotomy or useless contrived scenarios to try to prove their point. It’s like proof by contradiction, which in the context of math is sufficient for disproving a conjecture, but this does not work as well for science.

For competitive, high-stakes endeavors in which it can be assumed everyone practices, then innate ability is still the deciding factor, because practice has now been controlled for. All practice does is shift the mean of the Bell Curve to the right, but it’s still there provided the ceiling is high enough, which for competitive endeavors it’s unbounded or very high (like playing basketball at an elite level).

Or the test is graded on a curve to account for practice, as seen on the LSAT, by converting a raw score to a scaled score. As test prep becomes ubiquitous, a higher percentage of questions must be answered correctly to get the same score. For this reason, 170-180 scores on the LSAT are still uncommon and signify outlier IQ despite the ubiquity of test prep.

Lots of young people tryout for sports and practice; few make it. The odds are well-established and sobering:

Basketball and football, the most visible of high school and college sports, have a very low percentage of athletes who play in high school and then eventually move up to the professional ranks. In men’s basketball, for example, there is only a .03% chance of a pro career. This means that of the almost 156,000 male, high school senior basketball players only 44 will be drafted to play in the NBA after college, and only 32 women (.02%) out of just over 127,000 female, high school senior players will eventually be drafted. In football the odds are slightly better, with .08% or 250 of just over 317,000 high school senior players being drafted.

Or to put it another way: practice is necessary but insufficient. How much practice is also highly variable. This is why the ‘10,000 hours rule’ was rightfully criticized for being unscientific and wrong despite so much hype at the time: some individuals need far fewer than ten-thousand hours to get good, and others can practice forever and never get that good, let alone world class. The number of hours of practice is of poor predictive value for the attainment of world-class skill, especially when others are practicing. Sure, you will get better on an absolute basis, but in invoking the parable of the Red Queen race, still staying in place.

This is why high-stakes math competitions have become so common compared to decades ago, because the ceiling of the SATs and the high school math curriculum is too low, yet the stakes are higher than ever. Higher salaries and more social status for elites, like in tech, law, or finance, means the ROI (even after factoring in student loan debt) for an elite school is the highest it’s ever been, hence lots of competition and the need to excel at math competitions to distinguish oneself from the masses of applicants. Even AP courses and learning calculus in high school has too low of a ceiling and too common, but math competition problems are hard enough that only the smartest can do well.

Plus, unlike the science fairs and talent searches, in which there is a lot of uncredited family help and SES-status is more important, for math competitions the student still has to take the test under timed supervised conditions, so it’s more fair and meritocratic.

Overall, in today’s economy and society, due to high-stakes and high-ROI for elites–like in business, tech, or sports–means that talent is more important than ever. In addition, greater population relative to slots (lower acceptance rate) and the modernization and optimization of society overall (like better nutrition). Unlike in the ’30s, you’re not competing against the kid with rickets for a slot in the varsity team. Even with affirmative action, the mean is still raised, because now those slots are going to better-qualified applicants.

There is no avoiding it except by either choosing niches which are so small or esoteric that there is less competition, or lowering one’s expectations accordingly. You can practice with the expectation of getting better, but this is not the same as being competitive.