Innate Talents

Aaron Swartz' Non-Programmer's Apology has touched an issue that I have been pondering about for a long time:

[...] that statement [...] only makes sense [...] if you believe that abilities are somehow granted innately and can merely be cultivated, not created in themselves. This is a fairly common view, although rarely consciously articulated (as indeed Hardy takes it for granted), but not one that I subscribe to.

I have always taken issue with the idea of unearned privilegues (even as a child I was uncomfortable with the notion that I would have a "special talent for music and languages" as I was told, when all I did was listen to music, sing and read lots instead of playing outside as the other kids did; I concluded for a while that "talent" was a moniker for "special interest"), and an innate talent surely would be just that. What would be the point of celebrating the best sports-people, musicians, composers, writers, painters or the business-people of best productive ability, and of rewarding the "best", if "success" does not stand for individual achievement but for inherited genes. Shouldn't we reward their parents instead, no wait, better yet, their grandparents, no, their grandparents' grandparents' grandparents?

It is obvious that some are born with weak knees while others are not (and indeed this is sometimes due to inheritance of certain strengths and weaknesses, rather than an unfortunate incident at birth), so because of that some may have a lower probability of succeeding at running than others. Why shouldn't it be the same with certain regions of the brain? Again, indeed, this was shown to be the case (forgive my lack of references and general sloppiness, but hey, I'm just blogging, not essaying, and I'm mainly a software developer and entrepreneur, not a sociologist, biologist, psychologist or philosopher).

However, this alone does not constitute innate talents, only starting conditions.

Paul Graham has discussed the issue of innate talents refreshingly in How to Do What You Love:

Of course, figuring out what you like to work on doesn't mean you get to work on it. That's a separate question. And if you're ambitious you have to keep them separate: you have to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminated by what seems possible.

It's painful to keep them apart, because it's painful to observe the gap between them. So most people pre-emptively lower their expectations. For example, if you asked random people on the street if they'd like to be able to draw like Leonardo, you'd find most would say something like "Oh, I can't draw." This is more a statement of intention than fact; it means, I'm not going to try. Because the fact is, if you took a random person off the street and somehow got them to work as hard as they possibly could at drawing for the next twenty years, they'd get surprisingly far. But it would require a great moral effort; it would mean staring failure in the eye every day for years. And so to protect themselves people say "I can't."

I was always planning to research deeper into the issue of innate talents. One of the top-most results on Google revealed a paper titled Innate Talents: Reality or Myth? with the following promising abstract:

Talents that selectively facilitate the acquisition of high levels of skill are said to be present in some children but not others. The evidence for this includes biological correlates of specific abilities, certain rare abilities in autistic savants, and the seemingly spontaneous emergence of exceptional abilities in young children, but there is also contrary evidence indicating an absence of early precursors for high skill levels in young people. An analysis of positive and negative evidence and arguments suggests that differences in early experiences, preferences, opportunities, habits, training and practice are the real determinants of excellence.

Once I have accumulated some of that precious resource, time, I will work through it, as well as look further for discussion and criticism about it. Following academic discourse, unfortunately, is not something that can be done easily or quickly.

If you are wondering why this post is filed in the "Economics" and "Politics" categories, just consider the implications of the two conflicting propositions for the various brances of the social engineering industry (also called politics)... Of course, should it be found that nature is "inherently unjust" by dispensing unearned privilegues (innate talent), then people will find that the world must be "put to rights", society remade and equality of opportunity must be restored, by counter-balancing natural unearned privilegues with artificial ones. If that was the case, I might even find to agree at least with their conclusion, although probably not their approaches (more goals can be attained uncoercively than one would initially believe, and I do and will continue to maintain that a goal that can only be attained by coercion is not worth pursuing).

I'm prepared to accept as fact what can be logically and convincingly shown as fact (i.e. whatever we find to be the laws of "nature", or more concisely, reality), although I'm not yet sure about what conclusions to draw from either proposition and to what extent. Some thinking left to be done here...

Comments

[Dawn]

Good afternoon. I like weights. You know where you stand with them. Well, sometimes you're lying under them, trying not to let them crush you, but you see, you KNOW they'd crush you if they could. There's honesty.
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