Scott Young

think about things your background knowledge whereas if you know you're three or four you're not even able to pay attention to the class so i think there's a lot of cases where people sometimes uh overestimate how quickly kids can learn things

Well, I definitely think that if you've been playing for a very long time, that helps with proficiency.

But we also have to be careful, too, because the seven-year-old who's been going through intensive golf training probably had some natural talent already.

So there's a bit of a selection effect there.

When you hear about these chess prodigies that started at three, it was probably because the father or someone else, the mother, showed them a chess board and they had a strong interest and aptitude for it.

And then that's when the chess coaching began.

So

I don't think it's the case that, you know, if you're 30 or 40, you can't learn to golf, you can't learn to play chess, although it obviously helps if you have more natural talent.

Personally, I definitely think that there are innate abilities that constrain how we learn things.

So I'm not one of these people that says, you know, talent doesn't matter at all.

But I kind of don't like talent as a concept because it's sort of a residual concept.

It's sort of like what is left over after we account for the things that are easy to account for.

So talent is like when you can't really account for, well, this person started at the same time as this person and they seem to be doing better.

So it's talent.

It's just kind of a residual explanation.

Whereas there's a lot of research showing that, for instance, background knowledge, that the amount of skill and knowledge someone brings to the situation before they even start learning makes a huge difference.

There's a recent paper that I found that I found fascinating, which showed that people actually in this study learned at relatively the same rate.

But some people came to the classroom environment kind of at the beginning of the class before they taught anything, scoring much higher on the tests.

And so that sort of suggests that maybe they already knew it from somewhere.

They had already encountered some of this information.