Scott Young

speaker

174 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard May 2026 last heard 7 Jul

Scott Young’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Something You Should Know · How to Get Better at Anything & Why So Many People Like Tattoos - SYSK Choice · 9 May 2026 podcast

Well, I think that's true for some things.

I think the research shows that languages, for instance, if you start learning a language, and by learning, I don't mean like just go to a few classes, like you are immersed in some context where you're speaking it all the time, that people who learn before puberty, sort of, you know, in that younger age, they tend to reach a higher level of eventual proficiency.

But

the actual research on like how quickly people learn so not just like where you eventually get to but how quickly you get to whatever level you get to um it's surprisingly sparse showing that younger people are better so even in even in the language learning case it seems that adolescents and adults actually do better than small children at reaching those kind of like beginner and intermediate milestones which makes sense if you think about how like your adult brain is just like you know you have so much better self-regulation ability of so much better ability to like

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.

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.

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