To me, his main plausible x important claim is that performance is greatly improved by subject specialisation from age <5. The fact that many geniuses enter their fields late doesn’t falsify this, since that isn’t humdrum at all—barely one in a million kids specialise in that way. I think that people who enter a field such as CS at age 30, rather than at age 20 do have a mild disadvantage, maybe 0.5SD. So I wouldn’t be surprised if starting at age 4, rather than at age 20 gave you another 1-2SD advantage. Of course, subjects like CS do benefit a lot from basic maths and so on, but there are a lot of other things that they don’t benefit from that could easily be cut from the curriculum. If this sort of thing was true, it would quite profoundly undercut the standard EA advice to keep one’s options open.
I don’t think that’s true either, though. Early specialization requires solving an almost impossible prediction problem (it’s difficult enough to know what would be the ‘right’ field for a teenager or young adult, how are you going to do it for a <5yo? This is the same reason that high-IQ elementary schools can’t work); people, nevertheless, continue to try to do with Polgar says, and yet, we don’t see kids trained from toddlerhood dominating the elite reaches of every field. Early training is of pretty dubious value: when we look at early childhood interventions like Headstart, the gains fade out, and there are plenty of places like, I believe, Finland, which start education late and see no problem from this. (I think Scott also discussed this for homeschooling and in his graduation post.) “T-shaped” expertise requires a lot of exploration to gain breadth and figure out where to specialize, and for every Polgar, there’s a late bloomer (iirc, Epstein in The Sports Gene—which I liked far more than Bring Up Genius—gives many athletic examples, and made it a major focus of his 2019 Range: Why generalists triumph in a specialized world which I haven’t read yet); and you have newer results like “What Makes a Champion? Early Multidisciplinary Practice, Not Early Specialization, Predicts World-Class Performance”, Gullich et al 2021, which find the opposite of this claim:
What explains the acquisition of exceptional human performance? Does a focus on intensive specialized practice facilitate excellence, or is a multidisciplinary practice background better? We investigated this question in sports. Our meta-analysis involved 51 international study reports with 477 effect sizes from 6,096 athletes, including 772 of the world’s top performers. Predictor variables included starting age, age of reaching defined performance milestones, and amounts of coach-led practice and youth-led play (e.g., pickup games) in the athlete’s respective main sport and in other sports. Analyses revealed that (a) adult world-class athletes engaged in more childhood/adolescent multisport practice, started their main sport later, accumulated less main-sport practice, and initially progressed more slowly than did national-class athletes; (b) higher performing youth athletes started playing their main sport earlier, engaged in more main-sport practice but less other-sports practice, and had faster initial progress than did lower performing youth athletes; and (c) youth-led play in any sport had negligible effects on both youth and adult performance. We illustrate parallels from science: Nobel laureates had multidisciplinary study/working experience and slower early progress than did national-level award winners. The findings suggest that variable, multidisciplinary practice experiences are associated with gradual initial discipline-specific progress but greater sustainability of long-term development of excellence.
...On the other hand, Sir Chris Hoy, the most successful racing cyclist of all time, did not start track cycling until age 17 and won his first gold medal at age 26 (Mackay, 2017). College basketball player Donald Thomas started practicing the high jump at age 22 and became world champion in the high jump at age 23 (Denman, 2007). Furthermore, athletes widely regarded as the greatest of all time in their sports, Roger Federer, Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, Michael Phelps, and Sir Chris Hoy, all played a diverse range of sports throughout childhood and adolescence rather than specializing in their main sport at an early age (Epstein, 2019; Landers, 2017; Hawkins, 2014; Mackay, 2017; DeHority, 2020).
...This research focused on sports, but analogous findings have been reported for at least one nonathletic domain: science. Graf 2015 [Die Wissenschaftselite Deutschlands: Sozialprofil und Werdegänge zwischen 1945 und 2013] examined the biographies of the 48 German Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry, economy, and medicine/physiology since 1945. 42 had multidisciplinary study and/or working experiences. Compared with winners of the Leibnitz prize—Germany’s highest national science award—Nobel laureates were less likely to have won a scholarship as a student and took statistically-significantly longer to earn full professorships and to achieve their award. Taken together, the observations suggest that early multidisciplinary practice is associated with gradual initial discipline-specific progress but greater sustainability of long-term development of excellence.
(I favor their “multiple-sampling-and-functional-matching hypothesis”: when I read biographies, the importance of ‘fitting’ in a specific field that one can be obsessive about and which matches one’s unique profile, seems like a critical and often underrated factor in going from being a highly talented and competent researcher, to a researcher someone would be reading or writing a bio about.)
There is a tension between specialization and keeping your options open. But also, many people are far from the Pareto boundary. For most kids, the alternative to learning chess (or CS or whatever) is watching cartoons, not studying something else.
Specialization has the risk that the entire field may become irrelevant, so it doesn’t matter if you are world’s number 1. Or you may find out one day that you hate the job, but you can’t do anything else.
Polgár made a successful bet. All three of his girls made it to the top. But without the benefit of hindsight, I would say that his strategy was quite risky: suppose the girls instead become “merely” 10th best in their country; now what? -- Perhaps the idea was that they could later switch from chess to something else, and become good-but-not-genius at the other thing.
(Also, the girls were born during socialism, where full employment was the official goal, so not being able to find a job was not an actual risk. Arguably, in socialism it made a lot of sense to become a specialist on something that brings prestige, because the regime would redistribute the money.)
To me, his main plausible x important claim is that performance is greatly improved by subject specialisation from age <5. The fact that many geniuses enter their fields late doesn’t falsify this, since that isn’t humdrum at all—barely one in a million kids specialise in that way. I think that people who enter a field such as CS at age 30, rather than at age 20 do have a mild disadvantage, maybe 0.5SD. So I wouldn’t be surprised if starting at age 4, rather than at age 20 gave you another 1-2SD advantage. Of course, subjects like CS do benefit a lot from basic maths and so on, but there are a lot of other things that they don’t benefit from that could easily be cut from the curriculum. If this sort of thing was true, it would quite profoundly undercut the standard EA advice to keep one’s options open.
I don’t think that’s true either, though. Early specialization requires solving an almost impossible prediction problem (it’s difficult enough to know what would be the ‘right’ field for a teenager or young adult, how are you going to do it for a <5yo? This is the same reason that high-IQ elementary schools can’t work); people, nevertheless, continue to try to do with Polgar says, and yet, we don’t see kids trained from toddlerhood dominating the elite reaches of every field. Early training is of pretty dubious value: when we look at early childhood interventions like Headstart, the gains fade out, and there are plenty of places like, I believe, Finland, which start education late and see no problem from this. (I think Scott also discussed this for homeschooling and in his graduation post.) “T-shaped” expertise requires a lot of exploration to gain breadth and figure out where to specialize, and for every Polgar, there’s a late bloomer (iirc, Epstein in The Sports Gene—which I liked far more than Bring Up Genius—gives many athletic examples, and made it a major focus of his 2019 Range: Why generalists triumph in a specialized world which I haven’t read yet); and you have newer results like “What Makes a Champion? Early Multidisciplinary Practice, Not Early Specialization, Predicts World-Class Performance”, Gullich et al 2021, which find the opposite of this claim:
(I favor their “multiple-sampling-and-functional-matching hypothesis”: when I read biographies, the importance of ‘fitting’ in a specific field that one can be obsessive about and which matches one’s unique profile, seems like a critical and often underrated factor in going from being a highly talented and competent researcher, to a researcher someone would be reading or writing a bio about.)
There is a tension between specialization and keeping your options open. But also, many people are far from the Pareto boundary. For most kids, the alternative to learning chess (or CS or whatever) is watching cartoons, not studying something else.
Specialization has the risk that the entire field may become irrelevant, so it doesn’t matter if you are world’s number 1. Or you may find out one day that you hate the job, but you can’t do anything else.
Polgár made a successful bet. All three of his girls made it to the top. But without the benefit of hindsight, I would say that his strategy was quite risky: suppose the girls instead become “merely” 10th best in their country; now what? -- Perhaps the idea was that they could later switch from chess to something else, and become good-but-not-genius at the other thing.
(Also, the girls were born during socialism, where full employment was the official goal, so not being able to find a job was not an actual risk. Arguably, in socialism it made a lot of sense to become a specialist on something that brings prestige, because the regime would redistribute the money.)