zlacker

>>i7l+(OP)
> Around 90% of superstar adults had not been superstars as children, while only 10% of top-level kids had gone on to become exceptional adults (see chart 1). It is not just that exceptional performance in childhood did not predict exceptional performance as an adult. The two were actually negatively correlated, says Dr Güllich.

Even if "only" 10% of elite kids go on to become elite adults, 10% is orders of magnitude larger than the base percentage of adults who are elite athletes, musicians, etc. This doesn't sound "uncorrelated" to me so much as "not as strongly correlated as one might expect."

And describing something that happens 10% of the time as "rare" sounds a bit weird, like referring to left-handedness (also about 1 in 10) as rare.

>>FeteCo+Sb
I don't think you would be using the general population as the control group.

You're not going to take elite chess kids and then random kids and compare in 10 years and see anything interesting. Elite chess kids will be better considering most people don't even play chess...

Anyway, I understand being skeptical, and I'm not a fan of pop economics stuff like this, but I still imagine the researchers thought of this.