Nature v Nurture

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/opinion/sunday/sorry-strivers-talent-matters.html?hpw

Argument:  Talent determines success to a greater extent than does hard work, at least at the top levels of intelligence.

Exhibit A is a landmark study of intellectually precocious youths directed by the Vanderbilt University researchers David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow. They and their colleagues tracked the educational and occupational accomplishments of more than 2,000 people who as part of a youth talent search scored in the top 1 percent on the SAT by the age of 13. (Scores on the SAT correlate so highly with I.Q. that the psychologist Howard Gardner described it as a “thinly disguised” intelligence test.) The remarkable finding of their study is that, compared with the participants who were “only” in the 99.1 percentile for intellectual ability at age 12, those who were in the 99.9 percentile — the profoundly gifted — were between three and five times more likely to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or publish a literary work. A high level of intellectual ability gives you an enormous real-world advantage. 


Obviously the first assumption is that desire to reach those academic goals - doctorates, patents, published articles - is similar among the 99 percent-ers.  And the other is that everyone among these categories works equally hard.  This second assumption could be wrong; it could be that students of equal intelligence reach the 99.9 percentile through an extra bit of hard work.  The SAT is, after all, an imprecise test, and small movements on the margin can move the needle.  So we could be observing harder work, rather than greater talent, and mistaking one for the other.

But even if that were not the case, it could still be true that harder work yields more return to success on the margin -- meaning that an additional amount of studying, practicing, staying up late, etc., is more beneficial to any given individual than some magical addition of gray matter.  If the 99.9 people are 5x more "successful" than the 99.1 people, then it could still be the case, if hard work yields high returns, than a 99.1 person working extra hard could offset the "success gap" -- or even dwarf it entirely.