I've not read Mr. Gladwell's book but, from the reviewer's comments, it sounds like he goes to great lengths to show that diligence and hard work explain success far more than innate ability (if there is such a thing). The fact that he has to explain this shows that we Americans are biased toward attributing success to some vague X-factor that Bill Gates and Larry Ellison have that most of us do not have, which seems defeatist to me. Interestingly, the idea of universal perfectibility--that all have an equal capacity to enhance their moral and intellectual powers--is a very ancient one, having been stated by Confucius in his Analects 2,500 years ago: "All men are basically alike; it is learning and practice that set them apart." It seems like a truism, but it's not even clear that we
Americans even take this to heart.

Indeed, the one thing I would note of the smartest person I know (who does of course possess natural talent), is that he reads prodigiously, more than anyone else I have ever met. He is always at pains to stress to people how unclear it is even to him how much his natural talent made him want to read 7 books a week when he was a child, and how much reading seven books a week when he was a child led to the appearance of natural talent.

Well one could ask how much of his 'smartness' comes from actually doing and saying smart things and how much comes from his taking pains to explain to people that he reads seven books a week.

Stop being a facetious twat, this came up during long conversations/debates about nature vs nurture.

Effort alone isn't sufficient though - you need ability too:

"Gladwell highlights the claim of psychologist Anders Ericsson, that effort dominates ability (the 10,000 hours of practice thesis). My opinion on this can be found here, deep in the comments. The evidence is pretty strong in the case of science that native cognitive ability is a prerequisite for success. Practice (effort) is necessary also, but neither alone are sufficient.

...that quote sounds like it could be from Anders Ericsson's research on expertise. I disagree with his conclusions. His studies only show that effortful practice (about 10 years worth) is typically required to reach the highest level of capability. But he then confuses the logic and asserts that practice alone is *sufficient*, when in fact it is only necessary. You need raw ability *and* lengthy practice to reach expertise."

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/

But here is the issue: given a normal, healthy human being, why is there an apparent presupposition that they won't have the ablity?

Why is that we seem to assume that 'talent' is only sprinkled on a few blessed human beings like so many special raisins?

I haven't read Gladwell's book, but I would argue that we confuse the fact that success is generally limited to a few with the belief that ability must also be limited to a few.

I think the presupposition comes from everyday interaction with people of differing talents. Sometimes you can write this off entirely to nurture because they may have been better prepared for the task, but sometimes the task is radically novel.

Everyday interaction with people is fraught with perceptions, prejudices and sometimes even outright bigoted hallucinations. Personal testimony cannot be a guide to what human beings are or are not capable of, because so many people get it wrong.

Today I was in a checkout line behind a guy who was three or four times my size. Now this guy is going to have much better chances of playing pro football then I ever could have had. And if we ever played together, he'd flatten me.

But it doesn't follow that someone my size is incapable of playing football. It doesn't follow that because only a few people can make it to the pro football leagues that the ability to play a sport is therefore rare. In fact, most healthy people can play a sport, and often play it excellently. If this were not true, high school football could not exist because there wouldn't be enough players good enough to make a show of it.

There must be many people with the physical 'talent' to play football who just simply don't have the right size to play professional football. Thus the reason most would be football players don't make it to pro football must be more a matter of circumstance than talent, since the existence of larger competitors is a circumstance and not a matter of innate talent.

Now as regards intelligence, we seem to have the impression that if Einstein is a pro football player, then the average person is someone who can't move 3 yards down a football field without falling down. But this cannot be correct. I believe that since most healthy people are pretty much alike, then differences in intelligence have to be more like the differences in sports, which is to say, differences of degree and capablity and circumstances rather than differences in kind.

I think Dan Seligman's book "A Question of Intelligence" does a better job explaining the performance of East Asians on math/science subjects. Essentially, if you look at the group average, they do particularly well on the non-verbal component of psychometric tests. This is consistent with their performance on math/science subjects. Seligman also notes possible explanations of this including: "Severely compressed, his explanation goes about like this: Some sixty thousand years ago, when the lee Age descended on the Northern Hemisphere, the Mongoloid populations faced uniquely hostile "selection pressure" for greater intelligence. Northeast Asia during the Ice Age was the coldest part of the world inhabited by man. Survival required major advances in hunting skills. Lynn's 1987 paper refers to "the ability to isolate slight variations in visual stimulation from a relatively featureless landscape, such as the movement of a white Arctic hare against a background of snow and ice; to recall visual landmarks on long hunting expeditions away from home and to develop a good spatial map of an extensive terrain." These, Lynn believes, were the pressures that ultimately produced the world's best visuospatial abilities." Also, Gladwell's explanation for Jewish legal success on working in the garment industry in NYC isn't convincing. Seligman notes jewish performance on the verbal component of psychometric tests is above average. The Cochran/Harpending paper on Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence suggests this is partly genetic. See Charles Murray's commentary on the paper: "Assessing the events of the 1st century C.E. thus poses a chicken-and-egg problem. By way of an analogy, consider written Chinese with its thousands of unique characters. On cognitive tests, today’s Chinese do especially well on visuo-spatial skills. It is possible, I suppose, that their high visuo-spatial skills have been fostered by having to learn written Chinese; but I find it much more plausible that only people who already possessed high visuo-spatial skills would ever devise such a ferociously difficult written language. Similarly, I suppose it is possible that the Jews’ high verbal skills were fostered, through secondary and tertiary effects, by the requirement that they be able to read and understand complicated texts after the 1st century C.E.; but I find it much more plausible that only people who already possessed high verbal skills would dream of installing such a demanding requirement." <link>