Hypothesis: Your country's likelihood of fielding a world-class soccer team is roughly proportional to the number of person-days of access that the average kid has to an unfrozen soccer field.
Isn't this like asking why US colleges north of, say, Virginia have so much trouble recruiting top-class college baseball players, such that the College World Series always seems to be "some team from Florida vs some team from Arizona"? Aspiring players of professional baseball prefer to play for teams whose home field thaws out before April.
Of course, the opposite is also true. Great hockey players are more likely to be hail from Russia, Canada, New York, or Massachusetts than from Brazil, Italy, London, or California.
Honestly, I don't understand a point of professional team sports at all. If every team of every country can in principle hire every player from every country, constrained mainly by its budget and negotiating abilities - it becomes mainly a battle of budget, and politics also.
Sometimes it's largely statistics and genetics, and this is so unambiguously well supported that the only reason to disbelieve it is a desire to maintain a certain fantasy about human beings that isn't true but that nonetheless may be valuable or good for social function. (E.g. Kenya / Distance Running, Jamaica / Sprinting.) Of course then this effect becomes amplified by those places getting a better support and infrastructure.
Physical differences are undeniable, but chess is not a physical sport. There's a nice documentary "My Brilliant Brain" that shows how people can get extraordinarily skilled by (surprise surprise) making an extraordinary effort).
In the documentary a guy decides he wants his daughter to become a chess grandmaster, and trains her from a very young age (4 years) for 6 hours a day. The combination of intelligence, aptitude and effort made her one of the first female grandmasters in chess.
If _that_ is the result of dedication, the statistics and genetic factors (if they even exist) must pale in comparison.
> There's a nice documentary "My Brilliant Brain" that shows how people can get extraordinarily skilled by (surprise surprise) making an extraordinary effort).
There is also something called the g-factor that is a measure of intelligence. A significant amount of research shows that the basis for the g-factor is innate (i.e. due to genetics). It also turns out that this has to do with the physiology of the brain.
A good starting point for papers on this subject is Haier et al. You can find some of his papers at :
It is somewhat shocking that intelligence may be an innate factor. This is a fairly controversial topic (even without bringing gender or race into the conversation). But have you thought about the repercussions if intelligence is proven to be innate? A good example would be to classify people with a low intelligence as disabled (with the employment equity and disability aid that comes along with it).
It is somewhat shocking that intelligence may be an innate factor.
It's only become shocking to people in our culture in the last few decades, since it undermines the Truth that everyone is essentially of equivalent ability, and trying hard is the only reason some are better at some things than others.
The brain is still a physical object, and its development is a mix of genetics and upbringing, just as height and musculature are. The difference is that chess playing abilities isn't so readily visible as bulging muscles are.
There are some people who have a substantial advantage when they start their training and others who could never be grandmasters with any amount of training.
Genetic differences are often overstated by comparing one extreme to another.
Instead, consider the personal limits of any given individual to be the best in strength/physique contests, chess competitions, programming contests, time to run a mile, or playing in the NFL.
The brain is still a physical object, and its development is a mix of genetics and upbringing, just as height and musculature are. The difference is that chess playing abilities isn't so readily visible as bulging muscles are.
Such limits are unknown until the given person puts many, many years of work into a particular goal (often at least five years.) That's because limits are not defined by where one starts, but where one plateaus for multiple years following some kind of improvement over the prior five, ten, fifteen years.
Genetics may help push somebody over a plateau they would otherwise have hit sooner (just as having a good coach, training regimen, knowing one's own body, etc, will help as well). But discovering that one is genetically superior (which, for somebody with a given gift, could simply mean that he or she is able to accomplish something one second faster than somebody else with the same training experience in the entire lives--something hard to duplicate) doesn't displace the years of work it took to reach a point where genetics start to be the limiting factor.
For every person a journalist might say has a gift, there are hundreds of other people with the same level of achievement nobody writes about. There are about 2,000 active NFL players. There are many grandmasters. There are many active runners, swimmers, etc who are comparable to the fastest people of 50 years ago, but are slower than the current world record holders. All of these people have to train hard to get to where they are.
For example: it's possible that somebody on Hacker News has the kind of muscle fibers that speed runners dream of. However, that person would never know they are athletically gifted because they never got to the point where this ability mattered; e.g., their cardiovascular system runs out of gas quickly and they never bothered to keep trying, to see how good they could actually be.
Recap: do genetics matter at differentiating the best from the best? Yes. Are people who are not the best in a particular arena missing those genes they need to be Gary Kasparov, Randy Moss, Wayne Gretzky? Very unlikely. It's more likely they are missing the 5, 10, 15 years of exerted effort at that particular mission.
The best in the world are better than those who have tried to do the same professionally for many years. However, there are hundreds of millions of people out there who could be close to the best, who have not even tried (often, for the sake of a career, family, education.) Genetics are really one of the least important differentiators when comparing a professional (anything) to somebody who is doing something else. Therefore, the genetic argument is very, very weak.
>Genetic differences are often overstated by comparing one extreme to another.
Upbringing differences are even more often overstated by comparing one extreme to another. In fact your entire comment was just that.
>Such limits are unknown until the given person puts many, many years of work into a particular goal (often at least five years.) That's because limits are not defined by where one starts, but where one plateaus for multiple years following some kind of improvement over the prior five, ten, fifteen years.
Genetics aren't some sort of magical limit that appear after pushing yourself hard at some pursuit for a decade. They're another variable, along with training, diet, etc. It's difficult to say what anybody's absolute limits are, but ball-park predictions are possible. And no microcephalic is ever going to be an excellent chess player, regardless of training.
In your example of sprinting, the best in the world was noticed and brought into the sport due to his talents. According to wikipedia, "Upon his entry to William Knibb Memorial High School, Bolt continued to focus on other sports, but his cricket coach noticed Bolt's speed on the pitch and urged him to try track and field events." And then, with less than a decade of serious training, he utterly demolished world records in three different events. Two other points that suggest a large genetic component in his success are that he had only recently started training for the 100 when he broke the world record, and that he was the fastest kid in his school while growing up, even before doing an track and field training.
>For example: it's possible that somebody on Hacker News has the kind of muscle fibers that speed runners dream of. However, that person would never know they are athletically gifted because they never got to the point where this ability mattered;
Muscle fibers are only the least of what goes into running talent. Paraplegics typically have a higher percentage of fast-twitch fibers than sprinters. That noted, the premise that someone on a relatively small site such as this might unknowingly have the same level of natural sprinting abilities as a freak of nature like Bolt is ridiculous. Only if one believed that all hereditary dormant was "dormant" until one trained for decades and that the bobcat's leaping power sprang from its upbringing would that be a sensible hypothesis.
There's a mountain of scientific data demonstrating natural differences in abilities between different people. In order to deny the existence of talent, you'd literally have to throw out the last fifty years of psychology, biology and related life sciences. Sadly, quite a few people are willing to do just that! The fact that there's an argument at all about nature and nurture both contributing greatly to life outcomes makes it clear that the influence of nature is severely underestimated. That Gladwell and others who lack any background in life sciences are getting so much play in the media on this topic only serve as further evidence. Here are some scientific findings on the subject of talent:
William, I am not disagreeing that genetics may play a dominant role, but I do think it is a very weak argument to compare chess playing aptitude to running. From what I have read, we know a great deal about what physical traits (fast twitch muscles, bone length ratios, and so forth) make someone a fast runner. We know a fair bit about the role genes play in developing these traits.
With chess-playing aptitude we have indirect evidence of genetics gathered statistically. Can we measure a trait like seratonin to dopamine ratios? Can we measure a physical trait like the size of the brain or the pattern of the folds of the neocortex and statistically associate it with chess aptitude? Not to my knowledge.
So while there may be a statistical and indirect argument to make about chess aptitude and genetics, I think it should be made as such rather than making an argument comparing chess aptitude to something like running where (at this time) we know a lot more about the direct traits involved.
Yes, I agree with you. I was reacting to the common attitude illustrated by the parent post that goes "Why does any group of people excel at something? It's necessarily because of culture and social support and you're stupid for considering anything else."
Postulating variations in the human brain is socially off the table, and perhaps this is the best way for it to be. The evidence people are willing accept as absolute proof that human brains are basically equal is weaker by several orders of magnitude than that which would convince them that there is any statistical difference in the brains of any populations.
One indication of this is that people who think that there is no significant statical pattern in variations of human brains never take that thought further toward interesting scientific questions. (For example, why have all groups of humans had the exact same evolutionary pressures on all kinds of intelligence, or why is intelligence seemingly unable to evolve in different directions, given that however you measure it it seems highly, highly heritable as shown by twin studies and other evidence?)
So basically, I'm just a mood to explore really politically incorrect and dangerous ideas, many of which may also be wrong. However, people who explore these ideas are not stupid, and reactions like "duh, it's the society" aren't really warranted. It may be socially irresponsible to think about ideas like this, and I'm agnostic about whether that's so. It quite possibly could be indicative of a very poor political sensibility too (see James Watson, Larry Summers.)
I'm not making an argument for chess. I'm making an argument for the possible existence of a single counterexample to the "obvious" claim that if a group of people are good at X, regardless of the nature of X, then it is necessarily only due to cultural factors.
Actually, there are cultures which foster intense distance running so I think even the genetics/distance running argument isn't a "slam dunk" - ie, to just act like the point is proven is a cheap, unsupported argument.
Aha, but what if those cultures persist over countless generations? The degree to which one fits into one's culture partially determines one's reproductive success. Wouldn't this weed out the genetically poor distance runners while advantaging the genetically good distance runners?
