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submitted 21 hours ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to c/science_memes@mander.xyz

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[-] AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.ca 11 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

Lots of upvotes, but that's simply not true. It is true that people can be gifted in one area and not in others, but those people can excel in those areas more than someone even more passionately interested could ever hope to.

I knew a guy named Joe Rohde. You can look him up, he ended up being a head of imagineering at Disney. When I knew him, he was a high school art teacher, and then just starting at Disney. His aptitude for art was off the charts, and his mom said that was true when he was four and able to draw 3D renderings when his peers couldn't do stick figures. Sure, he practiced and developed skills, but his ability to hold a 3D image in his mind, tweak and rotate it, and then put it on paper, is something innate. He was absolute crap at math.

I spent 40 years at a company that mostly made rocket engines for NASA and the DoD, working with literal rocket scientists. I met all sorts of very smart people. Some were the stereotypical scientist that were geniuses in a particular area but had no skills outside of it, but others were just simply brilliant at anything they turned their mind to. Many of them defied the stereotype and also has great social skills.

It might be nice to think that anyone can be truly great at anything they put their mind to, but I've seen too many people who are truly great at things to believe it. Some people are just wired differently.

Edit: and none of the above mentions gender because gender doesn't factor into it.

[-] Uebercomplicated@lemmy.ml 1 points 13 minutes ago

his ability to hold a 3D image in his mind, tweak and rotate it, and then put it on paper, is something innate.

This is coincidentally a symptom of dyslexia, so you are right to think of it as something innate, unfortunately. It's also why so many architects are dyslexic.

[-] PotatoPie@lemmy.zip 2 points 11 hours ago

True, and it actually makes up the majority of the skill as well, i just don't like to look at people as gifted or lucky because it's unfair, it's kind of sad hahaha

I get easily conquered by defeatism if it's done through pure logic and there's no doubt about luck being a huge factor in skill! And in life in general, So i just kind of look away and continue grinding what i enjoy, because it's the only thing you can do to enjoy competitive activities

[-] AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.ca 1 points 8 hours ago

Even more so, luck is a big component of success. You can have both skill and hard work and not be successful at something. Likewise, some of the people who are successful aren't the most skilled, talented, or hardest working. There are correlations between success and those things, but luck is certainly a factor.

[-] searabbit@piefed.social 1 points 13 hours ago

When people say some people are wired different, they're usually thinking of high functioning autistic people. I would argue "innate talent" is very often autistic brains (look up the local overconnectivity theory) developing a special interest young enough that it became as second nature as other things typically learned at such early an age like a native language.

But I think what they're talking about is moreso relevant when we're talking about two people with equal potential because no one is disputing that the intellectually disabled exist. Two gifted kids may develop very different special interests. One might be reading math books at 8 years old likely because their parents are engineers while the other hyperfocuses on Harry Potter just because. The first gifted kid might tie their identity to their intelligence and look down on the other as being stupid. The second kid might internalize the message and who knows what they could've been. Society will label the first person as smart and point at all their status achievements as proof and label the second person as stupid and point at all their unproductive hobbies and lack of achievements as proof. But those external validators have much more to do with their interests, dedication, and what they value than they do with innate intelligence. I would also add onto this socioeconomic class as the biggest factor, but that's its own discussion.