The Harmful Myth of Inherent Equality

Malcolm Gladwell popularized the 10,000-hour rule in Outliers: The Story of Success. According to the Wikipedia article about the book,


…[T]he “10,000-Hour Rule” [is] based on a study by Anders Ericsson. Gladwell claims that greatness requires enormous time, using the source of The Beatles’ musical talents and Gates’ computer savvy as examples….

Reemphasizing his theme, Gladwell continuously reminds the reader that genius is not the only or even the most important thing when determining a person’s success….

For “genius” read “genes.” Gladwell’s borrowed theme reinforces the left’s never-ending effort to sell the idea that all men and women are born with the same potential. And, of course, it’s the task of the almighty state to ensure that outcomes (e.g., housing, jobs, college admissions, and income) conform to nature’s design.

I encountered the 10,000-hour rule several years ago, and referred to it in this post, where I observed that “outcomes are skewed … because talent is distributed unevenly.” By “talent” I mean inherent ability of a particular kind — high intelligence and athletic prowess, for example — the possession of which obviously varies from person to person and (on average) from gender to gender and race to race. Efforts to deny such variations are nothing less than anti-scientific. They exemplify the left’s penchant for magical thinking.

There’s plenty of evidence of the strong link between inherent ability to success in any endeavor. I’ve offered some evidence here, here, here, and here. Now comes “Practice Does Not Make Perfect” by , , and (Slate, September 28, 2014). The piece veers off into social policy (with a leftish tinge) and an anemic attempt to rebut the race-IQ correlation, but it’s good on the facts. First, the authors frame the issue:

…What makes someone rise to the top in music, games, sports, business, or science? This question is the subject of one of psychology’s oldest debates.

The “debate” began sensibly enough:

In the late 1800s, Francis Galton—founder of the scientific study of intelligence and a cousin of Charles Darwin—analyzed the genealogical records of hundreds of scholars, artists, musicians, and other professionals and found that greatness tends to run in families. For example, he counted more than 20 eminent musicians in the Bach family. (Johann Sebastian was just the most famous.) Galton concluded that experts are “born.”

Then came the experts-are-made view and the 10,000-hour rule:

Nearly half a century later, the behaviorist John Watson countered that experts are “made” when he famously guaranteed that he could take any infant at random and “train him to become any type of specialist [he] might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents.”

The experts-are-made view has dominated the discussion in recent decades. In a pivotal 1993 article published in Psychological Review—psychology’s most prestigious journal—the Swedish psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues proposed that performance differences across people in domains such as music and chess largely reflect differences in the amount of time people have spent engaging in “deliberate practice,” or training exercises specifically designed to improve performance…. For example, the average for elite violinists was about 10,000 hours, compared with only about 5,000 hours for the least accomplished group. In a second study, the difference for pianists was even greater—an average of more than 10,000 hours for experts compared with only about 2,000 hours for amateurs. Based on these findings, Ericsson and colleagues argued that prolonged effort, not innate talent, explained differences between experts and novices.

But reality has a way of making itself known:

[R]ecent research has demonstrated that deliberate practice, while undeniably important, is only one piece of the expertise puzzle—and not necessarily the biggest piece. In the first study to convincingly make this point, the cognitive psychologists Fernand Gobet and Guillermo Campitelli found that chess players differed greatly in the amount of deliberate practice they needed to reach a given skill level in chess. For example, the number of hours of deliberate practice to first reach “master” status (a very high level of skill) ranged from 728 hours to 16,120 hours. This means that one player needed 22 times more deliberate practice than another player to become a master.

A recent meta-analysis by Case Western Reserve University psychologist Brooke Macnamara and her colleagues (including the first author of this article for Slate) came to the same conclusion. We searched through more than 9,000 potentially relevant publications and ultimately identified 88 studies that collected measures of activities interpretable as deliberate practice and reported their relationships to corresponding measures of skill…. [P]eople who reported practicing a lot tended to perform better than those who reported practicing less. But the correlations were far from perfect: Deliberate practice left more of the variation in skill unexplained than it explained. For example, deliberate practice explained 26 percent of the variation for games such as chess, 21 percent for music, and 18 percent for sports. So, deliberate practice did not explain all, nearly all, or even most of the performance variation in these fields. In concrete terms, what this evidence means is that racking up a lot of deliberate practice is no guarantee that you’ll become an expert. Other factors matter.

Genes are among the other factors:

There is now compelling evidence that genes matter for success, too. In a study led by the King’s College London psychologist Robert Plomin, more than 15,000 twins in the United Kingdom were identified through birth records and recruited to perform a battery of tests and questionnaires, including a test of drawing ability in which the children were asked to sketch a person. In a recently published analysis of the data, researchers found that there was a stronger correspondence in drawing ability for the identical twins than for the fraternal twins. In other words, if one identical twin was good at drawing, it was quite likely that his or her identical sibling was, too. Because identical twins share 100 percent of their genes, whereas fraternal twins share only 50 percent on average, this finding indicates that differences across people in basic artistic ability are in part due to genes. In a separate study based on this U.K. sample, well over half of the variation between expert and less skilled readers was found to be due to genes.

In another study, a team of researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden led by psychologist Miriam Mosing had more than 10,000 twins estimate the amount of time they had devoted to music practice and complete tests of basic music abilities, such as determining whether two melodies carry the same rhythm. The surprising discovery of this study was that although the music abilities were influenced by genes—to the tune of about 38 percent, on average—there was no evidence they were influenced by practice. For a pair of identical twins, the twin who practiced music more did not do better on the tests than the twin who practiced less. This finding does not imply that there is no point in practicing if you want to become a musician. The sort of abilities captured by the tests used in this study aren’t the only things necessary for playing music at a high level; things such as being able to read music, finger a keyboard, and commit music to memory also matter, and they require practice. But it does imply that there are limits on the transformative power of practice. As Mosing and her colleagues concluded, practice does not make perfect.

This is bad news for the blank-slate crowd on the left:

Ever since John Locke laid the groundwork for the Enlightenment by proposing that we are born as tabula rasa—blank slates—the idea that we are created equal has been the central tenet of the “modern” worldview. Enshrined as it is in the Declaration of Independence as a “self-evident truth,” this idea has special significance for Americans. Indeed, it is the cornerstone of the American dream—the belief that anyone can become anything they want with enough determination….

Wouldn’t it be better to just act as if we are equal, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding? That way, no people will be discouraged from chasing their dreams—competing in the Olympics or performing at Carnegie Hall or winning a Nobel Prize. The answer is no, for two reasons. The first is that failure is costly, both to society and to individuals. Pretending that all people are equal in their abilities will not change the fact that a person with an average IQ is unlikely to become a theoretical physicist, or the fact that a person with a low level of music ability is unlikely to become a concert pianist. It makes more sense to pay attention to people’s abilities and their likelihood of achieving certain goals, so people can make good decisions about the goals they want to spend their time, money, and energy pursuing…. Pushing someone into a career for which he or she is genetically unsuited will likely not work.

With regard to the latter point, Richard Sander has shown that aspiring blacks are chief among the victims of the form of “pushing” known as affirmative action. A few years ago, Sander was a guest blogger at The Volokh Conspiracy, where he posted thrice on the subject. In his first post, Sander writes:


I also laid out evidence suggesting that large preferences seemed to be worsening black outcomes. I argued that this was plausibly due to a “mismatch effect”; students receiving large preferences (for whatever reason) were likely to find themselves in academic environments where they had to struggle just to keep up; professor instruction would typically be aimed at the “median” student, so students with weaker academic preparation would tend to fall behind, and, even if they did not become discouraged and give up, would tend to learn less than they would have learned in an environment where their level of academic preparation was closer to the class median.

I suggested that the “mismatch effect” could explain as much as half of the black-white gap in first-time bar passage rates (the full gap is thirty to forty percentage points). I also suggested that “mismatch” might so worsen black outcomes that, on net, contemporary affirmative action was not adding to the total number of black lawyers, and might even be lowering the total number of new, licensed black attorneys.

This is from Sander’s second post:






And this is from Sander’s third post:


Is it possible for contemporary American universities to engage constructively with this type of research? …


Leftists — academic and other — cannot abide the truth when it refutes their prejudices. Affirmative action, as it turns out, is harmful to aspiring blacks. Most leftists will deny it because their leftist faith — their magical thinking– is more important to them than the well-being of those whose cause they claim to champion.


3 thoughts on “The Harmful Myth of Inherent Equality


    This is well put. I find that people don’t often think about the nature-nurture issue and career development from the standpoint of opportunity cost and mental health. This means taking the path that offers the most gain for the least amount of time and effort or, in other words, going along with natural strengths. I learned this from being a gamer and wish I could get people who don’t understand to sit down and play a simple RPG video game as this concept is obvious in that context. There’s a reason why it’s best for development to follow preset bonus points instead of wasting time and energy turning a mage into a warrior or vice versa.


  2. With respect to work, I have to admit that I drifted until I was 38. I then seized an opportunity to take a job for which I knew I was well-suited — a job that I had wanted for several years. After that, it was only a matter of seizing subsequent opportunities, some of which I had a hand in creating. I knew my strengths, and built on them. If I had stubbornly persisted in following my “dream” — to be a professional baseball player — I would probably now be living on the street.


  3. Yes, Thomas, I agree that there can be a fair bit of learning by making mistakes and picking the wrong thing that goes on until you “Know thyself.” My early career path followed the pushing of conventional Asian parenting for awhile (#1 be a doctor, if not #1 then #2 be a lawyer, if not #2 then #3 be a university professor – a minor variation here as #3 is usually “engineer”) until I cracked and quit whatever program I was in. For whatever reason, I found that I’m not suited for structured learning environments given to “busy work” and was fighting my own self at every turn.


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