Brooke N. Macnamara

Discussion on social media is not my jam though, so I will likely bow out here.

I also want to add that I think all research should be scrutinized, and whenever my work is, I’m the fortunate one. I really mean that. Scrutiny improves scientific progress.

I hope I was able to articulate why the focus of our paper—patterns observed among exceptional performers—cannot be extrapolated to causal mechanisms across the greater population (collider bias).

I’m not on social media much and generally don’t get involved in online debates. But recently, there were some good faith arguments (thank you to those posters) and so I did post a reply thread on the two platforms I’m on.

Those were some of the analyses: prospective studies of the top performers at junior age and then looking at their later performance at peak performance age.

When selecting the best performers at young ages, it's the opposite pattern. We've also looked at comparisons across other bins in adulthood and it's not the same pattern: e.g., higher performers at lower levels acquired more discipline-specific practice than their lower-performing counterparts.

Compared with counterparts performing just below, world-class performance is associated w/ less discipline-specific practice, more early multidisciplinary practice, and more gradual early progress. E.g., those who were the top performers early on are underrepresented at the adult world-class level.

For decades, expertise research assumed that this pattern must also hold for adult world-class performers. But it doesn’t seem to.

We reported how, for most of the population, as well as young exceptional performers, higher performance is associated with better early performance and more cumulative discipline-specific practice (and less multidisciplinary practice).

This is the focus of the paper—the pattern is quite different for the broader population than the associations observed within the highest levels.

E.g., classic collider bias: height is negatively associated with free throw performance in the NBA. If claiming that height is bad for basketball (broadly), that is clearly wrong and due to collider bias. However, the negative association is accurate among NBA players.

Hi Michel, We did consider the selection process, collider bias, and regression to mean, among other statistical artifacts. We're focused on elite performers, rather than making broad claims about the greater population.

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A brief Comment at Nature Reviews Psychology about how theories of achievement--deliberate practice, grit, mindset--are based on cognitive fallacies: rdcu.be/dqMVI