> In the essay, he’s basically trying to square a circle: to reconcile the ideas that 1. natural talent exists and 2. everyone is morally equivalent.
I don't think this ideas are incompatible, or even unintuitive: most people intuit that it's equally wrong to murder a gas station attendant and a professor of medical ethics, even if the latter is more prestigious and/or talented in some sense than the latter.
(This is a recurrent theme in Scott Alexander's writing: establish a dichotomy and run with it, even if it's facially incorrect.)
The author concludes that "I should make sure I sweated blood working on a strength, [and] do more of what comes naturally." Something I found was that sometimes the things I have the most passion and interest for are _not_ the things that are strengths. But they have become strengths. Today, I would consider myself to be an OS and systems programmer person. It was abjectly _not_ something that came to me naturally. To understand assembly language, C, and other things, and gain any sort of a proper grasp on, it took years. Sometimes, I tell people how long it took me and how much I struggled, and they are bewildered that I found these subjects so difficult. But I did.
However, my motivating factor was my interest in the subject, not my innate strength in it, and that has pushed me to study it and become strong enough that I can (hopefully, I'm still in college!) succeed in that space.
There are subjects where I could probably succeed if I tried harder and effusively sweated blood (probably pure math related). Pure math is one of those things I just suck at. But the difference is that I don't find it personally interesting, and so the burden of learning and building talent feels infinitely more overwhelming.
Sometimes I wonder if interest influences not just my motivation, but my capacity for learning and talent. Sometimes I also wonder if my "lack of innate talent" is that actually "I generally learn more slowly." But maybe learning more slowly helps me learn things more deeply as well. Who knows.
* As a side note, the quote I was told is "if you want to be known as a dog killer, you should kill dogs."
Well, the absolutely best-case scenarios is when you both have an innate talent for something and deep interest/obsession about it; I think that the article encourages you to find exactly that and then focus on it, because once you combine innate talent + obsession, you do have unfair advantage over the others
I also think it's not super easy to evaluate whether you have an innate talent for something. The example of Ramanujan reading math textbooks when he was twelve is definitely an exceptional case, but I also think it's not clear to a lot of twelve year olds that such deep resources in a subject even exist. I was lucky that my county's library system had a literal treasure trove of computer science related books that I could check out as a tween and teen, so I was exposed to a subject before most people were.
If your parents present you with your first computer when you're five years old, and it drops you to a bash prompt, and that's all you have, then you'll probably know considerably more than everyone else just from that being your only choice for a computing environment.
So sometimes it's hard to quantify whether or not being more successful and growing faster is about the luck of exposure. There are times when I have switched textbooks for learning something or changed my learning style and suddenly catapaulted myself to having the highest scores in classes or understanding a topic infinitely better. People said assembly was easy for them, but maybe spending a year aimlessly typing "si" into GDB was not the most effective way to learn assembly.
But having access to all these resources for exposure allows people to develop their interests and find their talents. It's just hard to say sometimes if that's innate talent and aptitude or just interest and being exposed before everyone else.
I would partially agree. Speaking from experience, I can say that if you're naturally good at something, you can learn it pretty well even if resources are of poor quality. Obviously it makes all the difference if they're good, but you get it easily in any case
>Sometimes I wonder if interest influences not just my motivation, but my capacity for learning and talent.
It does. Anything you have an interest in, you will spend more time thinking about in general, be more focused while learning the relevant bits, and will breed a willingness to learn something related, but not specific to what you need.
I'm senior technical in my dept and have had a lifelong interest in tech, how it works, why it works, etc. and in my case, my interest definitely influenced my ability to handle work, broad skillset, practical application and more.
especially the example of the indian boy who borrowed and worked through math textbooks of local college students made it pretty clear to me that the difference between him and the poor kids in the US was the inherent drive he seemed to have in this anecdote.
Same as for when the author described feeling to be deserving of praise for the work put in to get a C in math. He would not be satisfied with a C if he had an inherent drive to do math, hell he wouldn’t have gotten that C if he had and if he did he wouldn’t have felt deserving of applause since the work he put in would have felt like playing almost.
I think it has to do with the Brain’s favorite sources of dopamine. If you steer clear of the hedonistic approaches and focus on finding constructive ways to get your dopamine, those constructive ways may give you a living you enjoy. Physics, math, trading, coding, writing are all self-feedback fields you can iterate on in your own to get as good as you want to be. The fact that you don’t depend on others to make progress can give you infinite dopamine rewards and fuel more desire to work. The key is finding your Brain’s most constructive sources of dopamine and see how much you can feed it.
This reminds me of Oliver Burkeman's insight in "Meditations for Mortals" that we can only control quantity, not quality. He suggests we focus on what's within our control: showing up consistently and doing the work, rather than obsessing over outcomes. Another piece of his advice is to choose pursuits where you have a natural aptitude. Otherwise, there's too much friction. People enjoy being competent.
Haruki Murakami describes a similar discovery in his memoir "Novelist as a Vocation." He didn't set out knowing he had talent for writing, he discovered it through consistent practice. Only by writing his first novel did he realize he might have aptitude for it. Talent wasn't something he was born knowing about, but something he uncovered through action.
True; and the best case scenario is to discover something that you do have a natural, above average talent/aptitude for and you're interested/obsessive about it as well. This very thing is possibly your biggest leverage in life
I think as part of my 2026 goals I’ve got to learn how to shitpost half as good as some of the people that make the HN front page. These blog posts have a solid self-fellating energy to them replete with quotes from brand names that’s just too good to pass up on. A complete lack of experience talking about talent with nothing to show for it? Shit sign me up I’m all about that. I’ll have to put a twist on it. Maybe I’ll find something from Grothendieck and maybe mix it in with Moebius to form that perfect slurry of articulated diarrhea. Hmm, I just have to choose the right serif font that gives my each word an air of Oxford superiority. Maybe I can prompt ChatGPT for tips.
After reading this note I realized that there is a special breed of people that attends meetings, coordinates communication strategies across the organization, pro-actively addresses blockers and engages stakeholders as naturally as ducks take to water (or as naturally as Ramanujan did math).....
If you think differently to people around you, treat their advice with some scepticism. Including the things about work life balance and burn out.
Erdos did _great_. I had no idea he spent decades working for longer than most people spend awake but I know the name. If he'd listened to the advice he was given, we'd have a lot less mathematics and he'd have been less content.
Some other people would have been a little less worried about him. Bad tradeoff.
(tangent) That referenced Scott Alexander article was how I figured out his real last name before the New York Times doxxed him - he gave so many details about his brother I realized who he was talking about.
FWIW, I don't think he wanted to hide his identity. He talked about just not wanting patients to google his full name and find his blog, as opposed to preventing people who read his blog from finding out his name.
Free will does not exist, but I suppose it's handy for society at large to pretend that it does.
I don't know why, but I let myself believe for so long that I was the captain of my ship. Now that I embody the fact that everything's out of my control, I have become so much more relaxed and content with life. I do not compare myself with people that are better (or worse) off than me. They lucked into their lives as well.
I am very grateful for everything I have been given. Even the fact that I exist and get to experience this beautiful thing called consciousness. I do not complain much anymore. I work hard to give back. Not that I am rich. But I am strongly inclined to produce more and consume less, perhaps that is because I wish to show appreciation for the gift of the present that I have been given.
And my reaction isn't positive based on only good luck. I've had my fair share of bad luck, and I have been deeply disadvantaged in certain areas of life. But even for those areas, I do not blame myself. Since I believe that it was 100% the role of luck in shaping everything.
I know some people can react to the lack of free will in a negative way, but that has not been the case for me. Would be interesting to dive deeper into why. This realization has also not taken my agency, or my will to live and take action. I know that sounds contradictory, but it's true.
Imo the author is missing crucial point, by making comparisons of things which are not comparable. You can not say, Person A is brilliant at xyz, why is Person B not brilliant at it, even though the circumstances and resources might be identical. The difference is, people who push themselves or are pushed to be good or great at something will barely come as far as those people who get drawn to something, because it means the can avoid suffering, grieve or else. Imo this is the strong driving force here, with the examples of Erdös and Ramanujan. I claim Ramanujan didn't became a great mathematician, because he wanted to be good at math, but mathematics gave him a space, where he could forget about his devastating circumstances of poverty and inequality. And the deeper he got into math the more he felt aligned to it and at home.
Yeah and using people who write as inspiration is really weird to me. I’d rather look up to people who are slightly too busy to write 2k words a day because they’re actually doing things.
Why is that weird? The author is obviously impressed by writers, given they have an interesting in writing themselves, so it makes sense to use writers as an example.
And why is writing a less valuable profession than another job? Writing is also "doing a thing" - it just so happens to be a profession for some, a great one for those who are skilled and gifted at it.
Everyone says that, but there are plenty of people who take amphetamines every day, and nearly all of them never approach the productivity of Paul Erdos.
Eh. It's possible to do well at stuff, without getting high. Just sayin'. I've been doing it for over 40 years. Just takes some self-work.
I think people get hung up on "keeping score." Things like GitHub Activity graphs, where people write scripts, to game theirs, or pumping out mountains of really bad code, in order to jack up their LoC scores.
And, of course, there's money. If you don't generate money for silly rich people, then what you do is worthless.
* Don't work in power-law / winner-take-all industries, unless you are truly remarkable (and even then, you need a lot of luck). Entertainment is the most obvious example of such an industry.
* No shit talent exists. Just look at basketball players. Presumably nobody thinks Wemby is 7'5" because he just trained harder at growing tall than anyone else? Why would any other characteristic be different?
Being tall doesn't automatically make you good or dominant at basketball, you can even be too tall. Wemby might just be at that threshold, but the unusual thing about him is his dexterity despite his height; such maneuverability and flexibility is trainable. I hear he also spent the summer training, likely harder than most.
No, but being short is completely disqualifying, so being tall is certainly a component of the physical traits that make you good at basketball. If you're 5'2" , it doesn't matter what other gifts you have -- you will not be a pro male basketball player today.
In tennis, being too tall is clearly net bad, but being too short is also definitely bad. 80% of male pro tennis players are 5'10" - 6'4", which is certainly not the statistics of the general population.
Absolutely it's a combination of many factors. However height is undeniably very important. Wemby at 5'5" won't be as impressive a player, no matter how much he trained.
Entertainment is illustrative. There have been controlled studies (e.g., https://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full....) showing that there are sort of chaotic social dynamics influencing popularity, in that what others are paying attention to influence what someone is paying attention to, which leads to these kinds of random paths of success. Clearly there's some ability at play as well, but beyond some level, it starts to have a lot of chaotic path dependency.
I suspect a lot of fields are like this also, like academics (nowadays at least) and some other things. Maybe a lot of life is like it.
The discussions often seem to me to become oversimplified, like comparing some poor genius with access to books who overcomes it all by sheer ability, to some hypothetical other person with comparatively great education that's taken for granted. But what if that hypothetical other person is being ridiculed for liking math? Or reading books? Or what if there is no college math books around, they get bored, and go off on the wrong path? What if their interests are for something more complex in its ability determinants than math, or that someone doesn't encounter until later in life usually?
Sometimes I feel like people aren't necessarily exposed to what they are best suited for, for all sorts of reasons. This is a classic "finding a career" problem, with advice to try things until you stumble on it — the converse situation being one where you think you like a vocation and then find out later you hate it. It's not like what you're best suited to is just on a shelf for you to look at and have an immediate grasp of; it comes from having experience with it, which not everyone might have. Maybe there's an excellent potential rugby player out there who never had the opportunity to play rugby or even knows what it is.
Life is just so complex, people get in each others' way for all sorts of reasons, and corruption complicates things more.
Winner takes all just means that a few people capture most of the value. That is the case in entertainment. It doesn't say anything about the talent needed to succeed in that industry. What you need to succeed varies depends on the exact industry. Athletes (who are entertainers) have more objective criteria than, say, pop stars. Even in the case of athletes there are factors beyond genetics (e.g. access to coaching.)
For pop stars you need to have some combination of the right look and ability to perform. Ed Sheeran looks a bit like a muppet but seems to be very good at creating catchy songs. Taylor Swift, to me at least, isn't that good at catchy tunes but she has the look and lives the life style. I imagine there are aspects of personality that are not as obvious but very important to survive in the industry.
one can wonder about the biological nature of the talent:
"Like all of Erdös's friends, Graham was concerned about his drug-taking. In 1979, Graham bet Erdös $500 that he couldn't stop taking amphetamines for a month. Erdös accepted the challenge, and went cold turkey for thirty days. After Graham paid up--and wrote the $500 off as a business expense--Erdös said, "You've showed me I'm not an addict. But I didn't get any work done. I'd get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I'd have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You've set mathematics back a month." He promptly resumed taking pills, and mathematics was the better for it."
Sounds like Erdős might have had ADD/ADHD or something similar, and amphetamines was his medication.
Edit: Never read about Erdős before and came across this: "Erdős published around 1,500 mathematical papers during his lifetime, a figure that remains unsurpassed". Maybe he was just a functional addict :)
Millions of Americans take amphetamines daily, yet very few publish papers. I wager that Erdös simply had talent locked behind a common dopamine disorder.
> In the essay, he’s basically trying to square a circle: to reconcile the ideas that 1. natural talent exists and 2. everyone is morally equivalent.
I don't think this ideas are incompatible, or even unintuitive: most people intuit that it's equally wrong to murder a gas station attendant and a professor of medical ethics, even if the latter is more prestigious and/or talented in some sense than the latter.
(This is a recurrent theme in Scott Alexander's writing: establish a dichotomy and run with it, even if it's facially incorrect.)
The author concludes that "I should make sure I sweated blood working on a strength, [and] do more of what comes naturally." Something I found was that sometimes the things I have the most passion and interest for are _not_ the things that are strengths. But they have become strengths. Today, I would consider myself to be an OS and systems programmer person. It was abjectly _not_ something that came to me naturally. To understand assembly language, C, and other things, and gain any sort of a proper grasp on, it took years. Sometimes, I tell people how long it took me and how much I struggled, and they are bewildered that I found these subjects so difficult. But I did.
However, my motivating factor was my interest in the subject, not my innate strength in it, and that has pushed me to study it and become strong enough that I can (hopefully, I'm still in college!) succeed in that space.
There are subjects where I could probably succeed if I tried harder and effusively sweated blood (probably pure math related). Pure math is one of those things I just suck at. But the difference is that I don't find it personally interesting, and so the burden of learning and building talent feels infinitely more overwhelming.
Sometimes I wonder if interest influences not just my motivation, but my capacity for learning and talent. Sometimes I also wonder if my "lack of innate talent" is that actually "I generally learn more slowly." But maybe learning more slowly helps me learn things more deeply as well. Who knows.
* As a side note, the quote I was told is "if you want to be known as a dog killer, you should kill dogs."
Well, the absolutely best-case scenarios is when you both have an innate talent for something and deep interest/obsession about it; I think that the article encourages you to find exactly that and then focus on it, because once you combine innate talent + obsession, you do have unfair advantage over the others
I also think it's not super easy to evaluate whether you have an innate talent for something. The example of Ramanujan reading math textbooks when he was twelve is definitely an exceptional case, but I also think it's not clear to a lot of twelve year olds that such deep resources in a subject even exist. I was lucky that my county's library system had a literal treasure trove of computer science related books that I could check out as a tween and teen, so I was exposed to a subject before most people were.
If your parents present you with your first computer when you're five years old, and it drops you to a bash prompt, and that's all you have, then you'll probably know considerably more than everyone else just from that being your only choice for a computing environment.
So sometimes it's hard to quantify whether or not being more successful and growing faster is about the luck of exposure. There are times when I have switched textbooks for learning something or changed my learning style and suddenly catapaulted myself to having the highest scores in classes or understanding a topic infinitely better. People said assembly was easy for them, but maybe spending a year aimlessly typing "si" into GDB was not the most effective way to learn assembly.
But having access to all these resources for exposure allows people to develop their interests and find their talents. It's just hard to say sometimes if that's innate talent and aptitude or just interest and being exposed before everyone else.
I would partially agree. Speaking from experience, I can say that if you're naturally good at something, you can learn it pretty well even if resources are of poor quality. Obviously it makes all the difference if they're good, but you get it easily in any case
>Sometimes I wonder if interest influences not just my motivation, but my capacity for learning and talent.
It does. Anything you have an interest in, you will spend more time thinking about in general, be more focused while learning the relevant bits, and will breed a willingness to learn something related, but not specific to what you need.
I'm senior technical in my dept and have had a lifelong interest in tech, how it works, why it works, etc. and in my case, my interest definitely influenced my ability to handle work, broad skillset, practical application and more.
YMMV, but imo, your statement is true.
GL!
True! But it feels like that if you find something that you're both naturaly good at and interested in - you're unstoppable
fwiw i think u hit the nail closer on the head.
especially the example of the indian boy who borrowed and worked through math textbooks of local college students made it pretty clear to me that the difference between him and the poor kids in the US was the inherent drive he seemed to have in this anecdote.
Same as for when the author described feeling to be deserving of praise for the work put in to get a C in math. He would not be satisfied with a C if he had an inherent drive to do math, hell he wouldn’t have gotten that C if he had and if he did he wouldn’t have felt deserving of applause since the work he put in would have felt like playing almost.
I think it has to do with the Brain’s favorite sources of dopamine. If you steer clear of the hedonistic approaches and focus on finding constructive ways to get your dopamine, those constructive ways may give you a living you enjoy. Physics, math, trading, coding, writing are all self-feedback fields you can iterate on in your own to get as good as you want to be. The fact that you don’t depend on others to make progress can give you infinite dopamine rewards and fuel more desire to work. The key is finding your Brain’s most constructive sources of dopamine and see how much you can feed it.
This reminds me of Oliver Burkeman's insight in "Meditations for Mortals" that we can only control quantity, not quality. He suggests we focus on what's within our control: showing up consistently and doing the work, rather than obsessing over outcomes. Another piece of his advice is to choose pursuits where you have a natural aptitude. Otherwise, there's too much friction. People enjoy being competent.
Haruki Murakami describes a similar discovery in his memoir "Novelist as a Vocation." He didn't set out knowing he had talent for writing, he discovered it through consistent practice. Only by writing his first novel did he realize he might have aptitude for it. Talent wasn't something he was born knowing about, but something he uncovered through action.
True; and the best case scenario is to discover something that you do have a natural, above average talent/aptitude for and you're interested/obsessive about it as well. This very thing is possibly your biggest leverage in life
I think as part of my 2026 goals I’ve got to learn how to shitpost half as good as some of the people that make the HN front page. These blog posts have a solid self-fellating energy to them replete with quotes from brand names that’s just too good to pass up on. A complete lack of experience talking about talent with nothing to show for it? Shit sign me up I’m all about that. I’ll have to put a twist on it. Maybe I’ll find something from Grothendieck and maybe mix it in with Moebius to form that perfect slurry of articulated diarrhea. Hmm, I just have to choose the right serif font that gives my each word an air of Oxford superiority. Maybe I can prompt ChatGPT for tips.
I was impressed by the writer and glad about reading the article until I found out he works for Palantir
Why did where he works have an impact on what he said, for you?
I'd caution against equating talent with drugs-enhanced mania, especially today when illnesses such as bipolar are on the rise and do shorten lives.
After reading this note I realized that there is a special breed of people that attends meetings, coordinates communication strategies across the organization, pro-actively addresses blockers and engages stakeholders as naturally as ducks take to water (or as naturally as Ramanujan did math).....
But who wants to be that special breed?
If you think differently to people around you, treat their advice with some scepticism. Including the things about work life balance and burn out.
Erdos did _great_. I had no idea he spent decades working for longer than most people spend awake but I know the name. If he'd listened to the advice he was given, we'd have a lot less mathematics and he'd have been less content.
Some other people would have been a little less worried about him. Bad tradeoff.
(tangent) That referenced Scott Alexander article was how I figured out his real last name before the New York Times doxxed him - he gave so many details about his brother I realized who he was talking about.
FWIW, I don't think he wanted to hide his identity. He talked about just not wanting patients to google his full name and find his blog, as opposed to preventing people who read his blog from finding out his name.
IIRC some of his most famous early posts ran under his own name! This wasn't ever a real secret.
Everything's luck, or lack thereof.
Free will does not exist, but I suppose it's handy for society at large to pretend that it does.
I don't know why, but I let myself believe for so long that I was the captain of my ship. Now that I embody the fact that everything's out of my control, I have become so much more relaxed and content with life. I do not compare myself with people that are better (or worse) off than me. They lucked into their lives as well.
I am very grateful for everything I have been given. Even the fact that I exist and get to experience this beautiful thing called consciousness. I do not complain much anymore. I work hard to give back. Not that I am rich. But I am strongly inclined to produce more and consume less, perhaps that is because I wish to show appreciation for the gift of the present that I have been given.
And my reaction isn't positive based on only good luck. I've had my fair share of bad luck, and I have been deeply disadvantaged in certain areas of life. But even for those areas, I do not blame myself. Since I believe that it was 100% the role of luck in shaping everything.
I know some people can react to the lack of free will in a negative way, but that has not been the case for me. Would be interesting to dive deeper into why. This realization has also not taken my agency, or my will to live and take action. I know that sounds contradictory, but it's true.
Imo the author is missing crucial point, by making comparisons of things which are not comparable. You can not say, Person A is brilliant at xyz, why is Person B not brilliant at it, even though the circumstances and resources might be identical. The difference is, people who push themselves or are pushed to be good or great at something will barely come as far as those people who get drawn to something, because it means the can avoid suffering, grieve or else. Imo this is the strong driving force here, with the examples of Erdös and Ramanujan. I claim Ramanujan didn't became a great mathematician, because he wanted to be good at math, but mathematics gave him a space, where he could forget about his devastating circumstances of poverty and inequality. And the deeper he got into math the more he felt aligned to it and at home.
I stopped reading after there was a quote about how amphetamines helped improve his math.
Like...maybe. But I think it's pretty well understood that taking amphetamines is a net-negative for individuals and society.
obsessively writing Motivational pieces is the new therapy … what a world…
Yeah and using people who write as inspiration is really weird to me. I’d rather look up to people who are slightly too busy to write 2k words a day because they’re actually doing things.
Why is that weird? The author is obviously impressed by writers, given they have an interesting in writing themselves, so it makes sense to use writers as an example.
And why is writing a less valuable profession than another job? Writing is also "doing a thing" - it just so happens to be a profession for some, a great one for those who are skilled and gifted at it.
The answer is always amphetamines
Everyone says that, but there are plenty of people who take amphetamines every day, and nearly all of them never approach the productivity of Paul Erdos.
Eh. It's possible to do well at stuff, without getting high. Just sayin'. I've been doing it for over 40 years. Just takes some self-work.
I think people get hung up on "keeping score." Things like GitHub Activity graphs, where people write scripts, to game theirs, or pumping out mountains of really bad code, in order to jack up their LoC scores.
And, of course, there's money. If you don't generate money for silly rich people, then what you do is worthless.
Two things:
* Don't work in power-law / winner-take-all industries, unless you are truly remarkable (and even then, you need a lot of luck). Entertainment is the most obvious example of such an industry.
* No shit talent exists. Just look at basketball players. Presumably nobody thinks Wemby is 7'5" because he just trained harder at growing tall than anyone else? Why would any other characteristic be different?
Being tall doesn't automatically make you good or dominant at basketball, you can even be too tall. Wemby might just be at that threshold, but the unusual thing about him is his dexterity despite his height; such maneuverability and flexibility is trainable. I hear he also spent the summer training, likely harder than most.
No, but being short is completely disqualifying, so being tall is certainly a component of the physical traits that make you good at basketball. If you're 5'2" , it doesn't matter what other gifts you have -- you will not be a pro male basketball player today.
In tennis, being too tall is clearly net bad, but being too short is also definitely bad. 80% of male pro tennis players are 5'10" - 6'4", which is certainly not the statistics of the general population.
Absolutely it's a combination of many factors. However height is undeniably very important. Wemby at 5'5" won't be as impressive a player, no matter how much he trained.
> Entertainment is the most obvious example of such an industry.
Is it? Consider the case of nepo babies: often no extreme talent (or perhaps any at all), yet extreme luck.
Entertainment is illustrative. There have been controlled studies (e.g., https://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full....) showing that there are sort of chaotic social dynamics influencing popularity, in that what others are paying attention to influence what someone is paying attention to, which leads to these kinds of random paths of success. Clearly there's some ability at play as well, but beyond some level, it starts to have a lot of chaotic path dependency.
I suspect a lot of fields are like this also, like academics (nowadays at least) and some other things. Maybe a lot of life is like it.
The discussions often seem to me to become oversimplified, like comparing some poor genius with access to books who overcomes it all by sheer ability, to some hypothetical other person with comparatively great education that's taken for granted. But what if that hypothetical other person is being ridiculed for liking math? Or reading books? Or what if there is no college math books around, they get bored, and go off on the wrong path? What if their interests are for something more complex in its ability determinants than math, or that someone doesn't encounter until later in life usually?
Sometimes I feel like people aren't necessarily exposed to what they are best suited for, for all sorts of reasons. This is a classic "finding a career" problem, with advice to try things until you stumble on it — the converse situation being one where you think you like a vocation and then find out later you hate it. It's not like what you're best suited to is just on a shelf for you to look at and have an immediate grasp of; it comes from having experience with it, which not everyone might have. Maybe there's an excellent potential rugby player out there who never had the opportunity to play rugby or even knows what it is.
Life is just so complex, people get in each others' way for all sorts of reasons, and corruption complicates things more.
Winner takes all just means that a few people capture most of the value. That is the case in entertainment. It doesn't say anything about the talent needed to succeed in that industry. What you need to succeed varies depends on the exact industry. Athletes (who are entertainers) have more objective criteria than, say, pop stars. Even in the case of athletes there are factors beyond genetics (e.g. access to coaching.)
For pop stars you need to have some combination of the right look and ability to perform. Ed Sheeran looks a bit like a muppet but seems to be very good at creating catchy songs. Taylor Swift, to me at least, isn't that good at catchy tunes but she has the look and lives the life style. I imagine there are aspects of personality that are not as obvious but very important to survive in the industry.
one can wonder about the biological nature of the talent:
"Like all of Erdös's friends, Graham was concerned about his drug-taking. In 1979, Graham bet Erdös $500 that he couldn't stop taking amphetamines for a month. Erdös accepted the challenge, and went cold turkey for thirty days. After Graham paid up--and wrote the $500 off as a business expense--Erdös said, "You've showed me I'm not an addict. But I didn't get any work done. I'd get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I'd have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You've set mathematics back a month." He promptly resumed taking pills, and mathematics was the better for it."
Sounds like Erdős might have had ADD/ADHD or something similar, and amphetamines was his medication.
Edit: Never read about Erdős before and came across this: "Erdős published around 1,500 mathematical papers during his lifetime, a figure that remains unsurpassed". Maybe he was just a functional addict :)
Millions of Americans take amphetamines daily, yet very few publish papers. I wager that Erdös simply had talent locked behind a common dopamine disorder.