the Polgar experiment actually disproves the hard work theory

Not to mention Stockton and Bird. Both with genetic issues I suppose. What a waste.

"Do I know what specific factors make that talent? No. But can I say unequivocally, without a doub that they have 'superhuman' gifts of talent for their respective fields? Hell yes."

Well, I mean, I think there is some equivocation going on, at least. Whenever you call something superhuman you make it a lot harder to figure out what we're really talking about. We don't really have access to what they worked on, how hard they worked -- hell for all we know, Magnus's pre-chess activities could have prepared him for chess. How much of the "talent" is chess specific, how much of it is just determination (because determination can be innate to some extent)... I mean there are plenty of sources of equivocation, here.

It seems pretty unlikely that Magnus is "just like us" or something... on the other hand, that doesn't mean we suddenly know any decent amount about what talent is, it just means, it seems like Magnus has a lot of talent. Well, if we have nothing else, that's something to go by, but it is what it is -- something completely wrong could seem like it was right to us, so one just has to accept the limitations of going by our instincts, and our unbelievable love of attaching the adjective "superhuman" to things that are at a much higher level than us.

apart from the fact that the problem arises, in the first place, because of the superhuman issue, things like, you've never been tested, to mention a few

I have to agree with some (many?) other people here. Without a definition of what "talent" means, it sounds to me you're just replacing the end result (what they become in the end) to means "talent". For all we know, that "talent" could just come by as a results of a lot of dedication and hard work, something that can be trained and taught, and not anything intrinsic in their genes or DNA. (Note that for the purpose of the argument here, there are only 2 sides: either it's via practice and training, something innate like genes and DNA. Here I assume by "talent", you mean something by nature, i.e. the latter).

So again, how do you know Stephen Curry isn't that way because of the extra training he has? Remember that up until 2 years ago, he wasn't so good (although his DNA has always been the same). He was good, but just about as good as any other NBA player. Perhaps in the last 2 years, he got extra training? A very good coach that understands his strengths and weaknesses? He got a good psychologist? In any case, we know it's something external, something in the environment, and not something he's always had within his DNA. That will also explain why most other NBA players are not as good as he is. Maybe they don't have a good suitable personal coach? Or some good personal psychologist who can unblock that mental block in each and everyone of us?

If we keep using the end result to mean something intrinsic by nature, then the ramification can be wild. Think about industrial output. Taking a whole people into consideration, nowadays we know an average German will be vastly more efficient and productive than an average Chinese or African (the difference in output will easily be comparable to, if not more than, the difference between Curry and the rest of the NBA field). Using your logic, should we say the German race has a better "talent" for work than Chinese or people from Africa? Which is exactly what "Mein Kampf" tried to argue, isn't it?

Dude - if anyone question's Magnus's talent at chess, they need to get themselves checked out. NOBODY can teach that ability at that age. 

He's of course one of the most extreme outliers in talent.

Believe it or not, I'm personally NOT a believer in my fate being largely determined by my talent. I do have some definite talents, but they're mostly not in areas that I work in (and chess is definitely NOT an area I have talent in!) so I'm ALL about hard work and always have been. 

But you're fooling yourself if you want to try and rationalize that Magnus had some special training that made him the way he was, or that Steph Curry has some secret special training method that allows him to be the world's best shooter.

Training works hellaciously well to get to "good", and even "oustanding" competence. You don't have a sliver of a chance despite all the best training in the world to get to "world champion" at a well established activity without the talent to take you there in addition to the training. 

BIG difference between world-champion level ability (which is our Polgar sister discussion level of chess) and simply 'oustanding' ability, which I do believe is eminently trainable, even for those with middling talent.

Talent does become harder to tease apart the older you get. 

Magnus and Judit though? NO QUESTION talent. You will NEVER get a 5-6 year old to play like Judit or even remotely close to them, no matter how many resources you throw at them, without extreme talent. 

Steph Curry is an adult, so I could see how it's easier for folks to say "well, MAYBE he really does have some special training method - you don't know!", and sure I don't, but odds are he doesn't. His results are so extreme and basketball is so well penetrated, that odds are much, much, much more likely that he is so much better than his peers largely due to talent (innate ability) rather than him just out-training everyone else. (He obviously had gobs of good shooting training as well in his past - that alone won't make you steph curry.)

And you're analogies with the 'whole people into consideration' have NOTHING to do with my conversations thus far. I've NEVER been talking about averages or large groups. 

This whole discussion I've been having has been centered on the singular talent of the Polgar sisters, and why I think genetics (not training) accounts for their unique results at world-class performance. I have no idea how you go from there to generalizing about an entire population, which is the complete opposite of the singular situation we're talking about.

When it comes to WORLD CLASS PERFORMANCE in well-penetrated activities (like basketball and likely even chess), you absolutely can ascribe level of excellence to talent as opposed to saying it's more training. At the world class level, you are by definition referring to a level of performance so unreachable that even with a huge number of people dedicating their lives to being the best at it (think of all the kids trying to be Jordan and LeBron) that virtually nobody will achieve it, even with maximal effort and maximal resources devoted to it. At that level, talent absolutely dominates.

For non-world class level, it would be an error to make the conclusion that talent accounts for most of the good results, since hard work can often outweigh talent at non-world class (and especially amateur) levels, but once you're in world class territory, you're so advanced that no coach can reproducibly create those results, even with 'talented' individuals to work with. YOu need RARE talent to get there.

"But you're fooling yourself if you want to try and rationalize that Magnus had some special training that made him the way he was, or that Steph Curry has some secret special training method that allows him to be the world's best shooter."

No I'm not trying to do that. I'm just not ruling it out just because our intuition wants to. It could be anything. It could be a huge amount of training, or it might just be that he got more training than we thought he did. Or that might be false.

There's a difference between bringing up the ways in which we are being presumptuous, and actually subscribing to those examples. I don't believe Magnus got special training. It's just that I'm not going to go from that, to saying, he's superhuman. Because I have no idea how much my bias is playing into a claim like that. I'm not saying it is playing into it, but it might be -- I'm aware of how that can happen.

"NOBODY can teach that ability at that age."

Again, it just seems to you that that's the case. It certainly seems that way to me, too. But the way in which I react to what seems to me to be the case is different from how you react. Me having a really strong feeling about something being true can have all sorts of reasons behind it. Sure, it actually being true is one potential reason, but hardly the only one.

"Dude - if anyone question's Magnus's talent at chess, they need to get themselves checked out."

Well no, it could just mean that they are taking a sceptical mindset with regard to the kinds of fast assumptions people like to make. People like to explain things they can't explain with mystical ideas. So it might just be that people who question someone's talent at chess are just much more sceptical people than what you're used to. It could mean they're stupid, too, but not necessarily.

I'm not diminishing in any way his talent, I'm just arguing with the nonsense of giving people supernatural powers.

"even with maximal effort and maximal resources devoted to it."

But we've likely never seen an example of this. We've seen people who devoted a huge amount of effort to something, but not so much the theoretical maximum.

Ok, true, but you can safely assume that in well-penetrated activities, the interest is sufficiently great that the top people are in fact devoting maximal resources and time to it. 

For example, Fabiano Caruana admits he has zero interests outside of chess. Even top athletes, can't train all the time or risk injury, often can't add any more volume or training to their maxxed out physical regimen for their talent level.

ANd in fact, the reality is that for the (vast) majority of the top world-class performers, practice volume or resources spent practicing no longer correlate with their performance once they're there. Steph Curry won't shoot a lot better if you added an hour of shooting practice to his current regimen every day.

You and I as non world class shooters would improve A LOT, but those NBA guys have already maxxed out their improvement curve, and he might actually be a lot better off watching a movie to relax than doing anything basketball related.

Ok, fair enough. Supernatural is pushing it as a word to describe it, but if you're talking some ability that is so special that literally nobody else in the world can do it, I think his abilities fit the bill.

Mental sports are far different than physical sports when it comes to training and should not be compared. in physical sports your training is completely limited to how much your body can handle and avoiding injury. I used to be able to run a 7:30 mile when I was 12 since I played a lot of sports and was in decent shape. I had a friend who was smaller than me, who played soccer, and who's parents made him run a mile a day in the morning, who could run a 6:10 mile. You could say he was a naturally good runner and was faster than me throughout our childhood. Being competitive and wanting to beat my friend I started the summer after my 7th grade year off by biking 4 miles a day at my maximum speed, and adding onto that until I could do 12 miles a day at the end of 3 months. I also went from doing about 30 crunches a day to 100, and ate completely healthy that whole time. I managed to get my mile time down to 5:30 when I was 13 and completely eclipsed my friend. in highschool I kept trying to get myself more and more inshape until I eventually injured my knee during a varsity basketball practice likely due to overtraining, and have pretty much stopped playing physical sports since then.

Something like that doesn't happen in chess. when you train yourself, build good habits and pass other people who don't work as hard or as smart (quality of training and focusing on the right things) and you keep adding on to your training continuously you don't suddenly run into injuries. Your lead just grows and grows until you are world class. When I was a 2000 player I kept track of how many hours I put into my training to become a master. I trained far more than I ever had before and very consistently. By the end of the year I had gained 200 points and achieved national master, and my average time spent training that whole year was 2 1/2 hours per day. Sure it was focused, informed training and I knew what would be best for my growth and what to focus on, but it was only 2 1/2 hours per day. If someone trained with the best resources, in the proper order of subjects, and really dedicated their time to it, say on average 6 hours per day (about the max possible for someone in college or with a job), they could have completely eclipsing what I accomplished. Most people do nowhere close to that amount. Most competitive world class players do 9-12 hours per day, or did during their more rapid strength climbs.

Training is obviously the most important aspect of being world class at just about anything. Being the very top of the hardest workers maybe comes down to talent, but 95% of chess skill is related to training.

I guess my phone doesn't like keeping paragraphs spaced out like how I typed them, sorry for the wall of text. I'll fix it when I get home

I completely agree with what you said.

The key thing though is your comment:

"Being the very top of the hardest workers maybe comes down to talent, but 95% of chess skill is related to training."

As I've said repeatedly in my posts above, my comments were aimed at discussing the Polgar's unique situation, and how TALENT was almost certainly the dominant factor in their ability, and allowed them to benefit from all that training. They were/are true world-class talents with world-class chess ability.

For the non-world class, and ESPECIALLY for amateurs, forget about the talent component or one's lack of it. Just focus 100% on the work and the method it takes to improve, and it'll happen. Just don't expect to be world champion - ever.

The 5% becomes significant once you get high enough and everyone has squeezed as much as they can out of the other 95%. However even at the top level not everyone is equally hard working. Gary Kasparov as an example worked harder than anyone else, and was atleast as talented as his peers and this combination resulted in one of the top players of all time. Bobby Fischer similarly worked harder and more obsessively at chess than any of his peers and was likely the most talented of his generation and accomplished similarly spectacular results.

also I respect your point and agree 95% ;)

Even sadder is the reality that THOUSANDS of parents do what the Polgar's parents do, and definitely a lot worse. Heck, my mom make's Laszlo Polgar look like an easy pushover in terms of what she did to myself and my brother.

You just never hear of these other tortured kids for the most part because they don't become world champions in their fields for the most part. YOu only hear of the very few that do, but there are plenty of wannabe Lazslo Polgars living through their kids out there and doing a lot more awful abusive things to them in hopes of glory that they personally couldn't achieve.

It may sound wrong, but I think this is correct up to a point. Obviously players who had coaches from an early age (like Polgar sisters) never had to bother about training themselves though.

But lets say for people who are "stuck" below 2000. I think the biggest obstacle is that the correct kind of work is completely unappealing to them.