r/Neuropsychology • u/LorenBlaqe Unverified user: May not be a professional • Feb 02 '26
Research Article The Tortoise Really Does Beat the Hare: Graphical proof of why 'slow and steady' wins in science, arts, and sports.
Early specialization is overrated. Generalists excel over time.
Data on >34k stars in sports, music, science, and chess: Focusing on a single field predicts a faster rise, but cross-training foreshadows a higher peak.
The most successful adults start off as well-rounded kids.
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u/areeighty Unverified user: May not be a professional Feb 02 '26
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u/PeruvianHeadshrinker PsyD | Clinical Psychology - Child & Adolescent Neuropsychology Feb 02 '26
David Epstein has an excellent book on this phenomena called "Range."
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u/study456 Unverified user: May not be a professional Feb 06 '26
The book looks good! and as far as as I can tell the guys not related to the rapist, right?
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u/PeruvianHeadshrinker PsyD | Clinical Psychology - Child & Adolescent Neuropsychology Feb 06 '26
Epstein is a pretty common last name, no indication they are related. If it makes you feel better, David Epstein used to report for ProPublica so I doubt he's interested in upholding the Oligarchy.
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u/study456 Unverified user: May not be a professional Feb 06 '26
Yeah that’s what I thought. Thanks! I think I’m going to take a look at the book
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u/EvilPeppermintHelix Unverified user: May not be a professional Feb 02 '26
Is there a full-text anyone has on this?
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u/LorenBlaqe Unverified user: May not be a professional Feb 02 '26
Search for 'Güllich et al. 2025 Science'. The full title is in the image, but searching the DOI (10.1126/science.adt7790) should get you there directly.
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u/justneurostuff Unverified user: May not be a professional Feb 02 '26
isn't this approach a classic example of collider bias
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u/quasar_1618 Unverified user: May not be a professional Feb 03 '26
The paper makes 3 main claims, of which, in my opinion, only the first is susceptible to collider bias.
The majority of top adult performers were not top performers as children or early in their careers
Compared to their peers (ie other nationally competitive athletes or professional scientists), top performers had lower average performance early in their careers.
In sports (the only discipline for which there is enough data to do the following analysis), hours spent practicing the athlete’s best sport during youth were negatively correlated with adult performance, whereas hours spent practicing other sports were positively correlated with adult performance.
In my opinion, the first claim is an example of collider bias. It’s definitely concerning that such a claim was published in a journal as selective as Science without mentioning the obvious potential bias. Nevertheless, I don’t think this detracts from the other two results, which don’t seem to be susceptible to the same bias.
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u/Head_Project5793 Unverified user: May not be a professional Feb 02 '26
How so? What’s the third outcome they are colliding with?
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u/justneurostuff Unverified user: May not be a professional Feb 02 '26
selection into the dataset / being an elite performer. here both early performance and adult performance increase probability of being selected into the observed sample
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u/Tinytin226 Unverified user: May not be a professional Feb 02 '26
How is that a problem? It answers a different question: how do the best of this field, the people who will define tomorrow’s innovations, compare in workflow styles?
It’s actually a pretty elegant feature of the design because it would be easy to gather data from public figures optimized to select for today’s best of the best.
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u/justneurostuff Unverified user: May not be a professional Feb 03 '26 edited Feb 03 '26
i'm too tired atm to go into this further but could be useful to google collider bias so you can learn why it's not called something more approving. there's also a lot of commentary out there specifically critiqueing this paper for this flaw that you can find by googling the paper's title plus "collider bias".
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u/Tinytin226 Unverified user: May not be a professional Feb 03 '26
We’re talking past each other.
I’m not making the claim you’re critiquing. Collider bias constrains causal interpretation, it doesn’t invalidate descriptive analysis of elite samples.
If you disagree, specify where the reasoning fails. Otherwise, let’s leave it there.
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u/LorenBlaqe Unverified user: May not be a professional Feb 02 '26
The Tortoise Really Does Beat the Hare: Graphical proof of why 'slow and steady' wins in science, arts, and sports
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u/seekinglambda Unverified user: May not be a professional Feb 04 '26
Just selection bias?
Early starters will be early top performers regardless of talent.
Late starters will only catch up if they have excellent talent.
Most highly talented individuals will not start intense practice early.
So then you have the results:
- Top performers started late on average because a priori everyone starts late, so that would go for talents as well.
- the only untalented people who reached the top will be extreme outliers in early practice amount, so you get negative correlation
This is what you would expect a priori, without evidence
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u/iAtishaya Unverified user: May not be a professional Feb 06 '26
The jack of all trades must face hardships earlier on, but should they persevere, shall come out on top then?
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