This is a great article that sums up my own (much lower-stakes) life experiences. Athletes live on the frontier so they're excellent subject to study - after all the Olympics are only every 4 years.
Before my first Taekwondo fight and Muay Thai fight I had so much adrenaline and cortisol in the build up to the fights and for some reason it seems to all dump in my legs making them all heavy and unresponsive - not a helpful response when you need to kick to win!
Before my first Chemistry finals I also momentarily forgot the periodic table despite writing it out several times a day in the run up to it.
But as the article states it can be overcome and things like breathing exercises can really drive the needle. The corollary to the mind-body connection is that there is a body-mind connection! Just as the mind can influence the body, the body can influence the mind and performing physical tasks that the body associates with relaxation (breathing exercises, hot spas, forest walks etc) can settle the mind.
The other thing I came across on my journey to overcome performance anxiety for us mere mortal non-Olympians is:
1. Some of the jitteryness is a result of being unaccustomed/intolerant of adrenaline. Doing stressful (but safe) activities can build up your own resilience to stressful situations - this is why I find value in Muay Thai/boxing sparring, there aren't many things more stressful than getting punched in the face
2. Presence of mind can be trained and an easy hack I found that is taught in the military is the 3x3 Grounding Technique [1]
The general theme of sports psychology reminded me of a BBC article [2] that investigated focus in champion tennis players (and other sports) as measured by their eye movement.
If you had a chat with me through lunch on some technical intensive questions, It would be a breeze. I could not only answer them, I could list limitations, how to address them, and I could even come with a working plan on how I could get it done.
Competition can increase cortisol but it's usually a relative thing:
When you are world #200 playing against world #50 might be stressful. When you are world #2 playing world #50 is probably another day in the office. Etc
I imagine once you win your first Grand Slam in tennis the nerves improve a lot - you kind of saw that in Andy Murray who needed a couple of attempts to break through the psychological barrier of winning Wimbledon, including winning the Olympics.
I would posit that the old folk tale is more related to the fact that centuries ago, most people were hyper specialised and standardised widespread education was less of a thing.
You'll find plenty of intelligent people in all walks of life depending on how you choose to define intelligence.
Until very recently, 19 of the last 20 quarterbacks who lost their first Super Bowl never made it back to the title game (Jalen hurts in 2024 is the one).
Historically, out of 38 QBs to lose their debut, only 4 eventually won a ring (Dawson, Griese, Elway, and Manning).
I'm not familiar with the Super Bowl could you help us understand this observation? Is it that people who lose never psychologically recover or that winners go on to become champions?
> there aren't many things more stressful than getting punched in the face
I can definitely see this happening in dangerous/adrenaline sports like climbing. Normal things and fears just don't bother me anymore, when you are continuously facing your fear of grave injury and/or death when abyss stares at you and you hold just on your finger tips. There is rope but that doesn't do much for the fear, and you can still get injured if fall is nasty. And its not just exposure to fear, but you need to semi-continuously keep overcoming it during entire session, repeat that 1..X times per week, and after few years you become somebody else in this regard (and few others).
Now-famous Alex Honnold said that his fear receptors in brain basically just don't trigger anymore - they did some MRI scans of his brain. But the thing is, there was nothing special apart from that, and he himself attributes this to 2 decades+ of daily exposure to increasingly dangerous situations (not just famous crazy free solos but a lot of wild scrambling which can, and often does turn into serious exposed solo climbing without a chance to retreat).
Brain is a muscle, and fear is one dimension of how to expose and train it. Too much too quickly and it will overwhelm anybody. Bud to it gradually and in dosed manner and things will happen.
So glad you brought up danger/adrenaline addicts - in my head there is a stereotype of the personality type, they exude a very chill energy and I've always wondered if their lifestyle meant they had become numb to normal life.
The anecdote about Alex Honnold not having fear receptors sounds on the mark
You don't pay CPF unless you have Permanent Residence/Citizenship so there isn't any mandatory saving for migrant workers (both low income unskilled and high income skilled labour) AFAIK?
Yep. As someone who worked on an EP, the difference was that I paid a low rate of tax that didn't contribute towards Singaporeans' retirement income, whereas a Singaporean living in Europe would pay a higher rate of tax that contributed towards Europeans' retirement income
I quite like Shelter [1]. Shelter apps are installed in a separate work profile, which essentially sandboxes it from the rest of your data. It also has a neat feature to automatically disable (freeze) specific apps and seamlessly re-enable them when you launch them through Shelter.
This is what I do too. If i need to use or test something i don't trust then I use an old phone. All of the phones use crDroid(1) and I have scripts to quickly wipe and reinstall the OS whenever I need a full nuke.
There are 7 year olds[1] who can play better than I can despite 30+ years of playing piano, and even with fairly dedicated practise the progress is so much slower than someone with actual talent.
I had a friend who could play all the Chopin Etudes at age 9. Some of the best art simply requires a virtuoso to bring it to life.
why do we never hear of 7 year old bands then? i think there's more to music than just technique and vast majority appreciate the artistic aspect. but i can imagine musicians appreciating the technique.
Are you looking for facts that will contradict your opinion?
Justin Bieber clearly was that. His youtube videos got him discovered at age 13-14.
Vanessa Paradis made her first public appearance as a singer at age 7.
There are several children prodigies I've seen on YouTube (singers, drummers, guitarists). They clearly have such talent that even at young age they do music better than most people would do with infinite amount of practice.
As to your question, the prodigy is, by definition, extremely rare. They clearly exist (Bieber, Paradis) but, by definition, you can't expect to have a lot of them.
And "why aren't 7 year olds headlining for Taylor Swift" is not a fair bar.
There are reasons 7 year olds don't do world wide tours that have to do with things other than musical talent. Like being in school or not being allowed to take a bus by themselves.
Did you watch the video? Her expressivity and musicianship is far beyond many adults..
She had also just finished a concerto playing with an orchestra
EDIT Also with band music or non-classical music so much of it is to do with platform and distribution, and 7 year old prodigies don't get much interest outside of talent shows or Youtube. Justin Bieber (as mentioned in another reply) though is a good example of someone who did at age 12
Michael Jackson is another. And there were child stars in the movies.
One difference is how popular music is produced today. The members of the band are not just performers, and in fact, they're often mediocre instrumentalists and singers. They're expected to create their own material, which probably requires a certain level of social development and experience. The emphasis is on other skills such as creating songs that resonate with the audience, performing on stage, etc.
I am a believer that in popular music there is an element of the "X factor" which is something intangible but to do with charisma/stage presence/force of character and that is probably exceptionally rare to find in pre-pubescent individuals and then to commercially market them beyond just a novelty factor - the real problem is distribution if anything
In classical music there is a slightly more "objective" character to performance given the high technical requirement and the audience culturally is more willing to earnestly listen to a child prodigy.
Most, if not all, musicians in any professional symphony orchestra was at one point an unusually talented 7yo.
It just takes many years worth of practice to get from being good by 7 years old standards to being good enough that people buy tickets to see your performance, especially in the classical music culture where skill, or "virtuoso", is everything.
It feels really great to wield the scientific method and feel supercilious to all other people and ideas that do not arise from such infallible reasoning, and sure the progress of humanity hockey sticked since empiricism took hold. But let's not forget that empiricism is limited by what we can/want/think to measure.
Like it's pretty well accepted that breathing exercises have physiological and mental health benefits but it took decades of consumerist appropriation of yoga and other techniques before academia properly found the motivation to earnestly investigate that yes breathing exercises are indeed good for you.
As someone who is a deep practitioner of martial arts and athletics, if the metaphors of qi gong and yoga were purely powerful visualisation aids that already provides more than enough tangible benefit. I don't need scientists to tell me that qi is good for my body - I can feel it.
So let's keep an open mind, our ancestors were anything but idiots.
> So let's keep an open mind, our ancestors were anything but idiots.
Just not so open our brains fall out.
Our ancestors were just like us, but fewer in number and inventing things from scratch. Miasma, spontaneous generation, Newtonian gravity, these were not people being idiots, and even though they have been shown to be wrong they are still close enough to still be useful today. Phlogiston also wasn't idiotic, but lacks utility vs being correct about oxygen.
One of the shared ways we failed then and now is that what sounds true isn't the same as what is true; the modern easy example of this is how easily many of us get fooled by LLMs, and I suspect that's how a lot of ancient religions grew, with additions and copy-errors evolving them to be maximally plausible-sounding to a human mind.
Just the other day the FT put out an article that the current generation of graduates are so serially online that they freeze or go silent when faced with basic small talk questions.
I have encountered this for myself.
A few months ago New York banned phones at lunch and was discussed on HN [1]
We live in times where parents and schools no longer have the authority to enforce behaviour and social media is peer pressure from the entire world.
These bans are obviously heavy handed but hopefully they are a reversion back to an equilibrium that gives our young a chance to properly develop...
It is one thing to ban something on paper, another to actually ban it in practice. In France, mobile phones for students in college (junior high school) have been banned but surveys of schools suggested only 9% of the schools actually banned the phones, citing practical and financial constraints. [0]
I feel all of this has been going on for the last 50 years. TV and video games were a substitute for a normal environment for kids to develop in the at the end of the last century.
> We live in times where parents and schools no longer have the authority to enforce behavior
Yes but the problem is much deeper.
I often observer various "families" with their kids on holidays. The French and the Brits are really a nightmare, strangely the same countries who are now banning social media. But my guess is this is more of chicken than an egg problem.
You will often have an hysterical woman, totally deranged and often alone, screaming constantly on the kids for no reasons. You wish you could call child protective services on them and this is only when they are "relaxing" on holiday.
We know those kids are gonna get into weird internet things and drugs anyway to escape this world. France can write any law they want it is not gonna solve the problem and send them back to any "equilibrium".
Blaming TV, video games and now social media 20 years late is just a way to avoid talking about the real problem.
> I feel all of this has been going on for the last 50 years. TV and video games were a substitute for a normal environment for kids to develop in the at the end of the last century.
Not really, I was born in the 80s and video games did help me know a lot of people I still hang out with.
I lost a nice swiss army knife in Singapore because I was carry-on only and forgot I keep one in my toiletries bag. Was really upset because it was a Christmas gift from my parents. Annoying they don't let you collect it on the way back, I totally get it but would have paid a fine to get it back
It would be nice if there was an option to box it up and mail it back home or to a friend/family member for a fee. While a lot of people have throw away knives and wouldn’t care, many also have knives that are either expensive or have a lot of meaning.
Maybe they would encourage more people to risk it and hope they don’t get caught, but a vast majority of these people aren’t criminals. When I was a kid I would always take a Swiss Army knife with me on vacation. That was my favorite thing to back, and I could look like a hero when an opportunity came up where it was useful. No longer.
It’s really not too bad - not having to fight for overhead space and thus being able to board last makes it worthwhile even if you don’t have items prohibited in carry-on bags.
I just bring a small backpack that fits under the seat, so no worries about overhead space. Also, no baggage claim, lost luggage, or navigating ground transportation and city streets with cumbersome bags.
Most of the time I will not pack liquids, and buy them locally, so I can avoid that TSA bother as well.
You should have backed up and posted it to yourself or a friend. Being the best airport in the world, there are self-service kiosks (Speedpost@Changi) in the transit areas of Terminals 1, 2 and 3, and in the public area of T4 (as the only terminal with centralised security).
They detected one of the very small Victorinox pocket knifes in my hand luggage at HKG airport and kept it; but I was given the option of picking it up at the carrier's airport office upon return.
Can't LLMs be fed the entire corpus of literature to synthesise (if not "insight") useful intersections? Not to mention much better search than what was available when I was a lowly grad...
I use Gemini almost obsessively but I don't think feeding the entire corpus of a subject would work great.
The problem is so much of consensus is wrong and it is going to start by giving you the consensus answer on anything.
There are subjects I can get it to tell me the consensus answer then say "what about x" and it completely changes and contradicts the first answer because x contradicts the standard consensus orthodoxy.
To me it is not much different than going to the library to research something. The library is not useless because the books don't read themselves or because there are numerous books on a subject that contradict each other. Gaining insight from reading the book is my role.
I suspect much LLM criticism is from people who neither much use LLMs nor learn much of anything new anyway.
I never suggested I want an LLM to be the definitive answer to a question but I'm certain that there are a lot of low hanging fruit across disciplines where the limit is the awareness of people in one field of the work of another field, and the limiting factor was the friction in discovery - I can't see how a specialised research tool powered by LLMs and RAG wouldn't be a net gain for research if only to generate promising new leads.
Throwing compute to mine a search space seems like one of the less controversial ways to use technology...
Before my first Taekwondo fight and Muay Thai fight I had so much adrenaline and cortisol in the build up to the fights and for some reason it seems to all dump in my legs making them all heavy and unresponsive - not a helpful response when you need to kick to win!
Before my first Chemistry finals I also momentarily forgot the periodic table despite writing it out several times a day in the run up to it.
But as the article states it can be overcome and things like breathing exercises can really drive the needle. The corollary to the mind-body connection is that there is a body-mind connection! Just as the mind can influence the body, the body can influence the mind and performing physical tasks that the body associates with relaxation (breathing exercises, hot spas, forest walks etc) can settle the mind.
The other thing I came across on my journey to overcome performance anxiety for us mere mortal non-Olympians is:
1. Some of the jitteryness is a result of being unaccustomed/intolerant of adrenaline. Doing stressful (but safe) activities can build up your own resilience to stressful situations - this is why I find value in Muay Thai/boxing sparring, there aren't many things more stressful than getting punched in the face
2. Presence of mind can be trained and an easy hack I found that is taught in the military is the 3x3 Grounding Technique [1]
The general theme of sports psychology reminded me of a BBC article [2] that investigated focus in champion tennis players (and other sports) as measured by their eye movement.
[1] https://www.armyresilience.army.mil/ard/r2/Mindfulness.html
[2] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180627-is-quiet-eye-the...
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