Nature vs. Nurture vs. Putting in the Work

When people discuss whether a particular trait is innate or environmental, it is usually assumed that each of these components is fixed. For example, people will talk about IQ scores as being ~70% hereditary and 30% environmental. Usually, ‘environmental’ is a catch all for whatever happens to be different between people’s experiences, which includes ‘shared environment’ (that which is common between siblings in the same household) and ‘non-shared environment’, which differs between siblings.

This nature vs. nurture framework is useful when you want to understand societal level policy questions like ‘can we improve test scores by giving kids free lunches?’ and similar things. Nature-nurture is much less instructive at the individual level, especially when the individual is willing to put in whatever work it takes to improve their situation. On an individual level, the extent to which you succeed at something depends largely how much you *actively* nurture it. The nature-nurture ratio for someone who doesn’t care is very different from the ratio of the same person who puts in the work.

A personal example: when I was a kid, I was decent at singing. Not amazing, but I could carry a tune and lead services at the synagogue on Shabbat, which requires some baseline musical ability. In terms of vocal range (just to take something quantifiable) I was maybe at the 60th percentile of the global male population. And I got to that level by some combination of nature and nurture. 

Then, in my 30s, I decided to take singing lessons. Over the course a few years, I extended my range by an octave, learned how to breathe correctly, how to use vocal modes to change the timbre of my voice, etc. etc. By now I think I’d probably be in the top 90-99th percentile of male vocal range. And this is mainly just because I took lessons, practiced, and was serious about improving. My starting point might have been helpful to getting to where I am now, but it also might not have been. If I had started at the 40th percentile of vocal range, I might still have gotten to the same place I am now, because anyway most people have to completely unlearn and relearn how to sing when they start taking voice lessons. 

Voice teachers will not necessarily take on just anyone as a student - some people are completely tone deaf and there’s basically no hope for them. But I think many people could probably get to where I am now if they cared to and were serious about it. 

One of the things I learned about singing - every singer has a somewhat unique voice and style, and people generally chalk this up to some sort of innate ‘talent’. But actually a lot of the variation in how singers sound actually boils down to *technique* and if you understand singing technique in a comprehensive way, you can imitate pretty much everyone. Certain singers might have a natural predilection toward one set of techniques than another, which is why that is ‘their’ sound, but getting that sound is often far more achievable with practice than most people imagine.

The standard nature and nurture still play a role here, in terms of whether you’re trainable at all, how quickly you’re able to learn and what your ‘cap’ is, i.e. if there’s a point you can’t progress beyond. But if you were to randomly assign 50% of people to intensively study singing for 5 years and compare them to a control group with no training, most of the variance among the population in singing ability would be neither be explained by either the standard nature or nurture (in terms of their upbringing) but specifically the fact that some of them had extensive training. 

It’s hard to know what things in life are like this. Mathematical ability is one area where this question is frequently debated. I’ve had the experience of taking a standardized exam in mathematics, being displeased with my score, then studying intensively to do better, only to receive the exact same score on my retest. So there seems to have been some sort of hard cap there (at least in terms of my speed at answering questions under the time limit). Still, there would have been a huge benefit in studying the if I didn’t know the material already. 

People do have hard caps on overall cognition - some people just will never be able to hack calculus however hard they try. But I wouldn’t be surprised if some 60th percentile math knowledge people could become top 90th percentile math knowledge people just by…majoring in math. They might have to take a slower curriculum than other math majors who started more strongly, would take them longer to graduate, etc. But as a general rule, it is possible to learn to be good at stuff, and for most things if you put in the effort you can be much better than the vast majority of the population. So unless you really think you’re hitting a brick wall, the work will probably pay off.