yeah all fair comments, please be aware i was trying not to write a thesis
To summarize,
-- What people call talent can usually be explained rather than invoking supernatural genes
-- Further more, when someone has a natural ability to do something, it doesn't make them talented
-- Just because your tall, doesn't mean your talented at who-can-touch-the-furthest-up-the-wall-game
In very rare cases, the sum of natural abilities, and environment will produce someone who can achieve a task better than someone else
However the more complex the task is, the less its natural ability and more environmental, which is proved by putting someone out of their comfort zone in a similar task
Additionally i'm not saying talent doesn't exist, its just used wrong factors times more then its used right (in my opinion)
Talent and slot machine selection are both about luck. Either you hit the payoff combination or you don't.
No... talent is some physical or cognitive ability that is able to produce an outcome better than others, talent and luck cant be used interchangeably. although, that's not to say you wouldn't be considered lucky to have talent
More to the point, being a Basketballer who is talented at throwing hoops, is not innately a talented basketballer, your just good at throwing hoops, many more skills to basketball that would make or break the nbl
If said Portuguese Gypsy orphan had little musical talent, then yes, little Johnny could become a much better Flamenco player.
Id put my orphaned Portuguese Gypsy kid (adopted by a flamenco family) against johnny-no-practice in a speed-flamenco-learning-competition any day, assuming both never played the guitar before, both had the same interest in learning, and both did the same amount of practice. That's not to say there is no such thing as guitar talent, its just to say, what ever talent someone has, its probably trumped 1000 times over by environment, i.e how can you be naturally talented at flamenco if you havent had life time of hearing it, johhnys talent wont get him far there, he will need a lot of environment to overcome that, or just turn into a djent player (all good)
You just put them into a situation to which their talent does not apply.
Although, on reading back i made the point fairly badly, the undercurrent here is, by using the word talented, you have to be sufficiently careful about what it is your labeling talent (if existed at all) i.e is super djent light speed player a talented guitarist? or just a talented super djent light speed player. moreover, have we absolutely canceled out the fact that, he has just practiced lots, have lots of djent peers, or was just lucky to learn the right things at the right time
Neither of us has sufficient information to know how good a Flamenco player Satriani would be if he were inclined to pursue it.
True, True, however i have personally seen more than my fair share of talented guitarist miss the mark out side of their comfort zone, so are they talented guitarist? or just good at what they do, my guess is flamenco joe would be fairly average compared to an average non naturally talented career flamenco player (that's just my guess)
But little Billy, the same age as Johnny and equally drug-free, possessing an identical iPod (MTV doesn't do music anymore) and listening to just as much music, might have the talent to become a great nuclear physicist and still become a lousy musician.
We can cancel billy out because no one tried to label him a talented guitarist, johnny on the other hand, has been labeled as such, so he must play the guitar, and as such, before we label him naturally talented, we have to cancel out the fact he maybe good for a lot of other reasons first
In regards to 10 year old girls who can play Paganini, before we call them talented, we would first have to compare them to all the other 10 year old girls who play Paganini first and those after them, and make sure we are comparing apples with apples, make sure they are given the same stimulus and tuition and motivation, and same practice. If one stands out more then the others, we are able to say she has natural ability to learn and play Paganini, we cant just broadly say she is naturally talented at violin, as there are many other skills she many not be good at.
The point of both my spiels are, that talent can get you through the door to larger goals, (ie super djent player) however it cant make you good at everything on guitar, only environment, and practice, intellectualism, and potentially dumb luck can get you there, in witch case, its not really talent we see, just the products of a lot of other things