[superposeur]

In any field, what it even means to be good morphs as you go up in skill level. Non mathematicians know only about arithmetic so they often imagine that mathematicians must be really really good at arithmetic. But this isn't so. Likewise, non musicians think what must make a great musician is perfect pitch. But some of the greatest musicians in history didn’t have it while many mediocre ones do. Similarly, non chess players think GMs must be good at calculating zillions of moves in advance, but apparently they only calculate a small set of moves, which somehow are the right ones.

To take an example cited in the article, Einstein was so far up there that it’s nearly impossible for a non physicist to even understand what he was so good at — crude measures like high school grades or “IQ” barely scratch the surface of the skill that he was a genius at.

Now, perfect pitch does modestly correlate with musical ability, mathematicians are better than average at arithmetic, GMs do calculate more moves than the average shmo, and Einstein got much better than average grades (after all he was accepted at ETH). But that’s all, modest correlations.

There is such a thing as talent in music, mathematics, etc. but it isn’t something a psychologist standing outside these domains would ever be able to devise a test for.