Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of statistical fallacies

Mark Goldstein points us to this post by Alex Dimakis, who writes: A paper was recently published in Science on highest level of human performance across athletics, science, math and music. I think the paper makes some classical statistics mistakes that still fool many smart people. The paper “Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance” by Gullich et al. claims: “In summary, when comparing performers across the highest levels of achievement, the evidence suggests that eventual peak performance is negatively associated with early performance.” The paper makes two mistakes. Base-rate fallacy and . . . Berkson’s paradox . . . The study says simply that the very top at young age are not identical with the very top adults. (As one would expect, since there are *many many more non-elite young candidates*). Still, elite young performers are 40 times more likely to be in the top adults compare to general population. This is acknowledged in the paper but…