There have been quite a few such people in history. It's really humbling to know that Galois did what he did at just 20, Gödel was just a year older than me when he broke PM, Neumann could solve problems faster than what it took a person to write a program on the computer to solve the problem and the computer running.

While genetics play a huge role, nurture plays a large role as well [1].

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/200507/the-grand...

Yes, it goes against the cult of Effort, "10000 hours of deliberate practice" and all that. But I believe you're 100% right: those at the absolute right end of the distribution are often gifted. They work hard, too, but that is akin to sharpening the knife. It is not the knife.

I'm reminded of a documentary on Tiger Woods on one of the Discovery channels where the voice over is going, "How did Tiger Woods become such a genius? Was it his family's Buddhist traditions?", and it went on to list a bunch of possible factors, all the while showing a clip of Tiger Woods playing golf with absolute perfection AT THE AGE OF FOUR! I had to laugh at the mental effort being expended to avoid the horrific conclusion that he was born with it.

> I think this kind of explanation irritates many people for some reason. As if things just can't be that way, there must be a repeatable, reproducible recipe that someone else could follow, and if they did, they would get the same results as Ramanujan.

Oh, there is an easy recipe : just emulate the universe as it was back then and observe Ramanujan. As we know, having a recipe doesn’t mean we have the resources to implement it.

There are several movies on Ramanujan as well as biographic books. Apart from the tragic path of is life, these material also depict him not only as gifted but as a compulsively working his maths. So that’s no wonder he would even dream about it. And of course, you can model that as the result of unconscious thoughts throwing the result of problems that were fed to the mind during awaken time.

So, the magic recipe is practice, practice, and practice even more.

> I think maybe because it flies in the face of everyone that claims 10x developers are not possible.

On what metrics? The ability to be able to throw impressive "magical" code and being able to work efficiently with the rest of a team will not necessarily come together, for example.

> Or that some people are just genetically gifted and there's nothing you could possibly do that would get you within a hundred yards of them no matter how much hard work you put in, or how good your teachers were, etc.

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” is generally attributed to Oscar Wilde.

Every life is genetically gifted, but not all lives encounter the environment that enables to thrives this gift – unfortunately.

Also no one is perfect. Many aspect of human life are not only dependent on how performant you are individually, so being really "too ahead" can be actually a severe handicap – at least if it doesn’t come with equal excellence into convincing other to trust you. And so depression is not something you can expect to be out of the realm of gifted evoked here.

I for one find the fact that such people existed very exciting. It means that some possible configuration of our physiology allows for amazing capabilities. Maybe nurturing has to do with it too, but the point is that it is possible.

Maybe one day (in a distant future most likely) the general population will have access to such mental prowess. This would then be another kind of singularity!

...or the 4-year-old chess prodigy, or the 5-year-old composer.

As an amateur chess player, I don't find it depressing -- although more likely I use it as an excuse. I know that there are kids out there who started out with a significantly-higher ranking within a year of playing than I will ever get to as an adult. (That said, many those same kids will eventually go on to put in tens of thousands of more hours than me.)

I guess the part that's slightly depressing is that, even if I slog and slog, and raise my ranking up by a bit, it will always feel like winning by perspiration, and not by divine inspiration. But I think it's fine for me to say "this isn't my game, I will play it so long as it's fun, but I won't ever be a genius at it."

I've had times when during a dream, I've heard a melody, and when I woke up, I picked up an instrument and was able to replicate the melody I heard when dreaming. If I can come up with good sounding melodies in my sleep despite being a fairly unpracticed musician, I can only imagine what geniuses in their respective fields are able to figure out unconsciously! Obviously the presentation within the above described dream is fairly dramatic, but that might just have been his mind's way of making sure he remembered it when he woke up.