Forming heroes
Hi Anna. Re:
"We can collect data (and count things) re: what skills and abilities high-accomplishing people have in adulthood, as well as in what formative experiences formed them."
Of course, this is rough experimentation which can't really be precise anyway, but except for people we know personally (and who trust us a fair amount) and historical figures whose lives have been pretty thoroughly documented, I'd naively expect the large majority of formative experiences to be inaccessible to us for data collection... either because they don't fit with the narrative people/media/biographers want to project, or just because they haven't been recorded very carefully. Eg. one of the most transformative experiences in my life was getting Cliff Pickover's book Wonders of Numbers, reading about Graham's Number, and turning up Eliezer's Staring into the Singularity. But if I didn't want to tell people that, or I was a public figure who we didn't know personally (and nobody who interviewed me asked about it), or I had just forgotten or misremembered, it'd be more or less impossible to include that in a data set. I'd expect books like Feynman's to be good for hypothesis generation (Feynman in particular had unusual introspective ability), but to promote something to the working hypothesis level I'd expect to need data from experiments (that we can observe firsthand), from talking to a fair number of different people with high levels of mutual trust, or from much more thorough historical analysis of the type that eg. Robert Caro did.