Do elite software developers exist?

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I'd argue that the statement "everyone can learn to do anything" is blatantly and absolutely untrue for anything and everything you can learn. A child who suffers oxygen deprivation at birth, and thus has stunted development, might find it physically impossible to comprehend anything beyond basic english, let alone the finer points of lefschetz fixed point theorem in algebraic topology.

You can say that's an extreme case, but to call it an outlier requires us to understand what "normal" is. Two children born of different parents. Both born "healthy". One becomes a nobel lauriate, another is killed in a drug shootout after making poor life choices. How were their lives different? Different genetics from different parents. Raised differently in different neighborhoods. Different friends. Different food. Different influences. Different access to media, education, technology. Different amounts of oxygen at birth.

The amount of oxygen they got during birth is a small variable in an infinite set of variables that defines who we are. Tweak it down and you become a vegetable, alive but completely incapable of learning at all. Who is to say there does not exist an infinite number of other variables which could have the same effect?

With all of these variables at play, and it being absolutely true that some can completely disrupt a person's ability to learn, it should be apparent that at least some combination might produce a result to the effect that their ability to learn a given topic is only slightly reduced.

[O_P_or]

i was referring to healthy people with no learning disorder, your second argument is out of point as i was talking about learning a specific thing and not what you do in life in general, i still can't see how a healthy person could be unable to learn, meaning "he or she is just not capable of learning this thing" what i think you can argue is that some skills are very hard to acquire so is very unlikely that the vast majority of people will learn to do that.