The AI scientist is here. This will be the end of wokeness
A paper just published in Science — the most prestigious journal in the world — claims to have discovered how humans achieve the highest levels of performance. Its conclusion: child prodigies don't become top performers, early excellence negatively predicts peak performance, and parents should not push their kids for fear of burnout. I found it odd. I asked Claude to analyze it. Claude found a statistical error in the paper's core claim, designed a counter-study with 3x the sample size, ran it, and proved the paper wrong. The correct conclusion: talent is real, it's measurable by age 14, and it predicts who reaches the absolute top. We are not all born equal. The AI scientist doesn't care about your feelings — it just follows the math.
Here's what happened:
The paper (Güllich et al. 2025, Science) claims that elite youth and elite adults are "discrete populations" — that the kids who dominate at 14 are not the ones who dominate at 30. Its key chess finding was based on 24 players. It told millions of parents: don't push your kids, prodigies burn out.
Claude applied Bayes' theorem to the authors' own numbers and showed the data actually proves a strong positive correlation between early and adult performance — the opposite of what was claimed. The "negative correlation" was a statistical illusion created by extreme quantile selection.
Then Claude designed the study the authors should have run: collected age-14 Elo ratings and lifetime peak ratings for every super-grandmaster in chess history — 67 players, nearly 3x the paper's sample. Ran the regression.
Result: β = +0.167, p = 0.003. Early achievement positively predicts peak performance.
An AI just peer-reviewed the world's top scientific journal and won.
