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You’re right, as an adult I’m not suddenly going to become a piano virtuoso.

Innateness here is a pretty complicated topic. Hard work at an early age probably has a huge part of molding skills we associate with so-called “intelligence”.

Was Mozart a genius? Or was he working really hard at being a musician from an early age, and thus just very skilled? Would Mozart succeed if we suddenly had to train him to be a Java programmer? Where does the narrow “skill” end and the broader “general intelligence” begin?

I would argue skill is measurable and meaningful, but “intelligence” less so

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Mozart was a genius.

Ryo Fukui started playing the piano at 22 (accordion at 18), he did alright for himself.

Mozart’s dad was a great student and his mother’s father was highly educated too. So my guess is, he’d be able to handle Java.

It’s actually easy (in principle) to measure the programming facet of intelligence: CS programs do this with weed-out classes.

These people are outliers. The problem with outliers is that they're so far out of the normal range that it's often difficult/impossible to use outliers' experiences to answer "what causes deviations within the normal range?" Were they gifted from birth? Did they have unique developmental opportunities? Did a radioactive spider bite them just so? We can analyze their lives and experiences, but we often place far too much stock in the facts of that analysis without properly assessing those facts' significance.

Using Mozart & co. as [counter]examples in a discussion about innate potential/intelligence/development is about as useful as using lottery winners to derive recommended savings levels for the general population, or using lightning strike victims to derive recommendations for public safety.

Not at all. They're great tools for understanding how intelligence is multidimensional. There are also math geniuses who are very untalented at music. That tells us something.

> but "intelligence" less so

I don't think there's any problem measuring intelligence, where we've traditionally run into issues is where we start to make policy or social decisions using this data without understanding it's subtleties.

I think Jordan B Peterson has a good classroom video segment[1] on this problem.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSo5v5t4OQM

Less so because its many up if many complex factors. But if there are conditions that negatively affect memory, attention/focus, writing and reading skills, pattern recognition and more to various degree, it's quite likely the opposite is true and that people Excel at all of these to various degree. Now, in the same way not everyone who's super strong is going to apply it to competitive weight lifting, not everyone who's a genius will do anything meaningful with it but that's a separate topic.