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>We can only be sure that we are witnessing the best basketball players in the world who are motivated by money, and the fastest runners who are motivated by fa

>We can only be sure that we are witnessing the best basketball players in the world who are motivated by money, and the fastest runners who are motivated by fame. I think that's a pretty big stretch. First of all, not all basketball players/runners are motivated by money/fame. If you are really good at something competitive you want to do it against other people who are also good. So it's highly likely that the best people want to compete against others who are at there level. Also with all the modern training, dieting and everything modern athletes do, I think it's pretty laughable to think someone can just 'walk up' and be better than them.

faceplanted 7y ago
You have a good point, distance running is the exception as far as I can tell, in that this has actually happened more than once now, I can't remember his name but the Australian ultra marathon runner who came out of nowhere from being a shepherd or something and more recently this article, people showing up with a new technique doesn't really happen in other sports like this, let me know if I'm missing some examples though, other sports tend to have far less variables I think, ultra marathon runners make a lot of decisions that sprinters and velodrome cyclists don't have to or at least they don't have as much of a cumulative effect. But then i do also think the guy above you has a point in that we can be pretty much certain based on the biases we know about that we're probably overlooking some excellent people in big sports just based on failures in our selection methods. There's no reason that children born in September should be better at sports and get better degrees, but they are over represented because of the way we select kids for sports based on school year, if you're older in the year at school, the benefits carry for a long time, and we've probably missed some potentially incredible athletes because of minor circumstances like that which caused them either to not get into it or not get the training they need. But that's not quite the same as them _currently_ being better outside of the competitions. Still bothers me though.

faceplanted 7y ago

You have a good point, distance running is the exception as far as I can tell, in that this has actually happened more than once now, I can't remember his name but the Australian ultra marathon runner who came out of nowhere from being a shepherd or something and more recently this article, people showing up with a new technique doesn't really happen in other sports like this, let me know if I'm missing some examples though, other sports tend to have far less variables I think, ultra marathon runners make a lot of decisions that sprinters and velodrome cyclists don't have to or at least they don't have as much of a cumulative effect. But then i do also think the guy above you has a point in that we can be pretty much certain based on the biases we know about that we're probably overlooking some excellent people in big sports just based on failures in our selection methods. There's no reason that children born in September should be better at sports and get better degrees, but they are over represented because of the way we select kids for sports based on school year, if you're older in the year at school, the benefits carry for a long time, and we've probably missed some potentially incredible athletes because of minor circumstances like that which caused them either to not get into it or not get the training they need. But that's not quite the same as them _currently_ being better outside of the competitions. Still bothers me though.