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That is sort of interesting. Depending on how extremely good Lebron James is at basketball could make Brian's statement false. I think I disagree that number of
by spywaregorilla 5y ago
That is sort of interesting. Depending on how extremely good Lebron James is at basketball could make Brian's statement false. I think I disagree that number of people is a meaningful metric. The difference between you and I, assuming we're both near average competency, could be millions of people, while the difference between Lebron and Brian could be just hundreds or thousands of people but represent a substantially larger skill gap. Otherwise you're suggesting that the more skilled two players are, the less noteworthy differences in skill are because there's fewer people around them to measure with.
- majormajor 5y agoThat's true, we could be separated by millions of people but at the same time only, say, a year's worth of two-hours-a-week practice. But in the absence of a reliable way to measure absolute skill, the z score one does seem about as good as we can get, though it can't truly answer something like "Lebron vs Jordan" - and you also would get different numbers depending on which population you picked. Population of the world, population of the US, population of the basketball-playing world, population of people who play basketball at least once a month? That's gonna change the denominator for the percentiles for the Scalabrines and Lebrons both.