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This is survivorship bias. I've played pick-up basketball with a ton of dudes whose parents sunk hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars into training and co

This is survivorship bias. I've played pick-up basketball with a ton of dudes whose parents sunk hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars into training and coaching, and they're generally stunningly mediocre. Tim Duncan, widely regarded as the greatest power forward of all time, held a basketball for the first time as a freshman in highschool when hurricane Hugo destroyed the pool and he had to pick a new sport to play.

majormajor 5y ago
Is your claim that effective practice is meaningless? Or just that it's not sufficient on its own to always overcome certain other advantages? I'm not convinced this is survivorship bias. This isn't "they used to build them better (but all the ones they didn't fell apart ages ago)." And there are far fewer Duncans than there are people who didn't touch a basketball until high school who didn't make the NBA. Studying the best players could have blindspots compared to studying the whole population, but that's impractical, and throwing out an outlier like Duncan is hardly a more rigorous argument. We also have no way to evaluate counterfactuals here - what would those players you played against be like if they hadn't spent all that time practicing? Maybe they'd be stunningly crappy instead of stunningly mediocre. And maybe Duncan could have been even better if he'd started at age 10. I'd certainly be very interested to see a study of neighborhoods, and what the kids in them did for sports and/or recreation, and their rates of generating high-level (college or low-level professional) players, though.
VirusNewbie 5y ago
Basketball almost assuredly has to be an extreme outlier here though, in that outrageously rare physical attributes are almost a necessity to play competitively. I realize there have been some exceptions with very small players but they seem rarer and rarer each year. This doesn't invalidate your point, but we might get a more accurate picture if we only looked at people who ended up 6'3, strong and athletic.
fakethenews2022 5y ago
Tim Duncan is a bad example. Tim Duncan is close to 7 feet tall. Supposedly roughly 20% of men 20-40 who are 7 feet tall are in the NBA. What percentage of men of average height are in the NBA? When David Robinson was in high school, he was not considered an NBA talent. When he grew to over 7 feet, he was drafted first and is now in the Hall of Fame. Height is a huge advantage in basketball. Larry Bird said that if he wasn't 6'9", then he wouldn't be in the NBA. Tim Duncan was a great player, great mind, and great leader, but height was integral to how he played.

majormajor 5y ago

Is your claim that effective practice is meaningless? Or just that it's not sufficient on its own to always overcome certain other advantages? I'm not convinced this is survivorship bias. This isn't "they used to build them better (but all the ones they didn't fell apart ages ago)." And there are far fewer Duncans than there are people who didn't touch a basketball until high school who didn't make the NBA. Studying the best players could have blindspots compared to studying the whole population, but that's impractical, and throwing out an outlier like Duncan is hardly a more rigorous argument. We also have no way to evaluate counterfactuals here - what would those players you played against be like if they hadn't spent all that time practicing? Maybe they'd be stunningly crappy instead of stunningly mediocre. And maybe Duncan could have been even better if he'd started at age 10. I'd certainly be very interested to see a study of neighborhoods, and what the kids in them did for sports and/or recreation, and their rates of generating high-level (college or low-level professional) players, though.

VirusNewbie 5y ago

Basketball almost assuredly has to be an extreme outlier here though, in that outrageously rare physical attributes are almost a necessity to play competitively. I realize there have been some exceptions with very small players but they seem rarer and rarer each year. This doesn't invalidate your point, but we might get a more accurate picture if we only looked at people who ended up 6'3, strong and athletic.

fakethenews2022 5y ago

Tim Duncan is a bad example. Tim Duncan is close to 7 feet tall. Supposedly roughly 20% of men 20-40 who are 7 feet tall are in the NBA. What percentage of men of average height are in the NBA? When David Robinson was in high school, he was not considered an NBA talent. When he grew to over 7 feet, he was drafted first and is now in the Hall of Fame. Height is a huge advantage in basketball. Larry Bird said that if he wasn't 6'9", then he wouldn't be in the NBA. Tim Duncan was a great player, great mind, and great leader, but height was integral to how he played.