Nanugu
2mo ago
I've been curious since reading it a few years ago... how are those suet puddings doing?
Nanugu
3mo ago
It's crass, but the simplest heuristic for 'greatness', if taken to mean the person with the most athletic prowess, is money. Fame also counts for something.
The top badminton player this year won about $650,000, approximately on par with the 460th player in the NBA. NBA (or UEFA, or NFL) money attracts far more competition than swimming, track and field, or gymnastics. It is also a measure of popularity and therefore the size of the starting pool of players.
I wouldn't say that Lebron James is superior to Lionel Messi simply because his net worth is twice as high - but I also wouldn't dismiss the notion offhand. But the US is a richer economy than most, and US sports are overpaid. And, again, Messi gets global fame and recognition as the pinnacle of the world's most popular sport. Once you're getting $500 million, you can afford to value those things more than another $500 million.
In short, I don't think most of the olympians have come through as intense a field as the professionals, and are not nearly as much of talent outliers.
Nanugu
3mo ago
Phelps deserves greatest athlete. His superpower was basically ADHD and a willingness to monotonously spend five hours a day swimming.
But somehow:
I also don't consider hard work, intelligence, or savvy to be part of athleticism.
Usain Bolt is 6'5", Michael Jordan 6'6". Bolt could presumably have made much more money in the NBA than the olympics if he were the athletic equivalent of Jordan. Basketball filters on height but also many other athletic traits, much less unidimensionally than sprinting.
Nanugu
4mo ago
Enlightenment has evidently produced several very different worldviews. The system we have in Anglosphere has been much more benign than the aforementioned.
But rejecting Enlightenment, as I understand it, would require tearing down our institutions and repudiating common values. It's so established - even traditional - that to undo it you have to destroy our entire system and start over from theory. That has not been a successful method historically. Hence the comparison to revolutionary groups.
Nanugu
4mo ago
From an Anglo perspective, haven't Enlightenment epistemology, values, culture, and nations been around long enough now that they are part of the sacred heritage passed down by our forebears? Honestly, one reason I can never stomach reaction is because it doesn't just want to drop the torch, it wants to piss on the ashes. It seems too much the Jacobin, the Bolshevik, or the Nazi.
On Pinker and Harris, I have an example of both on my shelf (never read them).
Random paragraph from Better Angels of Our Nature:
Russett and Oneal, the number crunching defenders of the Democratic Peace, also sought to to test the theory of the Liberal Peace, and were skeptical of the skeptics. They noted that though international trade hit a local peak just before WW1, it was still a fraction of the level, relative to GDP, that countries would see after WW2 (figure 5-24).
More than half (certainly more than half a percent) of this looks like objective information to me.
From The Moral Landscape (the concept of which I find asinine):
There are other results in psychology and behavioral economics that make it difficult to assess changes in human well-being. For instance, people tend to consider losses to be far more significant than forsaken gains, even when the net result is the same. For instance, when presented with a wager where they stand a 50 percent chance of losing $100, most people will consider anything less than a potential gain of $200 to be unattractive. This bias relates to what has come to be known as "the endowment effect": people demand more money in exchange for an object than they would spend to acquire the object in the first place.
The paragraph goes on to summarize sone consequences of these findings.
Both cases are a lot more objective and fact based than you imply, dedicating most of their words to explaining and summarizing data-based academic papers. Pinker even includes a graph of the data. Presumably these observations are eventually used to make an argument.
Nanugu
6mo ago
Inheritance of acquired traits is not a major driver of evolution. To the extent that environmental conditions are tranferable through epigenetics, the effects donnot persist through enough generations to result in speciation.
But the fact that Lamarck came up with inheritance of acquired traits as an explanation for evolution shows that natural selection never occurred to him, despite the fact that it is 'tautological'. Lamarck would not need a new theory to explain how species evolved if he knew of one that was already true.
This shows that despite being 'tautological' it was not a trivial realization.
Nanugu
6mo ago
Right, Darwin did not invent thenidea of evolution. He supplied an explanation that is intuitively obvious, even tautological, in retrospect.
Bringing up the example of Lamarck is helpful. He proposed speciation through the inheritance of acquired traits. Why would he ever propose such a ridiculous idea when speciation by natural selection is so obvious?
Nanugu
7mo ago
What Darwin's natural selection added was a description of how new species could develop through gradual, generational change and provide some good empirical examples where that was the obvious best explanation.
Yes, people know that long haired cats produce long haired kittens. Yes, it is obvious that long haired cats will survive in colder climates. What was not obvious was that, given enough time, two populations of cats would branch into distinct forms when geographically isolated, and that this would occur because the least fit would die out and the traits that made them unfit would die with them, while the most fit would survive to pass on those traits they posessed that were suitable for the local environment.
Von Neumann was very accomplished, but didn't he support preemptive strikes against USSR? Lower IQ people disagreed, and history has proven them right. At least, I prefer our timeline to trying out the one where he got his way. Math has a very high IQ skill cap, but in most other fields the cap is much lower.
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