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I think Cowen is just overrating the intelligence of his examples, which is a particular weirdness of basketball fans (probably trying to signal their own intelligence despite following a sport with a pretty dumb fanbase). LeBron is notorious for pretending to read. I'll give him Jordan, who clearly has impressive business sense, and trust him on Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, whom I only know from Airplane! In general, top athletes are surrounded by a large staff trying to make them appear as well as possible to the public, including media coaching and PR.
In the sport I follow, football (no, football football), intelligence seems to be all over the place, and somewhat but not entirely correlated with "football IQ." The easiest way to see this is by looking at the jobs they take after their playing career, with most top managers having played a high-football-IQ game rather than a physical one, often in midfield - Guardiola, Ancelotti, Wenger, Arteta, etc. all fit that mould, and Klopp describes his playing career by saying "I had fourth-division feet and a first-division head." Meanwhile, a lot of top players become pundits based off reputation, and quite frankly come across as pretty thick, if good at courting controversy in the mode of modern media. Or, to take an example of current players, Bukayo Saka and Emile Smith Rowe broke into the Arsenal team around the same time, and had very similar promise until ESR's injuries and Saka's break-out, but ESR is known among the team for being humorously dim while Saka scored relatively similar exam results to people I know from top private schools.
The bailey of your point is sound, I think, it's rare for top top athletes to be that stupid (much below 100IQ it would take a lot of crystallized intelligence just to understand top-level tactics). I'm sure most top footballers are above average intelligence, but not that much above average and generally quite uneducated. So there's definitely a floor for required intelligence, but at the highest level it's something which is important but can be traded off against other aspects of one's game, such that the smartest players aren't the best players and the best players aren't necessarily so smart that a guy like Tyler Cowen should be fawning over them and reading the books they "wrote".
(To address the elephants in the room: Ronaldo isn't that smart but makes up for it by sheer force of will. Messi is probably very smart but so cripplingly introverted he doesn't let it show off the pitch.)
Agree. Though I’ll note I posted it back here cuz felt more mental healthy to talk about how ideas pop thru the internet and the feel good feeling when someone widely viewed as smart says an idea you think you were somewhat novel on.
My original post was subtly a hbd type thing where black IQ average is supposedly low 80’s. But I don’t think the average athlete is that low. And many seem to be significantly higher. I think I’m just chilling in the bailey and Cowen is pushing it farther.
Yeah I just couldn't resist talking about football, too excited for the season starting.
The HBD point is kind of interesting, because both of the main 'black' sports have a much greater selection for body type which would presumably crowd out a lot of athletes who are smart but don't have the right body. But, while basketball does demand some serious tactical nous and on-the-spot thinking, american football is much more about getting really big guys and having them follow specific tactics to ram into each other, while giving themselves traumatic brain injuries - and when I think of famous black athletes doing really stupid stuff, it's pretty much all american football players and not NBA players.
Also I think both of us have confused motte and bailey here, I meant to say that the motte of your point is sound but I'm not sure about Cowen's bailey.
Some reason I confuse them a lot and went with your usage.
Basketball I feel like you are constantly running probabilities in your head. Is the three better than the pass for that guys cut for a lay up. Lineman frequently make a decision of two unblocked guys which one would be better to grab.
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Although it depends somewhat on how “famous” is defined, NFL rosters are about 3-4x larger than those of the NBA, plus there are two more NFL teams than NBA. So there is a larger pool of NFL players available to provide colorful off-field/off-court behavior.
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