I mean, I don't think this is true for 99% of people who do sports. That's only true of like the upper 0.001%. Most people do sports simply as recreation. It is in the same place as watching...
The value of sports is mostly in the status of the competitors (which is all relative and zero-sum), and the entertainment factor for the spectators.
I mean, I don't think this is true for 99% of people who do sports. That's only true of like the upper 0.001%. Most people do sports simply as recreation. It is in the same place as watching Netflix and doomscrolling on Instagram. The reward is intrinsic, not extrinsic.
The author seems to think that competition is something that be formed by society in some way, when in reality people compete in things they like doing. Physical sports tends to be a very intuition-based, which is a reprieve from a lot of daily stressors which are mentally fatiguing. Academic competitions can be even more mentally fatiguing.
Even many smart people like doing physical challenges. It's not like a meathead thing.
I'm not sure if the author ever actually participated in academic competitions. Sentences like
Academic competitions are extremely niche — so much so that my daughter could put in less than an hour a day of work for 9-months and become the most successful girl at the history bee world championship, not just in 2025, but of all time. Imagine putting in that level of effort to achieve that in ANY athletic sport.
don't inspire confidence in that respect.
Math competitions like IMO (International Math Olympiad) and USAMO are extremely competitive. And they matter, a lot. It matters for college, it matters after college - pretty rare! A very high IMO score alone will you get scouted by quant firms. It can be a difference between a 400k offer from Citadel as a newgrad.
People don't decide "I want to do a competition", and then pick the topic, like the latter doesn't matter. It's the reverse. They find something they enjoy doing, and eventually move into being competitive.
I read back a few posts It's really weird that he doesn't know that she "medaled" rather than "metaled" in multiple events. And it really doesn't look like many girls go to the event. She's very...
I read back a few posts It's really weird that he doesn't know that she "medaled" rather than "metaled" in multiple events. And it really doesn't look like many girls go to the event. She's very smart, and I know from my own scholastic bowl experience the environment wasn't friendly to girls regardless. But it all feels weird.
He honestly sounds like the most exhausting parent who makes his kid's success his entire life. But also it all feels like an ad - with a weird Instagram full of AI pics - for the whole Alpha School thing. Or whatever gifted talented variation she's in.
I hope she gets to choose what she wants to do as she keeps growing up and also gets to not have her face all over her dad's stuff. Unless he's giving her a cut of his subs.
From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]
From the article:
Humans no longer spend time chasing down antelope or outrunning lions. If human running performance stagnated at the level it had 100 years ago, our society would be fine. The same is true for almost all sports. [...]
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But while athletics is zero sum, academics is NOT.
If everyone in society could run at 2x their current speed human flourishing would be close to unchanged (maybe we would be marginally more productive as we would have slightly shorter unproductive travel times). But if everyone in society was twice as good at math, or twice as knowledgable about the world, or twice as good at clear communication, or twice as good at engineering — our society and world would be, if not twice as good, at least significantly better off.
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The first memory world championship was held in London in 1991. It was won by Dominic O'Brien. O’Brien dominated the memory circuit for a decade winning eight of the first ten national championships. He was significantly better than anyone else in the world. He could memorize a deck of cards in less than three minutes. If you gave him a list of random numbers, he could study the list for an hour and repeat back over 700 digits in order. His feats seemed superhuman.
But today O’Brien’s results would not be competitive at the national championships, let alone the world’s. The current world record for memorizing a deck of cards is 12.7 seconds — 14x faster than O’Brien. The current record for number of random digits memorized in an hour is 4,620 — almost 7x more digits than O’Brien.
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In 2005 Joshua Foer reported on the World Memory Championship for Discovery Magazine. He met some competitors who convinced him to compete himself in the US National Championships in 2006. They told him that the US was way behind the rest of the world in memory, and that with the proper coaching Foer could potentially win a national title. Foer followed their advice and won the Nationals with less than a year of training (and then got crushed at the world championship). Foer wrote about his experience in his book, Moonwalking with Einstein, that was published in 2011.
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Given that peak human memory has not gotten 10x better in the thousands of years prior to the introduction of a world memory competition, I think we can be comfortable saying that, at least in this case, academic competition led to higher human performance at the most elite level.
What did not happen is a general improvement of memory across the broader population. Why not? Because memory competitions, unlike say, soccer or basketball or even cross country running, is extremely niche. [...] There aren’t any weekend memory athletes.
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As a society we have discovered that kids get lots of value out of playing competitive sports — team work skills, leadership, time management, emotional regulation — lots of things they don’t get from studying math and reading and writing.
But what they don’t get from training in football, is better skills in math and reading and writing.
But a kid who competes in competitive math and competitive writing and competitive reading (whatever that would look like…), could get the benefits of competition AND skills that are fundamentally valuable on their own.
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My argument that I have been building over these last six posts is that competition is a powerful tool, and while it is great that a subset of society has been using it in athletic competitions, it is a net-loss to society that we have ignored the tool in the areas that could help society the most.
I mean, I don't think this is true for 99% of people who do sports. That's only true of like the upper 0.001%. Most people do sports simply as recreation. It is in the same place as watching Netflix and doomscrolling on Instagram. The reward is intrinsic, not extrinsic.
The author seems to think that competition is something that be formed by society in some way, when in reality people compete in things they like doing. Physical sports tends to be a very intuition-based, which is a reprieve from a lot of daily stressors which are mentally fatiguing. Academic competitions can be even more mentally fatiguing.
Even many smart people like doing physical challenges. It's not like a meathead thing.
I'm not sure if the author ever actually participated in academic competitions. Sentences like
don't inspire confidence in that respect.
Math competitions like IMO (International Math Olympiad) and USAMO are extremely competitive. And they matter, a lot. It matters for college, it matters after college - pretty rare! A very high IMO score alone will you get scouted by quant firms. It can be a difference between a 400k offer from Citadel as a newgrad.
People don't decide "I want to do a competition", and then pick the topic, like the latter doesn't matter. It's the reverse. They find something they enjoy doing, and eventually move into being competitive.
I read back a few posts It's really weird that he doesn't know that she "medaled" rather than "metaled" in multiple events. And it really doesn't look like many girls go to the event. She's very smart, and I know from my own scholastic bowl experience the environment wasn't friendly to girls regardless. But it all feels weird.
He honestly sounds like the most exhausting parent who makes his kid's success his entire life. But also it all feels like an ad - with a weird Instagram full of AI pics - for the whole Alpha School thing. Or whatever gifted talented variation she's in.
I hope she gets to choose what she wants to do as she keeps growing up and also gets to not have her face all over her dad's stuff. Unless he's giving her a cut of his subs.
From the article:
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