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by TangoTrotFox
2758 days ago
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A problem with this is that 'equal' tends to equate to fields where measuring performance is not really possible in an objective fashion. E.g. - how would you measure business performance? Is Bill Gates a Bobby Fischer of business, or is he a smart guy who had a great run of right place/right time? In reality there's a good reason that most competitive fields are not equal by any means. In many fields there are even racial/ethnic divides where physiological differences tend to be much smaller than those between sexes. It's because while any world class competitor (in anything) might be many orders of magnitude more capable than a layperson, in general the differences between the individuals at the top is very small. Because of this even the slightest difference is something that can radically shift the balance. As an example consider the LZR swimsuit [1] by Speedo. In the Beijing Olympics 23 of 25 world records broken were done by swimmers wearing an LZR suit. It had such a huge impact on swimming that the suit is now banned, along with possible derivatives of it. You might expect it's some amazing insta-swimmer, but it's just a regular swimsuit that's nicely engineered resulting in about a quarter less drag than their previous swimsuit. But these changes alone enabled swimmers to shave an average of about 2% off their lap times, which was way more than enough to just destroy just about all previous records. The ratios of your hips, legs, weight distributions, etc all are vastly different between men and women. And different, though less so, between races. Even consider all the physical differences implied by simply having breasts. Occasionally you'll find a genetic outlier, but in cases where the normal distribution tends to overlap strongly with the ideal performance distribution you're going to get a landslide of results. For instance Kenya makes up a tiny chunk of the world's population, but dominates pretty much all marathon running competitions. Even more interesting is it's not just Kenyans, but a tiny ethnic minority within Kenya that's doing this dominating. Some 0.06% of the world's population ends up dominating marathon racing. Most tellingly, Kenya was basically a nonplayer in these events until cultural changes in the 80s started bringing Kenya (and other East African nations) up to the standards of the west in terms of nutrition and general technology. There was a great article on this all a while back [2]. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZR_Racer [2] - https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/04/wh... |
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