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by barry-cotter 2055 days ago
> If this was a meritocracy, you would expect a proportionate number of every ethnicity and religion represented in the workforce of large corporations.

By this logic we should expect the NBA, NFL, NHL etc. to look like a random sample of the US population. If the source subpopulations differ by even small amounts on mean or variance those on the extreme tails of distributions will look very different from the general population. So the ranks of men who have ever run 100m in under ten seconds are basically all black and elite marathon runners are about half Kalenjin, an ethnic group of fewer than ten million.
2 comments
nicoffeine 2054 days ago
This is a ridiculous comparison. There are around 500 NBA players during a given season. Amazon alone just passed one million workers. You're going to have odd results if your sample size of society is absurdly tiny.

Also, going straight to comparisons of athletic ability and ethnicity is basically a hundred year old argument made by people you probably don't want to associate with.

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YuriGrinshteyn 2055 days ago
That's only if you assume that getting to that level is nothing but a matter of natural ability, talent, and hard work. Instead, much of it is about access to training opportunities, coaches, having parents who can afford to send you to various camps, drive you to weekend tournaments, and buy you the equipment necessary.

Tech exacerbates this problem even further. How can you get anywhere as a kid if your parents don't have a computer, and neither does your school? And that's just one example.

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jl2718 2055 days ago
Maybe this is true about tech, but you really must have never met anybody that even made it to pro camp in the NFL or NBA. I was pretty close with a dude that had only one year of football before being drafted and then won the NFL rushing title the next year. On the other hand, I played since I was 7, won a state title at 9, and put everything into it for years afterward, but it wasn't long before I couldn't be drafted to carry water bottles for a real team.
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barry-cotter 2055 days ago
> That's only if you assume that getting to that level is nothing but a matter of natural ability, talent, and hard work.

That and luck are well over 90%, yes. Otherwise the scions of the wealthy would be vastly more prominent in sports with low entry barriers. In practice the most decorated Olympian ever is the son of a police officer and a middle school principal[1]. The best basketball player ever comes from a less distinguished background[2]. College sports specially chosen to be niches to maximize the chance of being a recruited athlete are so competitive the children of hedge fund managers routinely fail to get in that way[3]. The outer extremities of talent distributions are people who are staggeringly talented, hard working and lucky. Then they complete with each other and the ones who win are better than that .

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Phelps

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jordan

[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/squash-...

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