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all share an element of arms-race components to them Sometimes arms races (in the figurative sense) can lead to better performance! This week's New Yorker has a splendid example of this in James Surowiecki's "Better All the Time
How the 'performance revolution' came to athletics—and beyond" (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/10/better-time). It's not easy to excerpt, but he points out that athletes used to barely train at all and now they do it all the time; musicians are better; elite students are "better" in many respects; manufacturing has improved. As he writes: as the sports columnist Mark Montieth wrote after reviewing a host of games from the nineteen-fifties and sixties, “The difference in skills and athleticism between eras is remarkable. Most players, even the stars, couldn’t dribble well with their off-hand. Compared to today’s athletes, they often appear to be enacting a slow-motion replay.” What we’re seeing is, in part, the mainstreaming of excellent habits. In the late nineteen-fifties, Raymond Berry, the great wide receiver for the Baltimore Colts, was famous for his attention to detail and his obsessive approach to the game: he took copious notes, he ate well, he studied film of his opponents, he simulated entire games by himself, and so on. But, as the journalist Mark Bowden observed, Berry was considered an oddball. The whole article is wroth reading. |