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Comment by scotch_drinker | Hacker News Reader

Calling athletes "freaks of nature" does both a disservice to athletes in general and his argument in particular. He falls into the same trap of missing the fact that regardless of talent or genetics, if you don't work your tail off, you aren't ever going to amount to much. Just because you're born tall, doesn't mean you can play basketball any more than if you're born as Scott Adams, you can play pool. It still takes an inordinate amount of work to become a "professional" at anything regardless of your starting point.

I don't see how it's impractical to keep a log of how much time you spend practicing something. It can be as simple as placing an X on a calendar or as complex as keeping a detailed journal. Once a person does that, they can typically begin to track their personal progress in any particular skill.

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The point isn't really that athletes don't work their tail off. The point is that, because of the small number of available slots, professional athletes tend to be the intersection of the sets {people who work the hardest} and {people who are the most genetically gifted}.

The fact is, the average person couldn't become a professional athlete no matter how hard they worked. That causes athletes' genetic gifts to overshadow their hard work.

That sounds plausible, but it is pretty hard to verify.

The following men won gold in a solo swimming even in 2008.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Phelps
  6 ft 4 in
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Bernard
  6 ft 5 in
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9sar_Cielo_Filho
  6 ft 5 in
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Tae_Hwan
  6 ft in
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oussama_Mellouli
  6 ft 3 in http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/beijing/TUN/Oussama+Mellouli/217537
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Peirsol
  6 ft 4 in 
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Lochte
  6 ft 2 in   
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosuke_Kitajima
  5 ft 10 in 
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maarten_van_der_Weijden (10 km marathon)
  6 ft 7 1⁄2 in

Height is not the most important factor in swimming, but out of 10 people, only one was under 6' and he is still taller than average. Now look at something like size of hands and they are going to stand out even more. Practice may be able to get an average person to the 90th percentile in most things but once you start talking about 99.99% DNA becomes extremely important.

This was the part I meant was plausible but hard to verify:

    That causes athletes' genetic gifts to 
    overshadow their hard work.

Obviously successful swimmers have to be tall, but merely being 6' 4" isn't the sort of genetic gift that's so rare it outweighs effort.

I should have added "in the minds of observers." to make that sentence clearer. It's more a statement about human nature than the relative weighting of the ingredients most vital to elite athletic success.

The average person cannot be Scott Adams either.

The point is that you could make the comparison to the top 1% (that's what a pro athlete is) of anything and point out that innate talent and hard work is what got them there. He uses athletes because it's easy - most of us don't have that ability, and somehow feel this isn't fair.

Most Hacker News readers, though, are on the high end of the IQ scale. I sure as hell don't have to explain to you how (generally) our innate ability to understand computers better than the average person somehow means we have to work less...

Absolutely - as I always say, it wasn't training that gave Phelps his flipper-like feet and extraordinarily long arms and something that all successful athletes have that you can't even see, the ability to recover from exercise and train again more quickly than average.

> The point is that, because of the small number of available slots, professional athletes tend to be the intersection of the sets {people who work the hardest} and {people who are the most genetically gifted}.

And were born during the right months.

That's important because a couple of months of age makes a big difference when you're young. Since you're competing with other folks who also have both genes and work ethic, physical maturity differences can be significant.

Because while yes, you still need to practice a skill if you're incredibly athletic and want to be a professional, you cannot be a professional if you practice a lot but aren't athletic.

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