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Comment by unholythree | Hacker News Reader

Parent poster didn’t seem interested it meeting some arbitrary diversity metric, it was that huge amount of potential talent is entirely unknown.

Because the barrier to entry is low, talent filters up better in many other sports. We probably know who the best hockey player in Canada is, but who would be the best dressage rider is a mystery because few kids have access.

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The problem with this argument is that it's equivalent to saying to someone in the Olympics that they're just there because of sample and survivor bias, which ignores the intrinsic counterfactual assumption.

Yes, under some counterfactual condition, there are better Olympians, but that imaginary world is not equivalent or meaningful in the real and current one. This is the basic conceit of a lot of critical theories and ideas, they aren't rooted in the real.

This argument just seems like the sports version of Infinite growth - sports will get infinitely better as we lower "barriers to entry" until we have the supposed best version of the game. How do we know that by lowering the barrier to entry we aren't just flooding the sport with less interesting to watch teams? Alternatively, what if the mechanically best version of F1 far less interesting to watch than what we have now?

Not to say we should never fix anything, but I need more convincing that this is a real problem.

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