An Important Point I Made In Another Thread

[David Sklansky]

This is my response to Lestat on another thread that I thought was important enough to repeat on its own. It concerns a Baye's Theorem type concept that people often get confused about. In this particular case the original subject was the importance of intelligence. But that is not why I am repeating the post here. Even if you think that the argument doesn't apply to intelligence, it does apply to many other important things. I had been meaning to write about this for a while but hadn't gotten around to it until now.

Lestat:

"Of course the forbes list is going to be above average in intelligence, but I'd be willing to bet there are very few among them who do not have someone who's even SMARTER working for them!"

Me:

Since you seem to want to learn, I will go out of my way to explain something to you. And to avoid your biases I will change intelligence to 100 yard dash speed.

I contend that in almost any sport, given no other information, the person with the higher 100 yard dash speed, will be favored to do better at that sport than the slower guy.

Now you point to baseball and point out that while the average speed of professional baseball players is much faster than average, rarely is the fastest player the best player. And that seems to negate my point. Or at least imply that once you get to a certain speed, anything faster hardly helps. Or that somehow the fastest players are weak at other skills DUE TO THEIR FASTNESS. But NONE of that is true.

The reason that the fastest player is almost never the best player stems from two facts.

1. Speed is only one attribute necessarry to succeed in baseball.

2. Super speedsters are MUCH RARER than merely fast players.

This second point is the key. If somehow there was just as many nine flat hundred men in the US as there were 9.8 hundred men (nothing in between and baseball paid more than any other sport) then almost every team's best player would be a 9.0 guy. Because it would be a rarity to find a 9.8 guy whose other skills were sufficiently better than all the 9.0 competion to turn him into the best overall player on the team. But if there is only one 9.0 guy on each team it is likely that among the other 24 guys on the roster, at least one will be able to overcome his speed disadvantage with other skills.

As I said I hope you see that this reasoning helps show the flaws in other similar arguments.