In many areas, staggering achievements have been made, although not nearly all talented have had the opportunity to participate.
Sports speculation one branch is to argue about which species are the hardest to reach the top. The degree of difficulty depends on how many enthusiasts the sport has. The larger the number of enthusiasts of a sport, the greater the number of its enthusiasts will have to struggle for success and the more competitors they will have to be able to leave behind.
Thus, the closest to humanity’s potential is probably reached in football, as it has by far the most enthusiasts. Lionel Messi is thus the most accurate approximation of what is possible for people in any area of life. Other species do not get such a glimpse of the upper limits of human potential because they do not involve the whole world as widely.
Same logic can be applied to everything else where people are distinguished by success, such as science and art. As long as not all the children of the world grow up in middle-class families with books and encouraging parents, and in societies with good schools, we will not be clear what the tops of humanity are capable of in matters that require learning. If everyone in the world had an equal chance of success, we could have quite different peaks of intellectual performance than we now have.
Even art classics are classics because they lived in a time when competition was scarce and their artistic innovations stood out in that state of scarce competition to their advantage. Milos Forman’s film Amadeus tells the story of the ingenious Mozart and Salier, who represents mediocrity. But what if the Central European music culture of the late 18th century had spread to all parts of the world and to all classes of society at that time?
The breeding ground for musical innovation would then have been vastly larger, and most likely the composers of this potential world, Li from China, Haryanto from Java, and Zerezghi from Ethiopia, would have left Mozart in the shadows with their ingenuity. Mozart would have been in Salier’s position in a comprehensive competitive situation.
Someone perhaps says that this thought test is a jealous slander. When just no peak is a peak in terms of human potential, successes are pulled down into the gray mass of mediocrity. However, the message is happier: it doesn’t hurt that even though the peaks are really mediocre, they’ve still done some breathtaking things.
The author is the editor of HS Science.
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source https://pledgetimes.com/columns-it-doesnt-matter-even-if-the-peaks-are-mediocre/
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