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Authors Edward Nevraumont Word count 1363 words

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skybrian (OP)

12 minutes ago

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From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

From the article:

Humans no longer spend time chasing down antelope or outrunning lions. If human running performance stagnated at the level it had 100 years ago, our society would be fine. The same is true for almost all sports. [...]

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But while athletics is zero sum, academics is NOT.

If everyone in society could run at 2x their current speed human flourishing would be close to unchanged (maybe we would be marginally more productive as we would have slightly shorter unproductive travel times). But if everyone in society was twice as good at math, or twice as knowledgable about the world, or twice as good at clear communication, or twice as good at engineering — our society and world would be, if not twice as good, at least significantly better off.

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The first memory world championship was held in London in 1991. It was won by Dominic O’Brien. O’Brien dominated the memory circuit for a decade winning eight of the first ten national championships. He was significantly better than anyone else in the world. He could memorize a deck of cards in less than three minutes. If you gave him a list of random numbers, he could study the list for an hour and repeat back over 700 digits in order. His feats seemed superhuman.

But today O’Brien’s results would not be competitive at the national championships, let alone the world’s. The current world record for memorizing a deck of cards is 12.7 seconds — 14x faster than O’Brien. The current record for number of random digits memorized in an hour is 4,620 — almost 7x more digits than O’Brien.

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In 2005 Joshua Foer reported on the World Memory Championship for Discovery Magazine. He met some competitors who convinced him to compete himself in the US National Championships in 2006. They told him that the US was way behind the rest of the world in memory, and that with the proper coaching Foer could potentially win a national title. Foer followed their advice and won the Nationals with less than a year of training (and then got crushed at the world championship). Foer wrote about his experience in his book, Moonwalking with Einstein, that was published in 2011.

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Given that peak human memory has not gotten 10x better in the thousands of years prior to the introduction of a world memory competition, I think we can be comfortable saying that, at least in this case, academic competition led to higher human performance at the most elite level.

What did not happen is a general improvement of memory across the broader population. Why not? Because memory competitions, unlike say, soccer or basketball or even cross country running, is extremely niche. [...] There aren’t any weekend memory athletes.

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As a society we have discovered that kids get lots of value out of playing competitive sports — team work skills, leadership, time management, emotional regulation — lots of things they don’t get from studying math and reading and writing.

But what they don’t get from training in football, is better skills in math and reading and writing.

But a kid who competes in competitive math and competitive writing and competitive reading (whatever that would look like…), could get the benefits of competition AND skills that are fundamentally valuable on their own.

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My argument that I have been building over these last six posts is that competition is a powerful tool, and while it is great that a subset of society has been using it in athletic competitions, it is a net-loss to society that we have ignored the tool in the areas that could help society the most.