Dan Luu on Nostr: The bball and fb players came from a larger pond with a more highly selected talent ...

The bball and fb players came from a larger pond with a more highly selected talent pool and were simply more athletically talented. On top of that, they had better training as being self-taught actually sucks.

There's this American romantic nerd ideal of the self-taught nerd who's great because they're just so obsessed, but it's not like these larger talent pools in more mature fields don't have obsessed people and the factors mention above totally dominate obsession alone.