
We Are Nowhere Close to the Limits of Athletic Performance - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/39/sport/we-are-nowhere-close-to-the-limits-of-athletic-performance
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petewailes
This isn't so much an argument that we're not close to the limit, but that the
limit seems to increasingly be in a direction no-one thought of before.

Look at Shaq and Bolt, as mentioned, or Jonah Lomu in rugby, or Rob Gronkowski
in the NFL, or Stephen Curry in basketball. The idea that you can get someone
who's so good that it changes how the game is played, making everyone else
completely irrelevant keeps turning up.

It's not just that there's extreme outliers, but that in many areas, we're
finding that the extreme outlier you need to counter what currently works is
something other than the current formula that works, but moreso.

Similarly, Google didn't make a better directory, they made a scaling search
engine. Ford made a car, not a better horse and carriage, Uber made a scalable
admin structure for taxi payments, not a better taxi company, and Apple made a
better mobile internet access device, not a better mobile phone.

It's the old idea the Bauhaus school tried to address (that everyone now
copies by looking at the output, rather than the concept), of trying to find a
new, better way of addressing the problem, not an improvement on the current
solution.

