
Why can we develop athletes and not writers? - robg
http://www.slate.com/id/2289380/pagenum/all/
======
saturdayplace
I'm not convinced the reasons he gives for why we're so good at developing
athletes are the actual reasons; I think they're methods we do it by, not the
reason for which we do it. The real reason we're good at generating athletes,
is that they generate large amounts of revenue for the companies they work
for. The entire system for creating athletes (youth opportunity, publicly
celebrating their success, etc) exists _because_ they make huge sums of cash
for their eventual employers.

It's also easier to compare athletes. Each sport has a canonical set of
statistics kept. I can easily compare athletes #1 and #2, and decide which is
worth more money based on their stats. Not so easy to do with writers, so much
of it is subjective.

There also exists a quick and easy test for determining athleticism: the game.
They're short, and they generate data. You can hold enough of them in a short
enough amount of time to get the data you need to make decisions about/develop
an athlete. If we're talking about them as products, athletes are much easier
to iterate than authors; the feedback loop is much shorter.

