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Comment by dwaltrip | Hacker News Reader

I would guess that the increased rate of information transmission across society has contributed to this trend. Copying is a key mechanism in how culture develops and propagates, and information moving more easily makes it easier for different groups to copy the dominant examples for any particular activity or discipline. A lot of information systems and cultural phenomenons have winner-take-all / power-law dynamics. Combined with increased information transmission, this would cause the leading styles and practices to become even more dominant.

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Tangentially related, but I was thinking about this while watching the Olympics men's figure skating competition recently (given the ongoing drama on the women's side, I'll leave that aside for now).

The quality of skating has drastically improved in just a decade. In 2010 the Olympic champion had no quad jumps. In 2022 the easiest jump from the top 3 competitors in their short program was a triple axel - the rest were all quads.

My theory about this is that the advent of smartphones and ubiquitous video has made it much easier to constantly see what your competitors are doing. This not only pushes you to work harder and try new jumps, but also lets you see what new techniques work for other athletes. A couple decades ago people wondered if a quad jump was even possible, now people train going into it that a triple is no longer the expected limit.

I wonder if, setting quality aside, the kinds of tricks (is "tricks" right?) that skaters do becomes more similar with technology. That is, skater X was going to do some random trick, until X learned that skaters Y and Z were doing quad jumps, so X figures he must do quad jumps now.

In other words, if we could represent skating routines as vectors, would the average cosine distance between all those vectors be increasing or decreasing?

They trained in 2010 just as hard as now. And learned from others for decades. I guarantee you they wanted to win as much and were trying new jumps.

What you see there is what you see in any sport - evolution of it toward better performance.

Kotler's The Rise of Superman goes into how some these meta-performance skills are a big part of what's being transferred more and more effectively. There's young kids doing mind blowing things in extreme sports like skateboarding and BMX that were unimaginable to even the top echelon of the sports a few decades ago.

It's exciting to see transfer learning's effects in near real time, as a lot of that has occurred over my lifetime. I just wish meta learning was more accessible and common knowledge. As it stands, I find myself continually having to do my own research to uncover ways to improve my own improvement.

Most of the meta performance skills and knowledge can be found in psychology textbooks.

Consult with a someone in the field.

Skateboarding is fairly new sport. A few decades ago, there was nothing. Same goes for BMX. Both at current level require technology unavailable few decades ago.

The trick were really invented not that far ago.

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