But though Scott is perfectly right about 1936, 1972, and the IOC, I do confess to having been drawn in this time around by the sweetness of the atheletes themselves…

I was watching a slot where specatators were interviewed coming out of the ground, and was struck by what one woman said: she was delighted that she’d taken her two children along, as now their role-models and heroes would be Olympic athletes and cyclists rather than Big Brother contestants. (Big Brother is an awful British reality TV show whose only function is to supply gossip magazines with a never ending supply of banal talentless “celebrities”.)

Whilst the specifics of Olympic competition and medal-winning may not translate satisfactorily to other domains, there is an “Olympic ideal” which is of universal importance: working immensely hard over a long period of time to become extremely good at one specific thing. My sense here in the UK is that a large number of youngsters have received that message loud and clear over the last few weeks – and if so, it has done the country a true service.

No Scott, I did not make any claim about sports freaks—or about “energy left over for other pursuits.” I said what I did.

… On the second read of my own reply, it does seem pretty tightly written. So tightly, that I can’t seem to rewrite its parts without losing as much conciseness as I did manage there, in the first place. So, I will let it stand as is, even though my sincere desire right now is to recast it in some other words more considerate to how you have tried (or managed) to put it.

Anyway, if you have to simplify and reduce a lot of what I said, you should at least have said something like: mental activity vs. physical activity. That would have done far more honor to what I said.

That difference is crucial. The first leaves the mind too tired to learn all of the other life-mastering skills. The second does not.

Now, about the so-called claims.

Given the fact of human free will, any claims involving that particular difference, can only be statistical in nature.

For an average 3 year old kid, while growing up all through his intermediate years to his teens/early twenties, if he were to spend a disproportionately great amount of time during all those years on only one kind of an abstract kind of mental work (whether maths, chess, or even “learning” to recite Sanskrit/Hebrew/Quranic texts sheer by rote without much regard to its meaning—the way such texts are usually taught), I would sure claim that his personality development can be expected to be lopsided enough to be of some concern to educationists. Most especially so, if the subjects are abstract and narrow of scope when it comes their fundamentals (like chess and maths are, in that order, but not so much when it comes to physics or other subjects).

In contrast, I do claim, even if a disproportionately great time were to be spent on physical activity, you might expect some dip in the overall development, though it wouldn’t be as lop-sided.

Both the cases are to be taken in the statistically average sense.

You can’t deny free will—and the possibility of an exceptional individual breaking the mold, whether that mold happens to be self-imposed or otherwise, and whether the breaking through is in the -ve sense of a binge-drinking partying Bob you mention, or in the +ve sense of some mathematical genius who grows up mastering enough of life-mastering skills required of man qua man, despite his being obsessed about winning a gold medal at IMO from age 3.

Nevertheless, note that to affirm free will and individual choice is not to deny the existence or the causal efficacy of those constraining circumstances. Their operation _should_ indeed come out in any well-designed large-scale statistical study.

One final point. An apparent counter-example that isn’t one, in reality. Many smart people are easily able to gun for IMOs and even get those medals, while still not being obsessed enough to spend 6–8 hours only on maths from age 3 through 20, every day. Even if they do, they may have greater enough total mental energy capacities so that they can master at least bare necessities of leading successful lives even after according only a little time to these other skills. In contrast, the point I mentioned is better understood by assuming that you don’t have any greater total mental energy, and still divert too much of it to maths or chess. Thus, the maths freak example is different from the naturally “gifted” and mathematically inclined ones. So, nope, Dirac wouldn’t fit the maths freak archetype, despite all the stories circulating about him. But, yes, statistical studies should bring the effect out.

Ajit
[E&OE]

But the bigger point here is that whether someone is considered “balanced” or not is a function not only of themselves, but of the surrounding culture and its attitudes. For example, suppose Bob spends 14 hours per day training at sports, while Tom spends 14 hours per day doing math. Then in the remaining 10 hours, Bob might have access to wild binge-drinking parties, swooning groupies, and other social opportunities to which Tom doesn’t—and you might mistakenly conclude that the sports must have left Bob more “balanced,” “well-rounded,” and so on than the theorem-proving left Tom. But no, all you’re seeing is a difference in opportunities.