The Paradox of Skill

The last guy that hit over 400 in Major League Baseball was Ted Williams. He hit 406 in 1941, so it's an interesting question why no players been able to do that since. Stephen Jay Gould argued that as people get better in a field, what happens is the skilled distribution narrows. So if you were a four standard deviation hitter in 2011, for example, 70 years later, you would have hit 380, right? That's awesome, obviously, but that's a lot less than 406.

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