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So, what are you reading?
I'm still on Herzog's Citizen Knowledge. It's a good primer for knowledge debates in recent times, and the references are great.
Paper I'm reading: Hannon's Are knowledgeable voters better voters?
For my birthday, a friend of mine got me a golf book, The Eternal Summer by Curt Sampson. It follows the majors in 1960, a transitional period in the professional game where Ben Hogan was waning, Arnold Palmer was at his peak, and Jack Nicklaus was just starting to emerge.
I'm not really expanding my mind with this, but reading about golf is relaxing to me. One thing it's got me wondering about, is why golfers often seem to peak much sooner than their physical abilities do; and then some mental factor makes them decline. The example in this story is Ben Hogan: dominant in the early 1950s, he was still able to strike the golf ball extremely well as he aged into his 40s, but somehow lost his ability to putt. Why does this happen? One would imagine you'd lose ball-striking first and putting last. It's one of the oldest questions in golf, and I don't know if it's ever been satisfactorily answered.
You also have players like Rory McIlroy, who burst onto the scene and won four majors very young, and has not been able to win another one since 2014. He remains an overpowering driver of the ball, and somehow the finesse areas of his game have declined; this, even though he's lost absolutely none of his physical ability. Why would a player of golf, a game which seems to reward incremental improvement over time, peak at age 24?
Someone in the Motte recently observed that people in creative areas are most productive from 25 to 40, and then the rate of new production drops off steeply. I wonder if there is some related phenomenon that happens in golf. Troubling as I hurtle towards 40 myself, lol.
Ben Hogan was never a great putter and it makes sense that his biggest weakness would be the first thing to go, especially since his car accident did him no favors with respect to his vision. I also think it's unfair to say that Rory McIlroy's skills have been in the decline. Golf and tennis are unusual in that we evaluate players based on their performance in a few selected events rather than over the course of an entire season, even though it's doubtful that this is an accurate representation of overall ability. Mac hasn't won a major in nearly a decade, but he was pretty damn close at this year's PGA. And he's the reigning Tour Champion, and won the Tour Championship just a few years ago. He's currently the No. 2 ranked golfer in the world. Lack of recent major wins is pretty weak evidence that his mental game has collapsed.
I don't know if this is really true among creatives either. It's most notable among musicians who operate in what can broadly be considered the "pop" field, but that's an area where youth is at a premium. It's also a area where more susceptible to fashion, and when styles change it can be hard to keep up when your strengths lie in another idiom. Within the rest of the musical world, this doesn't seem to be much of an issue. Jazz musicians and classical composers don't tend to have careers that drop off after 40, with the exception of some earlier jazz musicians who, for instance, didn't make the transition out of the big band era. For artists, authors, and directors this doesn't seem to be a thing at all.
One of the things about golf is, especially for the majors, anyone who gets in is basically good enough to win if they put four of their best rounds together. And in a field of around 150 players somebody generally comes close to doing that. That's why there are plenty of golfers who were career journeymen with only one or two career wins who randomly win a major.
It was a testament to Tiger Woods' insane dominance that he was winning a majority of the tournaments he played from ~2005-09, because that meant that his average four rounds was consistently better than the rest of the fields' best four rounds.
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