Talent pools prior to 1900?

"nutrition" "putative advances" "simply do not exist."

So your take is that the average person does not have better nutrition today, at least potentially.

I would suppose that top boxers were always well-fed once they were at the top, but what about the nutrition of their mothers during gestation, and their own nutrition in childhood and youth. Poor nutrition would slow growth.

 

That would be true if we were only talking about average ("mean") size, but even then it suggests that a "top 10" might understate the extent to which later heavyweights were bigger than their predecessors, because an outlier like Carnera might make the heavies of an earlier period seem bigger than they were. But there really isn't any substantive reason to question whether the top modern heavyweights, going back to at least the early 1970s, weren't bigger than their predecessors. One era has a ton of guys who are 6'0 and smaller, the other doesn't. One has a majority of men who are 6'3+, the other doesn't.

 

I like the content of your posts,I just think you ostentatiously use words that nobody employs in everyday usage. I can see allusions to Shakespeare because Martin lifted lots of ideas from the Wars of the Roses and I've read ,"The Prince".I'm familiar with denouement but not," litotes", my partner informs me that its the usage of a double negative to further affirm a positive,eg "I wont be sorry when we leave." Well at least I have learned something!

 

Mean is a kind of average. The only kind of average where the existence of an outlier like Carnera would likely even potentially matter. No need for a fuller response on this point, especially since you still seem unable or unwilling to articulate a plausible explanation for why we actually need "top 100" data to draw conclusions about the size of the top heavyweights in a given era.

 

Illmatic, without question is one of, if not the best Rap album of all time. Liquid Swords, 36 Chambers, Paid in Full, The Lost Tapes (Nas), Ready to Die & Low End Theory

I still say, the best hip hop song of all time is Uncommon Valor - A Vietnam Story by Jedi Mind Tricks

 

I wouldn't disagree with your points here, but mine was just that a sample of 100 is much less vulnerable to distortion from an aberration than a sample of 10.

 

I thought it was well established and well accepted that talent pools prior to 1900 were extremely thin. The sport was still developing, there were less gyms, most of those members were more like hobbyists, there were far far less full time professional fighters and thats why we get guys fighting the local tough guy, blacksmith, etc. Its also why the lines between weight classes were so blurred.

 

I'd also thought that this was all well established and universally understood, until I joined this forum.

 

The problem here is, your whole premise on music IS one big logical fallacy. Music, and what somebody finds enjoyable to listen to and appealing, has very little to do with logical progression. You can't tell someone who has nostalgia about a particular song, because it invokes certain memories or feelings, that their song is crap compared to Crescent or Giant Steps; because what music they prefer to listen to are likely directly correlated to their life experiences and intrinsic to them specifically. You might as well claim there is a logical progression to what the best color is to someone. That is visual, just like sometimes certain styles of music are appealing to the ear; they don't require mental gymnastics of logic from someone to decide if it's good. While I agree with some of what you say, and your methodology of logical progression is good; I don't agree that music can be defined by logical parameters, nor is it a logical exercise that can reach a sound conclusion to every single person.

 

BTW, a far more useful (but still off-topic) music analogy would be to consider whether the musicians who perform classical music today are more technically proficient than their predecessors. Not my area of expertise but the consensus appears to be that although people have been performing Bach's and Chopin's music for hundreds of years, today's top performers are much better than even the most renown performers of the early 20th century.

https://www.quora.com/Are-classical-musicians-getting-better-or-worse