Say you want to be on your school's running team because you know that you run really fast.
However, your running team's tryout involves multiple rounds of biology trivia - because once upon a time the people that ran fast were physio-kinesiologists that understood how to optimize muscles and ligaments in the legs.
As time went on, some people realized that you didn't need to be an expert kinesiologist to do well on these biology trivia. All you needed was to know the answers. What's better was that each school had a limited pool of trivia questions, so the clever people simply memorized their school's possible trivia questions and how to answer them, no longer needing to understand the exact kinesiology behind or the applications of it.
Thus your school ended up with a running team that would fare better at the biology science olympiad than a running meet. And you - remember that you run very fast - don't make the team since you are good at running fast, not trivia.
Is your school's running team still worth being on? If you said no, what if it could get you to the Olympics?
Why is it worth it to suffer the slings and arrows to do such a meaningless thing?
November 3, 2024