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Speedrunning Is Not Such A Waste Of Talent · Gwern.net

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On statistical and psychological grounds, we probably are not losing many future Einsteins to speedrunning or streaming or e-sports etc. the main issue with video games is that a guy who, if he lived in 1820s germany, would have done something like document every type of beetle in his local province instead ends up making a 26 part youtube series about how to get all the rings in every sonic game ⁠owen cyclops⁠, 2020-07-30 W hile funny, on purely statistical grounds, we can be highly confident that the YouTuber in question would not have done anything particularly remarkable; so the series did not come at the expense of our next Linnaeus or Einstein. From a statistical perspective, we can safely say that the probability that our hypothetical Sonic streamer would have been a noted entomologist is near zero, because the probability for any given person of becoming a noted anything is near zero. Few people are remembered centuries later. Thousands of German men passed through academic lif

--- title: "Speedrunning Is Not Such A Waste Of Talent" description: "On statistical and psychological grounds, we probably are not losing many future Einsteins to speedrunning or streaming or e-sports etc." thumbnail: /doc/ai/nn/transformer/gpt/dall-e/3/2024-05-01-gwern-dalle3-sanic-gottagofast.jpg thumbnail-text: "A crude crayon drawing by a kindergartener of the 'Sanic' meme character saying 'Gotta go fast'. Created by Gwern Branwen 2025-05-01 using DALL·E 3 to humorously illustrate a page on softwre optimization." created: 2025-03-14 modified: 2025-04-09 status: finished confidence: likely

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