So before I start, I want to say that I and we are actually not that sports-focused. If all you knew about where I came from was about the sports we have, and you thought this was a representative sample of differences between that place and Earth, well, that’d be very misleading indeed. It’s not really that important either, but I really still want to say a few words on how the way Earth is orienting to physical acticity and sports feels off to me.

Namely, it’s strange to me that the professional athletes here specialize in one sport. I mean, you have heptathlon and decathlon. But we go much further on that dimension – athletes competing in multiple sports is the default, and it’s basically higher status to compete in more sports. The pinnacle is the Omni-Athletes, competing in hundreds of sports. In any physical activity you can name, a professional Omni-Athlete will absolutely crush any normal person you’ll ever meet, goes the idea.

This is closer to the essence of what being good at sports is about, I feel. Being an athlete shouldn’t be about optimizing single-handedly for one specific thing, at the expense of all others. That just feels less fun, less what you want people to be aspiring towards.

And hence, for the Omni-Athletes, we are sampling from the whole distribution of sports. So, in addition to many sports that are popular here, we have also things like

  • Building a tower below of yourself, that you climb as you go
  • Speedrunning obstacle courses – this sort of energy
  • Moving a load of one ton a distance of a hundred meters
  • 50 meter crab walk
  • Digging a one cubic meter hole
  • Log rolling
  • Wall-climbing-Twister
  • Shuttle run
  • Push-big-heavy-ball-towards-the-opponent-by-throwing-small-light-balls-at-it
  • High accuracy javelin throwing
  • Climbing up the space between two walls
  • Dodging balls and ball formations shot at you
  • Underwater hoop course
  • Rope climbing
  • Juggletennis

We aren’t particularly picky about the exact distribution – when people come up with a New Sport, they are often just thrown into the mix. It’s also not uncommon for someone to just want to know what a strong human baseline in a particular activity would be, go around asking, some Omni-Athlete picks it up and posts a video online, even if all that is unofficial.

It’s not just sports – we take this stance to pretty much any big competitions. Our e-sports players don’t specialize in a single game, they go for zero-shotting any game you throw at them, or learning incredibly fast given a small amount of practice.

One place where Earth gets this right is math competitions: There are no separate number theory contests, algebra contests, combinatorics contests and geometry contests. (Or, there are, but they are not the prestigious ones, which is exactly how it should be.) If you want to know who’s the ultimate best in number theory, why, you’d just look at the number theorists who focus on that as a matter of professional specialization. But it’d be rather sad if there was nothing beside that, no competitions beside the ones created by Economics, nothing where aesthetics and enjoyment played an explicit role in the optimization objective.

As you guess by now, there’s a domain and a contest more general than just math. It’s not something you have a shared name for, I’m afraid. It’s the ultimate game. It’s the fully general hackathon. It’s the wizard power competition. You are given a task, a time limit and a budget, and your aim is to succeed at the task as well as possible, plain and simple as that. It’s a team contest, obviously.

Even if the Contest gives an overly rosy picture of how quickly one can achieve Progress, due to conveniently selecting projects that can be tackled in days rather than years, we feel it’s okay. It’s okay to reinforce that fantasy of an Omni-Expert a little, despite the real life optima on the generalist-specialist spectrum being at quite a different place. It’s okay to feel that the laws of Economics do not match your sense of aesthetics, and have a small dedicated place that does its own thing.

After all, the core message the Contest sends isn’t wrong. If you do things right, if you learn, study, practice, coordinate, prepare, think, you can achieve things and solve real problems, problems that would otherwise be completely insurmountable. The Contest makes that picture a little more accessible, by showcasing the peak of the peak accomplishing just that, creating the sort of role models we want our civilization to give to our Children.