[HN Gopher] What old tennis players teach us (2017)
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What old tennis players teach us (2017)
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 22 points
Date : 2026-01-08 16:50 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.raphkoster.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.raphkoster.com)
| jp57 wrote:
| An interesting article to revisit 8+ years later.
|
| Now, in 2026, men's tennis is dominated by Jannik Sinner and
| Carlos Alcaraz, both under 25 years of age
|
| Also, I don't think women's tennis has shown the same cartel
| effect in the top 5 or top 10 as men's tennis has recently. It
| seems like there's much more churn there, and many more young
| players, though I haven't measured this and maybe it's just a
| feeling.
| munificent wrote:
| I know nothing about tennis, but I think the general point
| still stands.
|
| Any time you have a system with feedback loops and economies of
| scale / network effects, the natural iterated behavior over
| time is an increasingly steep power law distribution.
|
| With the digital world where zero marginal costs mean huge
| economies of scale and social interaction means huge network
| effects, we are clearly seeing a world dominated by a small
| number of insanely powerful elites. Seven of the ten richest
| people in 2025 got there from tech.
|
| Our society wasn't meant to be this connected with this much
| automated popularity aggregation. It leads to huge inequality
| until we figure out damping or counterbalancing systems to deal
| with it.
| tmn wrote:
| A possible factor on your observation is females athletically
| peaking earlier.
|
| Edit. A quick investigation shows there is not a significant
| age difference between men and women for both top 10 player
| lists and top 100 player lists
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Or just that younger women are hotter so they attract more of
| an audience.
| tmn wrote:
| Lol. I didn't realize how important audience following was
| to winning tennis matches.
| globalnode wrote:
| its possible tennis has become more of an established business
| now and players are being groomed by cartels as a cog in the
| machine, compared to the more self made outliers of the past.
| foster_nyman wrote:
| A lot of Gregory Bateson's work warned that if the balancing
| loops in a system are too weak, the system stops being an
| ecosystem and starts being an arms race. The interesting bit here
| isn't that elite tennis players (or guilds, or platforms)
| dominate but that dominance _reprices the entry conditions_ and
| eventually kills the replenishment layer that made the whole
| thing dynamic. These _axioms_ read like something straight out of
| a Batesonian case study in runaway.
| foster_nyman wrote:
| As far as I can tell, you fix it by adding dampeners and
| renewal mechanisms, forced churn, diminishing returns on
| accumulated advantage, periodic resets, or constraints (i.e.,
| keep the system in the ferment zone). _How_ you do that is a
| much trickier issue. Bateson was also pretty wary of tinkering
| with complex systems in a top-down way, and history is replete
| with failed attempts to do so.
| foster_nyman wrote:
| Years ago, I recall reading about a Muscogee tradition (the
| Busk), which may have had this effect; basically a cultural
| dampener, a periodic, communal reset that interrupted
| accumulation of grievances, status debt, polluted fire, stale
| obligations, before it became self-reinforcing. A distinctive
| feature was a kind of amnesty/forgiveness for wrongs short of
| murder, and a re-establishing of social relationships. It was
| basically a ritualized negative-feedback loop: clean house,
| renew the fire, forgive (almost) everything, start the cycle
| again; like an engineered anti-runaway mechanism that
| prevents compounding into schism.
|
| [edit]: found it -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46595199
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| "There are thresholds in systemic complexity that serve the
| system but do not serve the components of the system well."
|
| Isn't that like Rule #1 from Systemantics, that systems grow to
| serve their perpetuation, not the features they were originally
| designed to supply?
|
| Also, pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy
| Agingcoder wrote:
| Is the same mechanism at play with football ? Say Real Madrid
| gets so much money from champions league that they can buy all
| the best players and then keep winning ? And then only a small
| clique of elite clubs end up winning all the time?
|
| ( disclaimer : I know nothing about football !)
| dfxm12 wrote:
| To an extent, yes.
|
| Rosters have some restrictions in terms of size, in terms of
| home grown talent, talent from outside Europe, etc. There are
| also a ton of great football players out there. One team can't
| buy up _all_ the talent, but a clique of elite teams can.
|
| There is some concept of financial fair play too, but that
| still rewards bigger teams who are already rich.
|
| There are probably studies written on this topic...
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