Investing your time and energy in a quibbling rivalry offers little return, Steve Sailer says:
The everlasting Brady-Manning controversy reminded me of an epistemological insight that Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker suggested when I interviewed him in 2002 during his book tour for his bestseller The Blank Slate. It didn’t fully register upon me at the time, but what has stuck with me the longest is Pinker’s concept that “mental effort seems to be engaged most with the knife edge at which one finds extreme and radically different consequences with each outcome, but the considerations militating towards each one are close to equal.”
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As Pinker observed, this notion of the most evenly matched being the most interesting “seems to explain a number of paradoxes, such as why the pleasure of sports comes from your team winning, but there would be no pleasure in it at all if your team was guaranteed to win every time like the Harlem Globetrotters versus the Washington Generals.”On the other hand, scientific knowledge is that which tends to become increasingly less arguable (which might help explain why Nielsen ratings are higher for football games than for chemistry documentaries).
Despite the intensive efforts that the two quarterbacks’ partisans have invested in arguing their respective cases over the years, it’s not clear that there are all that many larger lessons to be drawn from the Manning-Brady debate.