Being tall doesn't automatically make you good or dominant at basketball, you can even be too tall. Wemby might just be at that threshold, but the unusual thing about him is his dexterity despite his height; such maneuverability and flexibility is trainable. I hear he also spent the summer training, likely harder than most.

No, but being short is completely disqualifying, so being tall is certainly a component of the physical traits that make you good at basketball. If you're 5'2" , it doesn't matter what other gifts you have -- you will not be a pro male basketball player today.

In tennis, being too tall is clearly net bad, but being too short is also definitely bad. 80% of male pro tennis players are 5'10" - 6'4", which is certainly not the statistics of the general population.

Absolutely it's a combination of many factors. However height is undeniably very important. Wemby at 5'5" won't be as impressive a player, no matter how much he trained.

Dennis Rodman is a famous counterexample (tall, no particular talent, became an All-Star for rebounding and shot-blocking)

> Entertainment is the most obvious example of such an industry.

Is it? Consider the case of nepo babies: often no extreme talent (or perhaps any at all), yet extreme luck.

Winner takes all just means that a few people capture most of the value. That is the case in entertainment. It doesn't say anything about the talent needed to succeed in that industry. What you need to succeed varies depends on the exact industry. Athletes (who are entertainers) have more objective criteria than, say, pop stars. Even in the case of athletes there are factors beyond genetics (e.g. access to coaching.)

For pop stars you need to have some combination of the right look and ability to perform. Ed Sheeran looks a bit like a muppet but seems to be very good at creating catchy songs. Taylor Swift, to me at least, isn't that good at catchy tunes but she has the look and lives the life style. I imagine there are aspects of personality that are not as obvious but very important to survive in the industry.

Entertainment is illustrative. There have been controlled studies (e.g., https://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full....) showing that there are sort of chaotic social dynamics influencing popularity, in that what others are paying attention to influence what someone is paying attention to, which leads to these kinds of random paths of success. Clearly there's some ability at play as well, but beyond some level, it starts to have a lot of chaotic path dependency.

I suspect a lot of fields are like this also, like academics (nowadays at least) and some other things. Maybe a lot of life is like it.

The discussions often seem to me to become oversimplified, like comparing some poor genius with access to books who overcomes it all by sheer ability, to some hypothetical other person with comparatively great education that's taken for granted. But what if that hypothetical other person is being ridiculed for liking math? Or reading books? Or what if there is no college math books around, they get bored, and go off on the wrong path? What if their interests are for something more complex in its ability determinants than math, or that someone doesn't encounter until later in life usually?

Sometimes I feel like people aren't necessarily exposed to what they are best suited for, for all sorts of reasons. This is a classic "finding a career" problem, with advice to try things until you stumble on it — the converse situation being one where you think you like a vocation and then find out later you hate it. It's not like what you're best suited to is just on a shelf for you to look at and have an immediate grasp of; it comes from having experience with it, which not everyone might have. Maybe there's an excellent potential rugby player out there who never had the opportunity to play rugby or even knows what it is.

Life is just so complex, people get in each others' way for all sorts of reasons, and corruption complicates things more.