Standard deviation ... has fallen steadily year on year and decade on decade

You can see a very clear example of this in baseball. Scoring levels have stayed relatively constant in baseball for 100 years. A good batting average in the 1930s is still a good batting average. But if you look at the standard deviation (a measure of variance, of how spread out the individual scores are) of players’ batting averages by season, it has fallen steadily year on year and decade on decade. Players have collectively averaged the same, but the averages of the best and the averages of the worst each year have got closer and closer together.

N. Leamon & B. Jones, Hitting Against the Spin: How Cricket Really Works (2021), loc.2,338

In county cricket, 81 per cent of balls are bowled at slower than 82 mph

In county cricket, 81 per cent of balls are bowled at slower than 82 mph, and almost no deliveries are above 88 mph. Compare that to Test cricket, where over 60 per cent of the balls bowled are over 82 mph and 17 per cent are over 88 mph. We also move from bouncers making up 4 per cent of balls bowled in county cricket, to nearly three times that many in Test cricket (11 per cent).

N. Leamon & B. Jones, Hitting Against the Spin: How Cricket Really Works (2021), loc.827

We’ve got very used to this division very quickly, when it’s completely unnatural for humans

The same new survey we conducted in 2022 also tested whether we’d noticed this separation – and we have: two-thirds of us correctly say young people are more likely to live in cities and older people outside them. But over half of us say that’s always been the case, when this is actually a new trend that we’ve only seen in the last twenty or thirty years in the UK. We’ve got very used to this division very quickly, when it’s completely unnatural for humans.

B. Duffy, The Generation Divide (2023), loc. 175