Was Uber’s CEO really the second-best Wii Sports tennis player? – Ars Technica

This article has sat as an open tab in my mobile browser for I guess nine years now. Time to finally share it. "Last weekend’s New York Times profile of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick had plenty of important revelations about Kalanick and the company he runs, both of which have been facing some tough PR lately. But there was one incidental, almost throwaway line buried in the piece that made me stop in my tracks: “In other personal pursuits, he once held the world’s second-highest score for the Nintendo Wii Tennis video game.” ...I’ve spent an admittedly ridiculous amount of time looking into this one sentence over the past few days. As it turns out, getting to the bottom of Kalanick’s Wii Sports skill requires delving into the vagaries of human memory, reverse engineered asymptotic leveling systems, and the semantic meaning of video game achievement itself." Words have meaning. A great examination of hubris and the ubern myth with a deep dive into the nitty gritty of Wii Sports. You would…