Assuming a significantly large distribution of athletes sent by other rational managers, where all athletes are bound to the same rules of random event selection, I would still send the best possible specialist in a single discipline in this case, because without certainty that all other rational managers know certainly that some generalists will be better in everything than other generalists and that each one is confident that theirs is best, I conclude that some of them attempt a gamble of probabilities and send a specialist, and thus I also send a specialist to maximize my chances of winning.

After all, there are higher chances of the event being my athlete's specialty than there are chances of every single other athlete being less good at it if I pick a generalist, unless the number of possible events is large enough to outweigh the number of athletes. Throw in irrational managers and the possibility of other managers having information unavailable to you, and your father's argument seems very weak.

Now, of course, I'm probably attacking something that wasn't meant to be a strong defensible argument. However, I feel very strongly about the point that negative selection is wrong in many contexts it is currently used in (which I support), as well as the point that positive selection is so difficult and utterly impractical in so many cases (which I want to pound into tiny bits of forgotten wrongness).

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, however. I strongly agree with the article's statements, but my attempts to formulate any further useful thought seem to come up short.