Pitt19802
14d ago
How old are you?
I sort of object to your framing honestly, if you think you have an effort post in you about this, have at it.
As a child of the 90s, who grew up in a house where we attended church weekly, this isn't a thing I would have heard about by accident, it's a thing I would have needed to be pretty oblivious to have not heard about. (I'm trying to think if my dad ever attended an event, I'm not sure if he did or not, I'll put it at about 30% probability that he did).
For those that haven't heard of it, it was an evangelical men's movement in the 90s that was started by University of Colorado's football coach.
There was a stretch there where they drew large audiences at football stadiums.
If you're familiar with Tim Tebow's place in our culture, I perceive it being a pre-Tebow Tebowesque phenomenon (I'd actually be sort of surprised if Tebow's father had no interaction with Promise Keepers).
I find it sort of an interesting window into our culture's soul why people would seem to prefer it if Tebow didn't live up to his values.
Pitt19802
2mo ago
Not quite sure how to parse "don't believe in God",
Prosperity gospel churches tend to be very light on the 'these sins are going to damn you to hell' stuff.
There is a Joel Osteen XM radio station if you're interested in checking it out, your milage may very, but I often find listening to it improves my mood considerably.
Pitt19802
3mo ago
Good post.
I think where a lot of people get stuck is in waiting for the perfect piece of advice.
Line I read that stuck with me that I think applies beyond the specific instance - "Too many get stuck in analysis paralysis, worrying about the “right” source of knowledge: CLRS, TAoCP, Sedgewick, Skiena, Roughgarden, Dasgupta… you don’t need to obsess over these. Just pick something, get a foundation, and immediately move on to practice. You will learn everything from pattern recognition" (its from https://www.bowtiedfox.com/p/faang)
It's what I was trying to get at, but am not quite eloquent enough to put into words well, I think when you're young (at least I did when I was young), there's this mindset that if I follow out suboptimal advice, I'm wasting my time or I'm screwing myself over.
Being older, I think you learn a lot just by iterating over a lot of different things.
I should exercise and eat better than I do, that said, unless you're a professional athlete, starting down any path is 80% of it.
Pitt19802
3mo ago
Can I ask how old you are?
I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but this reads like something I might have written between 20-25 or so.
I think a big part of transitioning from the academic universe to something approximating the 'real world' is that no one is going to walk you through life.
It's on you to pull out the bits of advice that resonate with you and decide to try those out, then decide which of those you want to keep trying, which of those you want to stop trying, and what you want to try out that no one advised you to do.
You get to decide the itinerary, you get to decide the score card too.
Pitt19802
3mo ago
I found that it is very good at telling me which book I am trying to remember from a few hazy recollection of what the book was about.
I was trying to remember which book about basketball stats I read about 15 years ago which had a chapter comparing the relative merits of Tyson Chandler and Eddie Curry. Google gives you a sea of links to those guys wikipedia and basketball reference pages.
Chat GPT immediately knew it was 'The Wages of Wins' by David Berri, had a command of the basic thesis of the book in a way that jived with my memory of the book, was able to contrast and compare the arguments from the book with other books on sports statistics, talk about the various assumptions the arguments from those books relied on.
I was honestly pretty blown away at how useful it was in contrast to google searching.
Pitt19802
3mo ago
I generally use it as a search engine that I can ask more specific questions to than I can ask google.
I think its pretty helpful with travel planning, I feel like it lets me dictate more degrees of freedom than google does.
I'm taking a trip with my daughter next month, my daughter wants to go ziplining, "Can you help me find ziplining places, we're starting at A, ending at B, anywhere roughly along the route ..." I find LLMs handle that sort of thing better than google does. "We going to be in X for 2 days, what's some things we should do?" "Ehh, I don't think we would like that, what else" "Ehh, how expensive is that, is there something more affordable?". idk, couple iterations of that get you to something pretty workable.
Nice write up.
2 fairly off topic points.
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I listened to the audio version a while back, I did so through the Libby app on my phone (you enter your library card info into the app and it lets you check out digital books and audiobooks), each library's selection is different, but I bet the audiobook version of Mere Christianity is a pretty common offering across most libraries.
-
I'm highly confident that Scott has read a fair amount of Lewis -
"The best analogy I can think of is C.S. Lewis. Lewis was a believer in the Old Religion, which at this point has been reduced to cliche. What could be less interesting than hearing that Jesus loves you, or being harangued about sin, or getting promised Heaven, or threatened with Hell? But for some reason, when Lewis writes, the cliches suddenly work. Jesus’ love becomes a palpable force. Sin becomes so revolting you want to take a shower just for having ever engaged in it. When Lewis writes about Heaven you can hear harp music; when he writes about Hell you can smell brimstone."
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/26/book-review-twelve-rules-for-life/
I think that shout out was what motivated me to listen to it.
Pitt19802
6mo ago
It's not and it won't.
It's one of the many really poor habits that formal education engrains in you.
With all due respect, I think you're being quite Panglossian about the education you received.
Pitt19802
8mo ago
I would be interesting in a breakdown between what percentage of regulations are a situation where nothing happens prior to government approval, and where no new is good news from the government.
My dad is a nuclear engineer, I heard a ton of complaining about the NRC stood in the way of progress growing up. I wholeheartedly accept that story, that said, lawyers and financier aren't letting you proceed without government sign off.
My sense for it is that new drugs work the same way.
And on a smaller scale, getting the permits that you need to build any new building works the same way.
If you cut the people you need to give you the all-clear in half, you haven't improved the situation.
Pitt19802
8mo ago
Not sure that's how that works.
Many things are bottlenecked around getting the 'ok to proceed' from regulators.
If you cut half of them, you just doubled the backlog for the half still around, you haven't saved compliance costs then, you've made them worse.
The Commanders have had a good year, they did make the playoffs, they are in the 2nd tier of playoff teams in their conference, they will likely be the underdog in whichever playoff game they play. The 'don't follow it at all' thing to know about them is that they have a young QB Jayden Daniels who looks very promising, will almost certainly win rookie of the year this year, and if things go well, will be the Commanders QB for a very long time.
The Super Bowl will be some weekend early to middle February, as it will likely be every year for the foreseeable future.
Life is too short to pretend to have knowledge about things you don't care about.
My advice in these situations, is to not fake it, but be respectful that the universe of things to know and care about is big, and the things that you care about don't necessarily have priority.
In general, you are not going to read any cliff notes version of football and 'blend in' with people who actually care about it, similar to any subject.
I don't follow superhero movies at all.
I've gotten a lot of mileage out of "Oh, I don't really know that much about it, what happened?"
Giving the people who do care about it some space to show off their expertise will nearly always result in a reasonably smooth social encounter.
Pitt19802
11mo ago
Bit of googling came up with this article about athletes and online classes - https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/2019/12/23/online-classes-keep-football-players-out-of-academic-fray/40878105/
"Heisman Trophy winner Joe Burrow is a hero on LSU's Baton Rouge campus, but he hasn't seen much of it because he took graduate courses online. Justin Fields rarely has to step inside an Ohio State classroom building because he also does most of his school work online to accommodate his grueling football schedule.
...
Of the 46 Power Five conference schools that responded to an AP survey, 27 have no limits on how many online courses athletes may take. A dozen others have few online course offerings or limit how many athletes may take. Just six have no online offerings or prohibit athletes from taking them, including private schools Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Southern California, Texas Christian and Notre Dame. Michigan is the only public school among the Power Five conferences that doesn't offer online learning."
(Article is pre-Covid)
I suspect they still spend a lot of time with the academic support tutors, especially the younger athletes.
Pitt19802
11mo ago
Yeah, it seems if anything so far the NIL has increased the parity in the sport, which has been nice, parity is one thing college football hasn't historically always done all that well.
As to the academic logistics of being a student athlete, I have no firsthand knowledge, but I'd be curious to know what ratio of online classes athletes sign up for these days.
That was barely a thing when I went to school, I wouldn't be surprised to find that the flexibility some online classes provide are fairly essential lynchpins of making the logistics of being a student athlete these days work. I suspect there are a fair number of athletes who are almost never in physical classes. Especially sports like basketball with middle of the week travel (especially in conferences with across the country schedules).
Pitt19802
11mo ago
Update to Diego Pavia situation from https://www.themotte.org/post/1250/weekly-nfl-thread-week-11/267828?context=8#context
"A federal judge in Tennessee granted an injunction Wednesday that allows Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia to pursue another year of eligibility and could represent another significant blow to the NCAA's ability to enforce its own rules.
Pavia sued the NCAA in November, claiming the organization's rule that counts a player's time in junior college toward his overall years of NCAA eligibility is a violation of antitrust law that was unfairly limiting his ability to make money from his name, image and likeness.
Judge William Campbell's decision Wednesday is not a final ruling on the case, but it prevents the NCAA from keeping Pavia out of college football until the case is resolved."
Was listening to a podcast between Bill Simmons and Chuck Klosterman yesterday - https://www.theringer.com/podcasts/the-bill-simmons-podcast/2024/11/27/a-holiday-check-in-on-anything-and-everything-with-chuck-klosterman
Kosterman remarked that despite all the structural changes to college sports over the last couple of years, as best he could tell, it hadn't affected the popularity of college sports as he could see it.
His thesis was that college sports fans ultimately don't care about the meta structure of the sport.
I'm not totally sure those guys have their pulse on the exact nature of college sports fandom.
That said, I probably typify their point, I'm mostly neutral to negative on most of the changes that have happened over the past 10-20 years. I'm not especially negative towards players getting paid (although I don't feel like it's a matter of basic justice the way some people seem to feel), I am quite negative towards the conference realignment, playoffs, unlimited transferring, and a number of other changes.
Yet, I still follow it pretty closely, none of those changes have affected that.
I think this might be a thing where its hard to see the damage these changes do. You have a bunch of fans who are just in the habit of consuming your product, you can make a bunch of changes without effecting those habits.
I do wonder if those changes effect the habit formation of new consumers those. I got into it when my dad took me to a bunch of college games when I was a kid. As it turns out, I only have daughters, for the most part, I don't feel especially motivated to turn them into football fans. Occasionally we'll watch a game together, my younger daughter isn't interested at all, my older daughter will occasionally humor me be acting interested. But I would say that sports fandom is a decidedly non-central part of our relationship, somewhat different from me and my dad in the way that it was a big part of our relationship.
Pitt19802
11mo ago
"Did prediction markets and other indicators that called the race correctly just get lucky?"
Is beyond the paywall, if anyone happens to have access beyond the paywall and is willing to C+P ....
(semi-relatedly, I would love a substack setup where you could buy say 10 (or whatever number) of general purpose credits and use them across any substack. I would absolutely sign up for something like that. Signing up for 10 different substacks for the sake of reading the 1 or 2 articles a month that interest me .... not so much).
A thing I don't think the 'manosphere' (loosely defined) has really grappled with, is men's role dismantling the 'patriarchy' (loosely defined).
" the patriarchy is [in a broad and very simplified sense] a system where men are responsible for women and women are accountable to men. (More accurately, it’s a system where women are accountable to their fathers/husbands and men are responsible for their daughters/wives.*) "
That works as a definition well enough.
For that system to hold, its a 2 way street.
A real question, culturally, do men want the responsibilities, or just the perks?
Its relevant that concurrent with Promise Keepers, we had elected Bill Clinton twice to the highest office in the land, JFK was considered the coolest possible politician, Joe Namath had been famous for going on 30 years at that point for being good with the ladies.
Culturally, men, held up that ideal as something to be aspired to.
If men are going to aspire to be cads, a feminism that decides that men aren't worth trusting the patriarchy to is a reasonable response.
My mental model of Promise Keepers, their main message was "hey men, be worthy of the patriarchy"
Promise Keepers as a phenomenon, it was always fighting massive cultural headwinds, it was founded with that express purpose.
Is it a failure that it's not still going strong 30 years later? idk, what's that half-life of these things? I mean Lilith Fair isn't still selling out shows, whatever Louis Farrakhan is up to, a million people aren't showing up in DC on the regular to hear him. These things peter out.
If some men took it to heart and actually lived better lives, I would say that counts as success, even if in 2025 the movement is a minor footnote in history.
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