cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
1yr ago
No one responded, but I will let you know that this got multiple AAQC reports. So it will probably be in the next quality contributions roundup. People definitely liked it, good work!
cjet79
1yr ago
I definitely didn't realize it was a joke until it was pointed out by yourself and others in the comments. I guess I just really don't like most movies, and I'm happy to find any reason to skip watching old movies, so your advice to skip them all is exactly what I'd want.
cjet79
1yr ago
Why does genetic gift or not matter? That's like me saying to be consistent you need to care about only water sports or only land sports. You e created the distinction and you insist I follow it. No. It's not something I think matters as a distinction, I thought we'd get past this when I made my position on determinism clear
cjet79
1yr ago
We've had a long back and forth, did you already explain in one your posts why height should be considered part of athleticism?
I could be convinced wingspan is the same as height and should be used to ignore sports that favor it too much.
cjet79
1yr ago
I don't think I ever expressed any problem with genetics, or the winners of sports being determined by genes. Perhaps you have me confused with some other commentor.
cjet79
1yr ago
Athleticism: strength, agility, and speed at physical tasks (those words come up in lots of definitions, I'm not sure if power or toughness should also be included). I thought basketball allowed height as a partial substitute for these characteristics. You didn't have to be speedy and agile to get a rebound, you just need to be taller. You don't have to fight over the ball if you can literally just hold it over your opponents head. I say thought past tense, because after thinking about it, @Mottizen seems right that my opinions about basketball are outdated. A shift to shooting three pointers has apparently heavily evened the playing field in terms of height advantage.
There are some sports where injuries tend to take out promising athletes, fighting and gymnastics are two good examples. The people that do end up dominating these sports are still very athletic, but I just wouldn't be certain they are the most athletic. I just tend to feel that swimming and running have some of the least amount of blockers or gates on the sport. You can certainly still get injured doing both, but humans are designed for running, and swimming is low impact. Height gives a bit of an advantage, but it can still be overcome, the shortest gold medalist swimmer was 5ft 3in. Su Bingtian is a runner in the 2020 olympics, he is 5ft 7in. Su apparently holds the fastest 60m split time in the 100m dash (faster than Usain bolt). Those are below average heights for men in their country.
I'm not sure I'm not a determinist, so much as I think the determinism question is useless. Whether the universe is determinist or not does not change how I interact with it or how I think other people should interact with it.
cjet79
1yr ago
Yes and no. There are theoretically other genetics that might heavily gate a sport behind a non-athletic characteristic. I just don't know if any actual examples.
Gymnastics is sort of gated behind being short, so I'd sort of discount the abilities of those athletes as well. But that's just the other side of the coin with height.
I don't consider IQ to be athleticism related so if there were any sports that were heavily gated by it I'd apply the same discount to the athletes within that sport. But I don't know of any sports that are like that. Maybe chess boxing? Or maybe Esports which no one really looks to for examples of supreme athleticism. Even though most Esports players are in relatively good shape.
cjet79
1yr ago
No he's playing against lazy tall players. I just don't know how good he is as an athlete. Kinda the same problem as babe Ruth vs modern day hitters. Babe Ruth was hitting against shittier pitchers than there are today. I bet there is a player or two on every professional baseball team that might have beaten babe Ruth's record had they the opportunity to hit against the same caliber of pitchers.
cjet79
1yr ago
Phelps used his superpower of hard work to turn himself into the ultimate athletic specimen. If Phelps has worked hard at learning spreadsheets I wouldn't call him a good athlete. He worked hard at being an athlete. Possibly harder than anyone has ever worked.
Usain was born with muscle traits that made him an amazing athletic specimen.
Jordan played in a sports league with a bunch of lazy tall players that he could look impressive against. Steph Curry is doing the same thing.
Imagine a different world where basketball has a maximum height restriction, and that height restriction just happens to be the height of whatever basketball player you think is really good. I'd wager that we would fine better athletes who are a few inches shorter than the star players of today. But those few inches of height against Jordan would make them useless against the 7 foot centers of the sport. So they get weeded out early. I think there are 6'0" guys that could be to Curry and Jordan what they were to the rest of the league. Watch a bit of that weird trampoline basketball sport and you'll see how much talent is being left fallow in that sport cuz of height.
cjet79
1yr ago
They won the lottery on athletic related traits. Basketball players won the genetic lottery on height. I don't consider height to be a key component of athleticism.
I also don't consider hard work, intelligence, or savvy to be part of athleticism. Apes are better athletes than humans in most respects.
To me the only IQ related aspect of athleticism is hand eye coordination / reaction times.
cjet79
1yr ago
I wouldn't put any basketball players on any list extolling greatest athletes. Basketball has a huge height filter. Be seven feet tall and have any athletic inclination and you have a shot of being in the NBA. MJ could maybe make the lists just for being in two different professional sports. But his mediocre baseball career shows how much the NBA is a joke in terms of athletic prowess.
Being smart and strategizing is cool, but I don't see why that matters for athleticism.
Phelps deserves greatest athlete. His superpower was basically ADHD and a willingness to monotonously spend five hours a day swimming.
Usain Bolt should probably be second on a list of greatest athletes.
In terms of sheer physical ability they crushed their competition in sports with almost zero barriers to entry.
cjet79
1yr ago
Everything is a major issue lately. You can spend an extra three minutes to add more.
cjet79
1yr ago
This is the culture war thread, not the small question Sunday thread. Please add more substance to top level posts, not just a single rumor and a question.
cjet79
1yr ago
Lasers can be countered with foil on the drone. Mark Rober has a good video on the state of drone warfare.
cjet79
1yr ago
His agent dropping him does though. But that might just be because the only thing Kyle has going for him is that he is adjacent to Jack Black, and once that is gone there is nothing for an agent to gain.
cjet79
1yr ago
I'd always wondered how it stayed running so long.
My main guesses were:
- Jack Black actually liked the band and was having fun.
- Kyle was very good at guilting him into coming back.
- It was a way for Jack to stay in an active performance role between movies and to keep him sharp.
Jack cancelling the tour makes me wonder doubt the fun explanation and makes the other two explanations sound more likely.
Kyle always kinda confused me. It seemed like he just super lucked out being next to Jack Black early in his career and otherwise didn't have the talent to keep up. Any of their stuff together Kyle is just sort of a way for you to take a break from laughing at Jack.
cjet79
1yr ago
I don't know who Sarah Michelle Gellar is. Jack Black played alongside Kevin Hart and Dwayne Johnson in Jumanji. And honestly his was the best comedy performance in that movie. Add to that being the star voice actor in a major animated movie (kung-fu-panda) that has grossed over 2$ billion dollars internationally in ticket sales. If those things don't make you an A lister, then I have no clue what does. (by your standards who even is an A-lister other than maybe Tom Cruise?)
cjet79
1yr ago
The first is a threat, and the second is blackmail.
But also you just said those things and I don't think you expected to be persecuted (nor should you be). So as words they are fine to say. Its when they are paired with a context that the underlying meaning is the problem.
cjet79
1yr ago
I suppose when it comes down to it I just want a maximum punishment for the spoken word. And cancellations often go way beyond my nebulous line for what a maximum punishment should be. People should suffer social embarrassment for a day, maybe a week for really bad things. And then it should be let go. The written word can maybe receive twice as harsh of punishments. If they are some form of sociopath that isn't really punished by social embarrassment then we can work something else out as a punishment that is about equally as harsh.
Humans aren't perfect, and sometimes they slip up and say dumb things without realizing they have crossed a line. I don't know if you think you've lived a perfect life and never said anything wrong before, but I know I've certainly said things I shouldn't have. I would like to not lose my livelihood over saying those things. I specifically remember one of the earliest instances of me saying a wrong thing, I was bullied by a kid in Elementary school, in middle school that kid committed suicide, in Highschool I made an edgy joke to a friend about being glad he wasn't around to torment me anymore, the friend winced and didn't laugh. I felt mild social embarrassment, and learned not to joke about that. That is an easy one to describe that I feel safe sharing because I can say I was an idiot in highschool, but I've made dumber and worse speech decisions in my adult life that I'd absolutely not feel safe sharing.
Humans also sometimes hold views that are not socially acceptable or within the Overton window. We are specifically on a forum that has been chased out of a larger social media site, because we want to allow people to say things outside of the Overton window. I am very uncomfortable with social rules that make it impossible to state anything outside of the Overton window. My own Dad often says things that are not acceptable on wider social media. He has been temp-banned on Facebook a few times for things he has said. He isn't really willing to not say some of his thoughts. Banning him from social media doesn't really remove him as a person, he is still out there thinking those forbidden thoughts. "Jokes" are one way to tease out the limits of the Overton window. The attempt to use humor, even if the attempt fails, shows that the person in question cares about social conventions. This is a sign that you don't need to punish them as harshly.
cjet79
1yr ago
Assassination seems more like an extreme form of hecklers veto. Someone could have unanimous -1 support and get assassinated.
Riots and mobs are maybe justified under this logic, which tells you how crappy democracy is as a justification of power.
cjet79
1yr ago
This is not rdrama, this would not be acceptable to post here, and it would be clearly waging the culture war.
cjet79
1yr ago
Against the grain of the advice you are looking for ... but maybe take the position? How bad could it be? And could you term limit yourself?
Communities are made better when people step up and do volunteer work. It won't really feel like you are helping a whole bunch, but maybe you doing this annoying but necessary tasks frees someone else up to do less annoying and less necessary but more beneficial tasks.
I was the secretary for the parent teacher organization at my daughter's small pre-school. I was mostly helping put emails together. It sucked and it was boring. But it wasn't a ton of work. And me doing it meant that the other parents in the organization got more done organizing fun events for the kids.
Inter-generational responsibility
Sometimes I have these moments when I realize I've got a big hole in my mental models for other people. This came up a few weeks ago, but I didn't get around to posting about it because other stuff happened.
The hole in this case is inter-generational responsibility. To what extent are parents responsible for the actions of their kids, or kids responsible for the actions of their parents. And how much of that responsibility carries across multiple generations.
My answer has always been something like "kids are never responsible for the actions of older generations, and parents are mostly responsible for the actions of their kids while they are guardians of those kids, but most of that responsibility goes away when the child reaches adulthood". I thought this was close to most people's take, but I'm pretty certain its not. I had all the clues and information I needed to put this together sooner, I just didn't. So any comments that basically say "how are you so stupid that you only just now figured this out" my response is yeah yeah yeah, whatever, congrats on being so smart, I was busy noticing and caring about other things.
Evidence I had but didn't really put together:
Anyways, now that I am unmoored from my previous set of assumptions, I'm not really sure where to set anchor again. I'm curious what people here believe in terms of inter-generational responsibility, and what you think the general consensus is on inter-generational responsibility.
In partial defense of my original view and thinking it was standard ... the US legal system mostly seems to take the same viewpoint. Deviations by other countries legal systems is often something that is noticed and gets commented on. Like North Korea still doing full family punishments, or Singapore having a built in legal responsibility for kids to take care of their parents in old age, or the grown adult in Italy that sued his parents for not continuing to treat him like a kid.
But the political system doesn't so clearly take the same viewpoint. Welfare and social security are mainly paid for by the currently young and healthy to the current old and infirm. Debt is taken on by the federal government, and that debt will inevitably be paid off by the children of those alive today.
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