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Do you believe false things?
You, high IQ, well educated, traveled and read motte denizen, you personally?
Not ordinary mistaken trivia knowledge, for example when you are unsure whether US has 50 or 51 states, or on what continent is New Guinea, but when facts about the world that serve as bedrock of your beliefs that happen to be totally delusionary, at catastrophical odds to reality. Can it happen to you?
It happens frequently. See the famous poll where about one in 20 of "very liberal people" believe that tens of thousands of unarmed blacks are annually killed by police.
For non-US example, see this poll among Palestinians, where one third of population of Gaza believe that Israel has less than 500k inhabitants.
"No, it cannot happen to me! I was trained in martial arts of rationalism by ancient master Yud the Yumongous! I am unstoppable!"
Well, it can happen not only to "brainwashed libtards" or "dumb Ayrabs".
It happened to credentialed rationalist and one of Yud's disciples.
The short xeet that went viral:
Until I was 38 I thought Men's World Cup team vs Women's World Cup team would be a fair match and couldn't figure out why they didn't just play each other
And the long essay where Eneasz Brodski at request of his readers and haters explains how it happened:
How To Believe False Things - by request, this is an explanation of how I got 38 years old believing a match of World Cup men's team vs World Cup women's would be fair.
TL;DR: EB learned about relative strength of men and women as we all learn all things we know. From his own experience, from media, from experts. EB trusted them all, without considering that his experiences could be extremely unrepresentative, media could be completely fictional and experts could just plain lie to his face.
I'm sure we all believe false things but tbh, to have reached this conclusion, this guy must be quite underdeveloped in certain aspects of intelligence, curiosity, and yes, even rationality. I think he comes across as blaming the world for giving him a false impression and thinks the world should change to fit his neurotype, whereas he might consider holding all his beliefs more lightly and questioning his assumptions a lot more. His argument might go a bit better if he gave examples of 'experts lying to his face'; rather, all his examples are Marvel-type movies and video games, which he should never have expected to map the real world in the first place.
More that he has built his life in a way where the maximum required level of strength for any task he performs is within the range of a reasonably athletic woman. My wife is in great shape, we can move furniture together in most Craigslist pickup cases. If "moving a couch" was the most strength I ever expected to display in life, I wouldn't really have much of a test to prove one way or the other how strong my wife is relative to me. I don't know that I would even call this author to help me move, so he might be below that level of maximum displayed strength. Jean ValJean never reveals himself if he never sees that cart in the street.
Certainly if this man is as wildly unathletic as he purports himself to be, he would experience hearing from PMC women in his circle about athletic feats they've performed that he would be unable to perform, with very little context for what he might be capable of. Hell, I know a half dozen women who have qualified for the NYC Marathon which in my age range is a 3:13 Marathon, and I sure can't do that. If I never looked up the qualifying times for men, I'd just hear that they ran a marathon in three hours and change, which would also be a pretty good time for a hobbyist man, and assume that if women tried they are just as good. Similarly in rock climbing, I know lots of women who could smash everyone in this forum by grade.
Your point about marathons supports a belief I have about womens' sport leagues. I am not sure how many others share it.
Competitions are mainly about status and the purpose of sex-segregated sports is not to keep the league fair per se. It is really because society intuitively understands that regardless of the differences between men and women, female athletes should not be penalized in status. The same is true for disabled athletes, which is why we have the special olympics and other sporting events like that.
That we don't have a competitive league for unathletic men like Brodski reveals that league segregation is not really about fair play. Arguments about "not putting in the same amount of effort" are essentially my point -- Brodski's weakness is low-status but an athletic woman's weakness is high-status. It is even difficult to say it in English. We still call them "athletic women" because all the words we will use for this concept (like "weak" and "athletic") are status-laden and graded-on-a-curve.
Because the way we talk about athletes (of all sexes) uses fuzzy terms instead of objective ranks, someone like Brodski can hear about women qualifying for marathons and being strong and he will continue to be blind to physical reality.
Contrast in Chess, where the definition of Grandmaster is actually the same for men and women. However, there is a different title called Woman Grandmaster which has fewer requirements. Presumably, being a woman is also a requirement to hold the title, but I am not sure. Maybe a man who can't quite make GM can call himself a WGM. It would be an unconventional for sure. But, nobody can deny that the purpose of the WGM title is the same as any other title, which is to assign status.
Do you have the same feeling about weight classes? Would you say that the flyweight UFC Champion is athletic? Would it be accurate to call him tough, despite weighing 125# (fighting weight) at 5'5"? Or is it inaccurate in the same way "athletic woman" is inaccurate because he would be toast against any higher weight class fighter? What about Ilia at featherweight, 145# fighting weight and 5'7", but reportedly closer to 180# walking around, who probably stunts on most average men but would be similarly stomped by a LHW or HW UFC fighter? Or do we consider p4p for men, but not women?
This kind of discussion confuses me sometimes, because a lot of men who aren't running 3hr marathons and can't climb 5.13b and can't sink a three pointer on an open basketball court love to shitpost about how stupid the idea of an athletic woman is. The existence of someone better doesn't seem to preclude the use of the word athletic in my mind.
I mean, does an announcer belting out "In the red corner, the Heavy Weight Champion of the Wooooooorld" have the same gravitas as Feather Weight Champion? I mean, I'm not gonna fuck with a featherweight champion just because I weigh more. But all the same, which weight class sells more tickets on average? Heavyweight is where the big bucks are. There is a perception that the Heavyweight is the champion of champions.
@PutAHelmetOn ((Because I'll cite back to this in my reply to you))
This is less true than you think it is in modern fight sports.
Average Purse for Boxing By Weight Class:
🔹Heavyweight: $20M
🔹Bridgerweight: $1M
🔹Cruiserweight: $3M
🔹Light Heavyweight: $5M
🔹Super Middleweight: $25M
🔹Middleweight: $2M
🔹Jr Middleweight: $3M
🔹Welterweight: $10M
🔹Super Lightweight $5M
🔹Lightweight $15M
🔹Super Featherweight $1M
🔹Featherweight $1M
🔹Super Bantamweight $4M
🔹Bantamweight $1.5M
🔹Super Flyweight $2M
🔹Flyweight $500K
🔹Jr Flyweight $1M
🔹Minimumweight $200k
You clearly see that Super Middleweight (168#) tops the charts, and that lightweight and welterweight are both vastly higher than any of the weights between Super Mid and Heavy.
For the UFC, the top ten highest paid fighters of all time includes four heavyweights, but also two lightweights top the list and it also features middleweights and welterweights. In the UFC in particular, among fight fans HW is often seen as a bit of a sideshow, with a shallow talent pool and sloppy fights; the biggest stars and best fights have normally been between 155# and 205#, where the fighters tend to land at "normal male" heights of between 5'9" and 6'2".
That's what more fans are tuning in for, rather than the Universal Championship at HW.
Historically in Boxing the Heavyweight Championship was the ne plus ultra of sports, but back then your heavyweight champions were Rocky Marciano at 5'10" 190#, and Mohammed Ali at 6'3" 226#, a big fella but not a mass monster by any means. I'm on the bigger side for my BJJ gym, and I'm a few pounds bigger than Marciano; the biggest couple guys in the gym are significantly larger than Ali.
The problem might be talent pools: basketball and the NFL soak up too many of the really athletic big fellas. Jalen Carter or Micah Parsons might be HW contenders if they had trained for it, but they make twice that fight purse a season in the NFL; and forget what guys like Lebron and Luka make in the NBA without getting hit in the head too often.
The correlation between weight and purse is 48%, which seems high enough to confirm the theory that heavier is more prestigious. There is also a mild bias in favour of the "classic" weight classes over the more recently added fine-grained ones, although the difference ($7.1M vs $5.6M) may not be statistically significant depending on the number of fights making up the averages.
That's not really a useful way to examine weight classes relative to @WhiningCoil 's assertion that HW is the prestige weight class. HW is the "open" class that any fighter could enter if they were better, they're the "real" champion, any other weight class whether at 200# or 125# is a "fake" champion by comparison. The assertion made wasn't "people like watching bigger fellas" it is "people like watching the 'real' champion, not a 'fake' champion protected by weight class regulations."
The real pattern you see is that fans like watching fights with great champions and great challengers, they like seeing great athletes compete against other great athletes, regardless of weight. This holds throughout boxing history: HW was big when you had multiple challengers passing the belt around in the Ali-Frazier-Foreman era, and decayed when the Klitschko's dominated it; Leonard, Duran, Hagler, and Hearns made middleweight great and their fights are still legendary today. Mayweather has the biggest three purses of all time. It's how it works.
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Lower weight classes offer different opportunities to view excellence - supreme speed, reaction time, endurance, doggedness. Big Man Smash Good certainly looks more attractive and brings eyeballs, but the other stuff is entertaining and a showcase in its own way, and in a way that women's classes aren't.
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I was not giving opinion on if "athletic" should be graded on a curve.
In case this sentence wasn't clear, I can annotate it:
There, I used "athletic" in the curve-grading sense, the same as you seemed to use it.
Yes, you are dunking on average men because female athletes outperform them. The sting of your dunk is precisely because the idea of an objective!athletic woman is silly. It wouldn't take much for the average man to outperform her. The disrespect we show female athletes is precisely because a man at that level is also not praised or respected for it. The respect and praise is allocated based on status (and society's intuitions for who should be given it), not based on who can do what.
The existence of weight classes proves that the featherweight's objective!weakness is high-status.
That there is no league for short basketball players seems to prove that short king's objective!weakness is low-status. I suppose one could try to argue that short players are not outmatched in basketball to the same degree that light players are outmatched in fighting. Probably the team-based aspect of basketball makes it harder to analyze individual players. In some sense it is the team that is the player in basketball, and there is no such thing as a short team.
I do not think it is a coincidence that short stature in men is one of the classic incel status resentments. Furthermore, I've heard it (but have not looked into it) that the male height-income gap replicates better than the gender income gap. In other words, a man's height is a classic status marker.
That's why I brought up Topuria specifically, because he is in a smaller weightclass on a UFC scale, but at his walking around weight he is essentially an average American male. In my view, that makes him objectively athletic, because he's outperforming the majority of men. And the market agrees! The most famous UFC fighters of all time are Connor Macgregor and GSP, who fought primarily at 155 and 170 respectively. The highest earning divisions have historically been between 155 and 205, rarely above or below. There's a deeper and more interesting talent pool that puts on good fights.
The assertion regarding lower-weightclass athletes or female athletes that:
Is the purest fentanyl-strength copium. I know a few dozens of women that climb 5.13b, that's not a trivial achievement for a man. Neither is a 3:13 marathon, or sinking three pointers, or playing scratch golf even from the women's tees, or any number of other female athletic achievements we see.
Really, I agree with you that athletics is about status, but I don't think the adverb "objective" belongs anywhere near the adjective athletic. Because there is no being "athletic" in some platonic ideal sense, there is only being more athletic than and less athletic than. And the question as to calling someone athletic when we get into weight classes, women's divisions, "master's" age classes, is probably whether such people are either "more athletic than the average person" or "more athletic than the expectation."
So I guess the status I'm interested in conferring on others when I call them athletic is that they are more athletic than you'd expect.
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