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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   1974 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 13, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Sometimes when I am really tired and want something entirely mindless I just switch on speed running videos and marvel at how much time and effort these seemingly intelligent determined capable men are spending on clipping a wall at a game released in 2003 to save off 750 milliseconds or something. Is there anything else that is such a massive waste of human talent than speed running communities??

What isnt? Sports, chess, literally anything that isnt a paid service?

Sports provide tremendous value as a source of community and social opportunity for fans. I've met some of my best friends through football - even if it added no other value to my life, paying the minor fees involved would be worth it. What's surprising about speedrunning is that it's incredible talent and dedication being put into a prestige race among communities which are mostly tiny and fully-online, and that it's talent that's more transferable to something useful. The physical and tactical talent a top athlete has could maybe be parlayed into being an effective soldier or a good oilfield worker, but that's not a loss to society comparable to having these speedrunning guys optimizing time on Sonic 2000 instead of optimizing some useful process. I guess the equivalent would be that a professional sportsman would be wasted in the Middle Ages when he could have become a knight instead. (And, indeed, some of the greatest knights, like William Marshal, started out as effectively their era's equivalent of pro athletes)

With chess I can agree. The type of person who is into speed running today might had been into chess 50 years ago.

Doing sports is at least actually good for your body and people who go pro are usually not the cognitive elite.

Paul Morphy, the best player ever, has said:

"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."

Talking shit on the internet, maybe?

Is that actually true? Like, it sounds plausible that it could be true, but it also seems plausible that it helps shape culture and behavioral norms, because people are less likely to do things that lead to scorn and mockery. Granted, people probably spend an inordinate amount of effort talking shit on the internet above and beyond its actual value, but there is the potential for actual value buried in there.

Sure, but shaping culture/norms is kind of a blank check. Speedrunners are also providing some sort of influence on culture, either as an impressive form of entertainment or as an ur-example of certain nerdy behaviors.

But it specifically applies pressure against negative behaviors, at least according to the subjective perceptions of the mocker. X behavior is stupid/bad -> Y group of people mock it -> Z group of people care about Y's opinion and/or avoiding mockery in general and do X less or fail to start doing X -> less X exists. If the mocker has good subjective opinions and targets, then this is a net positive since it reduces the prevalence of stupid/bad behaviors. If the mocker has bad subjective opinions and targets, then this is a net negative since it reduces the prevalence of good behaviors that have been mislabeled.

Speed running.... makes speed running look cool? Like, maybe it encourages people to try really hard and dedicate themselves to a task, or peer into the underlying mechanics of games and pedantically look for flaws that they can exploit which maybe increases their ability as a hacker/programmer/anti-hacker? But the most likely outcome is that it makes people more likely to become speed runners. I suppose one could make a similar argument about a lot of hobbies, but a lot of hobbies have depth or broadly interesting components, while speedrunning is about pedantic details and weird edge cases.

Like, if someone has a hobby of using tweezers to arrange tiny colored grains of sand into beautiful artwork, that's kind of cool. I wouldn't do it, it seems like more time and effort than it's worth to me, but if someone else wants to do that good for them, and maybe at the end I'll look at the picture they make. If someone has a hobby of using tweezers to arrange tiny grains of sand into binary representations of the code to retro videogames, that's stupid. It takes similar levels of pedantic effort to perfectly arrange each grain of sand into the right shape, but in the end you have a bunch of dots of sand and the binary representation doesn't do anything because operating systems can't read sand, so it's functional equivalent to a random arrangement of sand. I suppose if someone had some property of their brain that makes this hobby enjoyable for them I'm not going to say they're not allowed to do it, but to me it's boring both to do AND to hear about or watch, while the colored sand piles are boring to do but might be worth watching a little bit. I feel that videogames are more analogous to the colored art sand: pragmatically useless towards survival in the real world but interesting to experience or view, while speedrunning is analagous to the binary representations: similarly complex in function but more pedantic and way less interesting.

All to say that pressure towards making people more interested in speedrunning is negative because it increases the amount of people with boring hobbies, which funges against more interesting hobbies that they could have. And while this is mostly a subjective opinion from me as someone who thinks speedrunning is boring, I think there is some way in which speedrunning is objectively worse than most hobbies, including broader videogaming, although I'm not entirely sure exactly how to formalize, hence vaguely gesturing at it via the above analogy.

Yes but how much of the arguing and shit-talking on the internet shapes future behavior in a good way? It's not just foolishness that meets with scorn. Far from it.

Tru.

The sport of Rock Climbing. As distinct from alpinism, where there's the idea that you go that far to get the view, There is nearly always an easier way to get to the top of whatever you're climbing. While equipment and technique has come a long way, people die doing it every year.

The sport of Rock Climbing. As distinct from alpinism, where there's the idea that you go that far to get the view, There is nearly always an easier way to get to the top of whatever you're climbing.

Agree. But not with the distinction. Alpinists insisted on doing the North Face of every peak, and died in droves for it.

I think I phrased the distinction poorly in my initial comment. Alpinism at least involves skills that are mildly relevant to some kind of theoretically functional task, traveling long distances over difficult terrain to reach a goal. Rock climbing essentially takes a single one of those skills and specializes it to reductio ad absurdum. It's possible to at least imagine a scenario where Alpinism would provide relevant skills, like reaching a remote village in bad conditions or launching an ambush or something. Rock climbers have to go out of their way to find routes that are difficult enough to test themselves, and coming up with a scenario where the ability to climb anything past 5.10 would be relevant is purest fantasy.

The crazy thing to me is the ‘free solo’ stuff where they do it without safety ropes. Pure deathwish, adding unnecessary extra risk to feel closer to the void.

Not crazier than the wingsuit guys? I guess both die doing the thing they love.

As crazy, maybe?

It's the physical counterpart to speedrunning: not aiming to be the best at the thing, but instead defining a sub-goal of doing an easier thing with the utmost perfection.

I'm not sure if you climb much, but it is absolutely not true that you can get to the same view with an easier way. We call these technical summits. Off the top of my head Cerro Torre is famous, near me is Slesse Mountain in British Columbia, in the Canadian Rockies there's Mt Louis, Mt Birdwood, Mt Alberta. etc.

That was phrased poorly. I was thinking more in terms of rock climbing as guys going out to climb a 5.12 route that's sorta on a random cliff, which they mostly drive to or take an easy hike to, which they are seeking out more or less purely because of the technical difficulty of the climbing. In my mind most technical summits are by definition Alpinism, because you had to first journey to the rock face before reaching the climb, with the climb forming just part of a larger journey to the top of the mountain.

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