There is no such thing as strength: a parody

It is interesting, though, how non-general strength is.

There is indeed a widely (unwittingly) held idea that "strength" is a one-dimensional thing: consider, say, superhero comics where the Hulk is stronger than anybody else, which means he's stronger at everything. You never read a comic where the Hulk is stronger at lifting things but Thor is stronger at throwing; that would feel really weird to most people. If the Marvel universe had a comic about strength sports, the Hulk would be the best at every sport.

But this isn't at all how strength works in the real world: there is a pretty large component of specificity. Very, very few athletes are competitive at high levels in even two strength sports, never mind all of them. Giant male powerlifters frequently have a snatch weaker than tiny female weightlifters, despite having dramatically more lean body mass, and naturally higher testosterone, and (usually) the benefit of performance-enhancing drugs. And if you put a powerlifter in the Highland Games - a contest of strength via various throwing events - well, they'd be hopeless!

To a strength athlete, this is obvious. Of course powerlifters have a lousy snatch! Most powerlifters don't even train the snatch! Strength isn't just about raw muscle mass; there is a very large component of skill, technique, and even neural adaptation to specific movement patterns.

But under the folk one-dimensional model of strength, this is a strange and surprising fact.

I don't think I've ever been blind-sided by Poe's law as hard as I have by your post.

There is Strength, I checked; it's the first attribute on my character sheet.

What, you've never got to see your character sheet? Poor souls, how are you going to ever know how to play yourself properly?

There is no such thing as height, either.

I'm taking the parody literally-- a hammer-thrower talks about the ways she is and isn't strong.

http://espn.go.com/olympics/story/_/page/bodyamandabingson/hammer-thrower-amanda-bingson-says-athletes-come-all-shapes-sizes-espn-magazine-body-issue

It's a lot easier to evaluate strength than IQ.

(I got about one paragraph in and thought "this is an allegory for intelligence, right?".)

Thing is, I don't think it works the way it seems to be intended to work. That is, I basically agree with the surface-level claims it makes. (Until near the end, where the author seems to get a bit confused between mocking "intelligence isn't real" and mocking "race isn't real", which screws up the analogy because strength and intelligence are hugely more alike than strength and race, and which maybe gives the game away a bit about his underlying motivations.)

You really can be strong in some respects and weak in others. This really does mean that summarizing people's strength with a Strength Quotient would be throwing away information. This really does mean that comparing different groups of people for strength by measuring their SQs would risk mistaking a difference in balance for a difference in overall strength (whatever that might mean).

I wouldn't even bet heavily against the proposition that the use of "strength" as a very general ability ("So, what do you consider your greatest strength?") produces bias against people and groups with less physical strength (e.g., women). I'm not sure how one would go about testing this, though.

I think this is the Fallacy of Gray. http://lesswrong.com/lw/mm/the_fallacy_of_gray/

You see an overused or incorrectly used concept, and instead of trying to improve it, you set out to try to deconstruct it completely. Mentioning sexism and racism makes it doubly suspect: especially the link between racism and strength is really weak and occasional at best (as stereotypes went both ways), and it looks a bit like guilt-tripping, guilt-by-association tripping which combined with too much deconstructionism looks like a classic "postmodern" failure mode.

From a rational, predictionist viewpoint, strength is a useful concept for the application of energy. It is a useful term when it is more about pedalling than steering. To hit a target with an arrow, both exact aiming needed and the energy to propel it to the target, and strength is from a family of concepts that have more to do with the propelling.

A good point can be made that one should clarify different kinds of energies and strengths better. When I talk with simple rural blue-collar folks they are often like, the body-builders are just fake-strong, they could not dig ditches 10 hours a day i.e. they focus more on muscle endurance, while the lifters usually focus on 1 rep max.

Besides strength is often used metaphorically - ability, willpower etc.

This was about the rational stuff. Now for some uglier and more personal stuff - if you can go subjectivist so can I: the sexist part is largely because testosterone is real, and it seems to affect many kinds of strength - from 1RP to muscle endurance, and the more metaphorical willpower kind of stuff too. Obligatory article. besides, on a purely personal preference level, we are quickly approaching a world where women out-perform men in pretty much everything that matters. Recognizing the simple truth that men have an advantage in a not too important field helps keeping some kind of an anchor to tether male identity, masculine identity to, without that it would all too easily evaporate. While identities can be built around something else than gender, in practice it seems to me gendered identity is fairly big and important. This is why transgenderism is such a big deal these days - it would be difficult to explain to Jenner that gender does not matter much. Men today are feeling insecure about themselves, not really sure what being a man means in the 21st century when you are absolutely positively not going to be a conquistador or similar type of a heroic manly ideal. We need an ideal that embraces much of the historical aspects of masculinity to tether it all to, yet has the least amount of potential fallout / harm to women, gays etc. and this seems to be currently the solution. A bit of an obsession about one's own body, while narcissistic, is at least something that does not really have a lot of consequences for others.

EDIT: disregard this, I did not see it is a parody.

I've had similar thoughts before:

Now imagine you said this [that some people are funnier than others] to someone and they indignantly responded with the following:

“You can’t say that for sure – there are different types of humour! Everyone has different talents: some people are good at observational comedy, and some people are good at puns or slapstick. Also, most so-called “comedians” are only “stand-up funny” – they can’t make you laugh in real life. Plus, just because you’re funny doesn’t mean you’re fun to be around. I have a friend who’s not funny at all but he’s really nice, and I’d hang out with him over a comedian who’s a jerk any day. Besides, no one’s been able to define funniness anyway, or precisely measure it. Who’s to say it even exists?”

(/shameless blog plug)

While this post is meant as a parody / reductio, I think the idea that "there is no such thing as strength" is not entirely invalid. This has of course nothing to do with strength being culturally constructed or some such nonsense but with "strength" - as it is used colloquially- being highly multidimensional.

Thus there is no unambiguous way to say my strenght is [number] [unit]. You can of course devise a strenght test and define a strength quotient as the output of this test. And if the test is any good of course this strength quotient will corelate with different abilities and outcomes such as digging ditches or carrying stones or the probability of having back pain. But this does not mean that "your strenght" as measured by the strenght test behaves like a physical unit.

It may for example (depending on the exact nature of the test) not be meaningful to ask how a non human like an ant or a zebra or an excavator would rate on the test for example because the test may involve handling dumbbells (what neither ant nor zebra can) or involve endurance tests (what the excavator can do until the fuel tank is empty or not at all). I hope the parallel to AI is obvious. On the other hand if I do measure a dimension of strength this problem goes away. If muscle x at max tension applies a torque of y to joint z this does behave as a physical unit and can easily be applied to any system with joints, be it ant, zebra or excavator.

Furthermore the strength test is to a certain degree arbitrary. You could do a slightly different test with slightly different correlations and stil call it "strength". This is not the case with a single dimension of strength. That muscle x at max tension does apply a torque of y to joint z is an objective fact about the world which can be ascertatined with a host of different methods all of which will yield the same result (at least theoretically).

Concerning intelligence we unfortunately do not know the onedimensional subcomponents. I think this is the propper steelman for "there is no such thing as intelligence".

Indeed, strength is implicated in both sexism and racism. Women have long been held to be the "weaker sex," consequently needing protection from the "stronger" males, resulting in centuries of structural oppression.

Uh, reality check. Despite all the propaganda about "warrior women" who can kick men's asses, in the real world even an out of shape man can overpower most women - indeed, the hysteria about rape culture implicitly assumes that.

And again in the real world, women can't pass U.S. Army Ranger training. Men just have more upper body strength than women on average.