Sports

This is something that I always found weird hanging out with LWers, how people almost take pride in being anti-sports. I'm not athletic at all and yet I play a dozen different sports and watch everything from figure skating to college football. Is this because the nerd/jock dichotomy actually happens in American schools and not in movies? All my friends from the math club in high school in Israel played soccer several times a week, every chance that we could.

I encourage everyone to try playing a sport, if you've never tried then something like ping pong or even throwing a frisbee around can be good entry level activities for people who think they're horrible athletes.

I was extremely extremely dedicated to it back in middle/high school. Actually, it was pretty much all I cared about (not an exaggeration). This may or not be crazy... but I wanted to be the best player who's ever lived. That was what I genuinely aspired and was working towards (~7th-11th grade).

This was me, but more like 6th-9th grade.

Off the top of my head, I think the main benefits I got out of playing competitive basketball were:

1. Physical fitness.
2. Ambition and competitiveness.
3. Something fun I do occasionally now.
4. Hard to describe mental skills related to practicing shooting form.

Elaboration on 1: I think it's really awesome how much "excellence porn" there in sports. You can go on youtube, and see tons of motivational videos. I wish there were the equivalent for intellectual domains. The closest you get is Paul Graham's essays for startups.

Elaboration on 3: Practicing shooting feels similar to meditation. I'm trying to pay close attention to tiny details of A. how my body is moving, B. Whether that feels like a good motion/shot or bad motion/shot C. How the ball actually moves. Furthermore, there's metacognition to see how your shot/motion changes when you're playing less close attention to it (e.g. when you're actually playing a game. Or, if you were focusing on improving your form in your legs, and then you switch to focusing on your form in your arms, you may notice that your leg form degrades again. Furthermore, you notice that leg-form and arm-form are not independent, and that there are local optima and that sometimes you have to get worse in order to get better.).

There's a lot more I could say, but I'll leave it at that for now.

I think the difference between playing and spectating sports gets glossed over in lots of "sports are dumb" conversations.

I do not care at all about watching other people play sports. It's super boring.

Playing sports ball with people you enjoy being around is quite rewarding.

One thing to bear strongly in mind when considering what sport to play is how prone that sport is to injuring you. Young people generally don't realize that pretty much any injury you get is a permanent injury.

Breaking your arm and needing a cast creates muscular imbalances that don't correct themselves without therapy. Twisting your ankle makes your ankle permanently more prone injury. Practically any blow to the head, even sub-concussive blows, yield cumulative brain damage.

Chronic pain sucks. It deflates your willpower, your emotional energy, your joie de vivre. Normal, non-athletic old people experience massive diminishment of life-enjoyment from normal aches and pains. Athletic injuries have the potential to drastically compound this.

I simply didn't have enough time to put in the 14 hour days I envisioned.

I've been guilty of similarly over-ambitious athletic goals in the past. It seems like I have a hard time motivating myself to do anything at all unless that thing is epic - unless accomplishing that thing would be amazing to have accomplished. So in the past I've been prone to shoot for goals that are actually impossible, because if I aimed for realistic goals, I wouldn't be motivated to work towards them.

Ex. running suicides until you collapse. And then getting up to do more until you collapse again. It takes a lot of willpower to do that. I think willpower is like a muscle, and you have to train yourself to be able to work at such intensities.

However - at a certain point, some module of your brain may check in, notice that running suicides is extremely unpleasant and that it's not providing any hedonic benefit, and metaphorically cut your legs out from under you. You wake up one day and find that you just don't care to do that again today.

This happened to me when I did Crossfit. I was very intense about it for about two months, doing three or more sessions a week, and then woke up one day an the whole idea just seemed stupid. The shift had happened at some level below consciousness. So now I'm more wary of "overdoing it".

Knowing that I am capable of working at high intensities has given me confidence that "I could do anything".

I find this to be true for non-physical work as well. Various stages of graduate school were somewhere between "marathon", "series of sprints" and "death march" in terms of how hard I pushed myself, and now I will always know that I can push myself way, way past the point of feeling like I can't push any more.

Competition can go to your head. My final round in the last Taekwondo tournament in which I competed saw me behind on points and desperately trying to kick my oponent in the head hard enough to knock him unconscious, basically just wildly pummeling his upper body with my feet and shins. This is funny to reflect on, because it feels like going temporarily insane. (It's also valuable to have a reference for the emotional experience of "crushing defeat", which is what followed after.)

Taekwondo specifically had pros and cons. One of the pros was that we trained as a team but we competed individually, so I think the bullying was less than it could have been. That said, it only takes one jerk instructor willing to knock you out to prove a point to make the whole enterprise a waste of time.

your lengthy basketball quote

I really enjoyed The Art of Learning for its general approach to breaking things down like this.

I'm a typical nerd, I've had bad motor skills all my life, I never really practiced group sports and that's the biggest reason why I've never enjoyed playing those kind of sports, and it always felt like I lowered my status by even trying. It always felt like I was in the way and just caused harm, so I just tried not to bother anyone and I felt more outcast than in other circumstances, and worst memories from school are from those group sports.

But there are expections at adult age when I've done it with people who accept my shittiness, and the goal is having fun and not competing with others. I admit that in those kind of circumstances it's more fun than other ways of spending time and it enables easier bonding with others.

Recreational sports is fun! Unfortunately, for me and perhaps many other people, high school quite ruined that - no real friends, an obligation to play, shouting. I'd rather walk alone for hours. You really are in luck here, that it didn't make it worse for you.

Although badminton with someone you like might be still nice:)

I no longer play sports (unless it's mandated by work), unless you count grappling on occasion.

Yes, I maintain a fantasy football team to practice statistical thinking (as opposed to actual statistics, at the moment) and because I found it ingratiates me with my colleagues. My workplace went from a den of geeks to regular Monday night football types in the space of months, so I switched from D&D to fantasy football.

It's safe to say I don't really have teams I root for (once upon a time it was Newcastle United, because I liked zebras as a kid) or sports I watch more than a few minutes of. Yet I'm interested in sports- now more than ever.

It's in the details. How does a tennis player improve his reaction time? How does handball transfer to boxing? How does the conditioning a football wide receiver employs differ from a midfielder's training in football? What are the steps coaches take to improve performance? When performance is at a peak, what's the best method for getting a group of people with adrenaline driving them to incorporate tactics into their play? Are tactics something you need to pay attention to? Sports provide a simple world with well-defined rules to explore the effect of competition on innovation.

If a team isn't maximizing play within those rules, that team should lose over time. There's a consequence for not paying attention to reality- especially in professional sports. If passing the ball in a particular way is bad form but it works and isn't against the rules, surely teams will eventually start doing it, and the game will have to be re-examined.

You can find a lot of these aspects in multiplayer virtual games, but the physical skills required for sports introduce a whole new element that's extremely interesting. Sure, Counter-Strike might raise your reaction time, but that's just your eyes and your hands. A squash player, now, she'll need to move her whole body.

I see the value in sports. I just don't find it fun to, actually, you know, play, due to skill mismatch. People are either way better or much worse. Unless it's capture the flag, paintball, or some other 'new' sport. The sports I do enjoy are one-on-one, but they carry a high risk of injury or are a heavy time sink.

I do wonder why people haven't come up with a better game- one that maximizes suspense and use of complex tactics.

But which sport has had the most rules changes over time? A cursory glance suggests the NFL, but I suppose I should make a note to crunch those numbers when I'm inclined.

One last thing. I think there might be a better way to structure professional teams to encourage drama. As the saying goes, you're just rooting for a jersey. Perhaps some sort of player buy-in to a team might change that. After all, city leagues, high school games, national, and even college sports make for more compelling stories.

Non-athletic thinkers are myopic. I see at least three very important reasons any rationalist must value exercise.

As someone who has trained extremely hard in distance running, sports in general and athletic conditioning in particular create an intuitive understanding of the fallaciousness of Cartesian Dualism and the accuracy of materialism [LW · GW] in the sense that the mind is merely a part of the body. 

Physical challenges also force one to understand the limitations of Kahneman's "system two." For example, one may know what it means to not start a race too quickly and then "die" (running jargon for running out of steam prematurely), but repeated failures in actual races teach one to realize the limitations of one's rationality, especially under stress (even if distance running is classified as eustress rather than distress; remember, cortisol levels & arousal are the same in either case).

Conditioning has been shown to increase cognitive performance. This study notes a difference better reaction time in fit adolescents (no causal link, n = 30). This review shows decreased "system 2" aging in physically fit elderly individuals (causality likely, preponderance of evidence). Acute exercise has also been shown to cause immediate improvements in decision making.

So, I'm incredibly clumsy. It's gotten better over the years, but you know those cliche movie scenes where the protagonist is learning to use a sword? And their mentor says "Think of it like an extension of your arm?" I have trouble feeling like my limbs are extensions of my body. I quite literally forget where they are in space. As I've gotten older, I have learned to space myself farther away from people to account for that.

Team sports were a disaster. Not totally! I actually had marginal success in volleyball. Positions on the court were clearly delineated, and people called out when they went for the ball. That was fine, usually.

All that being said, I have done better in martial arts and dance. The martial arts schools I've been to relied a lot on building fundamentals with solo footwork drills, so I had a grounding in the basics before I ever had to make physical contact. Grappling went well, too. In dance, I'm either dancing alone or am in near-constant physical contact with someone, which also seems to ground my limbs.

I do find a lot of the benefits that you outline here in structured physical activity. Activity that has a "play" feel to it, even though it's incredibly hard. The camaraderie, the post-workout "highs," and massive improvements in my day-to-day coordination are all noticeable. My recent dance class has been more effective than talk therapy at treating my depression and anxiety. I haven't been measuring, but I also know that evidence points towards cognitive benefits too.

I want to learn to sail to signal status, stay fit, and learn a practical survival skill.

The athlete of today is stronger, faster, quicker, and more physically conditioned that at any time in the history of sports. What we know about physical training and conditioning, and nutrition continues to be applied at all levels of athletic competition at greater and greater frequencies. Therefore, more athletes are achieving physical peak performance than ever before.

In order to achieve an edge, the athlete of tomorrow will have to gain a mental edge to achieve success over equally physically developed and gifted opponents.

Because this is the case,performance psychology and mental conditioning are two of the fastest growing disciplines in the world. The ever-growing financial, mental and emotional pressures placed on athletes are demanding a more prominent role for sports and performance psychologists. Constant stress and expectations are placed on sports stars, coaches and organizations – leading to the current increase in sports psychology.

-This mental conditioning app, designed by Dr. Luis Valdes, Ph.D., CEO of PSYCHOGENYX, LLC,

My impression is that people here aren't very interested in sports.

I am not particularly interested in competitive sports because it's not an area where I have a competitive advantage :-)

I also think that sports get a bad rep for being simple and dull.

I think there's a lot of difference between "solo performance" kind of sports (e.g. running) and "interactive" kind of sports (from fencing to soccer). The "interactive" sports are anything but simple and dull.

I like adventure sports that pit people against nature rather than the mainstream team and adversarial sports that pit people against one another. The government and responsible corporations ought not fund divisive entertainment!