Comment on Painful to recover from

phx@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

• exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I wouldn’t put too much stock into the jock versus nerd stereotypes.

  Life isn’t an RPG with stats that come at the cost of other stats. Being bad at sports doesn’t make someone more likely to be good at school (if anything, the correlation might run the other way). And charisma, ambition, intelligence, physical appearance, athleticism, work ethic, are all distinct factors that sometimes feedback on each other, and feed into things like wealth, happiness, attractiveness, etc.

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  • phx@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Life isn’t an RPG, but there has definitely been a push by certain groups to value looks and strength or martial prowess over intelligence and education, particularly in North American culture. Yeah, somebody can be an athlete without being dumb, and as another person pointed out there actually a lot of high-speed decision-making that requires intelligence to pro-sports.

    At the same time, there are people who very much lean towards looking buff, tough, but not too bright as they categorize intellectuals as losers or socially unwanted. Similarly, there are girls or women who will emphasize their looks and actively hide their intelligence. Il This over time leads to a willful ignorance that IMO is worse than simply being of lower IQ or lacking education.

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    • exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I’m not aware of any culture in which hiding one’s strengths is a common response to one’s own surroundings. Placing value on a particular characteristic does not imply that a completely unrelated characteristic is undesirable. Plenty of beautiful smart people out there, and even in a society where beauty is prized above all else, why would someone beautiful hide their intelligence?

      For whatever it’s worth, in my circles (urban white collar millennial professionals in dense cities), most people are both athletic and intelligent. There are plenty of finance bros and tech bros who have Ivy League degrees (sometimes Ph.D.s, M.D.s, J.D.s) that represent real academic achievement and can also turn around and dominate on a basketball court or in a fighting gym. Lots of smart people like gyms, whether we’re talking resistance training, Olympic lifting, CrossFit/Hyrox, endurance cardio sports like marathon running or biking, winter sports like skiing, etc.

      That’s also consistent with what I saw in my high school. Most of the top students headed towards Ivy League or similar caliber schools were also athletes who were very good at a competitive sport for the school. The “nerd”/“jock” dichotomy we expected from John Hughes movies never really materialized, and the popular kids tended to be people who were both good at school and good at sports.

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      • phx@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        And yet where do you think the demographic that voted for the guy that shits his pants and falls asleep comes from exactly, and moreover continues to double-down on supporting him even to their own detriment? How about the people who modify their trucks to spread black smoke just to “own those pissy hybrid drivers and cyclists”?

        The continued attempts to enumerate activities that would have fit on Jackass (and likely watched the same on repeat).

        Never knew a pretty girl in school who got good grades but hid then and played dumb?

        There’s plenty of people who embrace an absurdist mentality and openly reject anything that requires actively using one’s brain.

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• MajorasTerribleFate@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  “Just don’t pick an red-hatred idiot” took me a sec to parse.

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  • SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    It’s a typo but the intended group still fits! Love it.

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    • phx@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Yeah I meant to your red-hatted but hatred seems to come with that package too so…

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• ricecake@sh.itjust.works ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  The thing there is that when people say “people are attracted to intelligence” the intelligence people think of is different than the type people are generally attracted to.

  Highly analytical intelligence is a type of intelligence. So is the ability to make correct choices in a variety of situations.
  Almost every athletic endeavor entails being able to assess situations quickly and accurately, and know how to respond. Team sports require group coordination, training and predicting teammates behavior.
  That’s intelligence, but it’s often considered a lesser sort than the analytical sort.

  It’s why people see the people doing work that requires the type of less prestigious intelligence as less intelligent, and see people being drawn to them as proof that people aren’t really drawn to intelligence.

  To be blunt: it doesn’t matter how strong you are if can’t read or get confused by the garage door opener every day.

  It’s the same as saying that people aren’t attracted to appearance because plenty of people are drawn to normal attractiveness people.

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  • phx@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    That’s actually a good point about sports intelligence. Pro athletes likely have a certain almost instinctual grasp of certain physics even if they aren’t running the actual numbers in their heads.

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    • ricecake@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      You can take away the qualifiers. :) and it’s not instinctual, just practiced.
      The notion that athletics doesn’t require intelligence draws away from the understanding of exactly how much practice it takes to hone the skills to that level.

      And, for a fun reference, the typical NFL player has significantly more traditional education than the average person.

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• WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Women like beer bellies, and big forearms.

  Everything men hate, women like.

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