I am not a big fan of noble savage theory. Seems to me the lives of ancient humans were more likely to be “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short” than “happy, fit, sexy, proud”. There are still some stone-age tribes around, you can take a look :-/
Going back to sport, there are some primal crossfit versions which basically try to emulate prehistoric “exercise”—you run, but not on roads or trails, you lift, but boulders instead of iron, you carry logs, climb trees, etc.
However I think you’re mixing up different things. There’s a hardwired pleasure in movement (which many people managed to suppress quite successfully nowadays); there is the competition aspect into which competitive sports like soccer (or boxing) plug into; there is the general fit = sexy linkage, so weightlifting is popular; and dancing is either pleasure in movement or foreplay with clothes on. You are not going to find a single activity which satisfies everything in here.
There are still some stone-age tribes around, you can take a look :-/
At this point, any tribe still living anything like a stone-age lifestyle is ipso facto very unusual and so shouldn’t be expected to be representative of actual stone-age lifestyles back in the Stone Age when everyone was living them.
(This remark is not original to me; I have a vague feeling I saw it years ago in a book by C S Lewis.)
A fair point, though I’m not sure I accept it fully. Yes, certain groups of people progressed to civilization while other groups did not. That, on the face of it, makes them different. However the jump to the conclusion that their lifestyle (and the degree of happiness and sexiness) back in the stone-age days was significantly different looks very tenuous to me.
That conclusion would be both too confident and in the wrong direction. The right conclusion would be: We aren’t entitled to much confidence that other groups, back in the Stone Age, had lifestyles similar to theirs now.
Hm. At this point I think we’ll need to distinguish lifestyle which is observable patterns of behaviour, and intangibles like “happy and proud”.
We clearly don’t have a clue about those intangibles (other than what we know about generic baseline humans) since we have any data. But lifestyle is largely determined by your surroundings and your technology. If you live, say, in the veldt (like the Bushmen) or in the tropical forest (like the Andamanese) and only have stone-age technology, there isn’t much variation on the lifestyle available.
lifestyle is largely determined by your surroundings and your technology
The same surroundings and technology could be compatible with hunting/gathering or primitive agriculture. With a rigid social structure where everyone has a precisely defined and immutable place or with near-frictionless social mobility. With a society obsessively dedicated to serving and placating ancestral spirits or one unencumbered by such superstitions. With nuclear families, or extended families of several dozen living together, or no overt family structure at all (though the latter is probably psychologically unrealistic). With a culture of working as hard as possible in order to accumulate status-enhancing possessions, or one of doing the least possible and enjoying one’s leisure. Etc., etc., etc.
In any case, the point at issue actually was intangibles like “happy and proud”, no?
I am not a big fan of it either, but I see a non-zero chance that same brains with simpler environments can sometimes ponder or experiment with some problems more.
Any people who are still in stone age should be considered automatically huge outliers.
Now, as for sports, just from the top of my mind, competitive acrobatic dancing e.g. womens pole dancing would easily satisfy a large chunk of it. This is why I think there is a potential to optimize it.
I see a non-zero chance that same brains with simpler environments can sometimes ponder or experiment with some problems more.
Um, the general rule is that simpler environments lead to simpler brains. I don’t buy the whole “the current life is making us crazy” argument. Put someone smart in a very simple environment (e.g. an exile to a small village in the boonies) and while there is a non-zero chance he’ll write a genius book, I’ll bet on him becoming an alcoholic or sinking into the general dumbness.
womens pole dancing
It’s not a sport, it’s an occupation with the goal of making men stuff money into your underwear X-)
If you want a high-status full-body-development sport, try kite surfing.
If you want a high-status full-body-development sport, try kite surfing.
Lumi, you are smarter than this, you must be trolling me now :)
Kitesurfing is a textbook example of the high-investment extreme sports that require the right location, expensive equipment, right weather, high pre-existing fitness and so on. It is not a generic applicable routine.
As a comparison, basketball requires a hoop, a ball, and at least one opponent. It has far more capability there, to be become a universal exercise sport.
Let me point out that you didn’t ask for a “universal exercise sport”. You asked for what kind of fun sport do “high-brow people e.g. Bay Area” do and kite-surfing is a valid answer to this question.
Put someone smart in a very simple environment (e.g. an exile to a small village in the boonies) and while there is a non-zero chance he’ll write a genius book, I’ll bet on him becoming an alcoholic or sinking into the general dumbness.
Or a Buddha / Zen masta :) Let’s face it we both are speculating here. There is no evidence either way.
It’s not a sport, it’s an occupation with the goal of making men stuff money into your underwear X-)
Of course there is. Sending inconvenient (and sometimes smart) people into exile to the far corner of nowhere has been a pretty standard way of doing things at least since the Romans. I am not aware of any study which tried to systematize evidence, but there is data.
As to your video, I would call it “performance art with athletic elements” :-P
I am not a big fan of it either, but I see a non-zero chance that same brains with simpler environments can sometimes ponder or experiment with some problems more.
If you believe that your rain dance has to please the rain god, you won’t optimize your rain dance for muscle building or other physical benefits.
It will also be less effective for other people who copy the rain dance without believing in it’s significance.
Now, as for sports, just from the top of my mind, competitive acrobatic dancing e.g. womens pole dancing would easily satisfy a large chunk of it. This is why I think there is a potential to optimize it.
Pole dancing isn’t ergonomic. It’s bad for joints. It doesn’t train good movement habits.
If you want acrobatic dancing there’s Zouk. Outside of regulated ballroom dances that have rules about feet touching the ground stage dancing also involves a lot of acrobatics.
From your list of goals I don’t think “Feeling proud” is a worthwhile goal. It’s better than feeling angry but I don’t consider it to a clearly positive emotion.
Pole dancing isn’t ergonomic. It’s bad for joints. It doesn’t train good movement habits.
It does not differ too much from standard gymnastics, rings, bars, horse, vault etc. And while I am not sure what makes movement habits good or bad, to me gymnasts look like the kind of people who have perfected the mastery over the body.
From your list of goals I don’t think “Feeling proud” is a worthwhile goal. It’s better than feeling angry but I don’t consider it to a clearly positive emotion.
Healthy level of self-confidence then. “Nerdy” people tend to have far lower than what is healthy. Social anxiety etc.
It does not differ too much from standard gymnastics, rings, bars, horse, vault etc.
Rings are not the same thing as a static pole.
Rings move. A pole doesn’t.
Having perfect mastery over your body when you are 25 isn’t worth having joint issues when you are 50.
But let’s look at Svetlana Khorkina who’s the top female medalists at the World Artistic Gymnastics Championships. The first interview I find is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaJ92uuKjpo .
She has little body movement while talking. I think she’s simply trained to lock body movement instead of allowing her body to move freely.
Healthy level of self-confidence then.
Proudness is a real emotion and there are people who seek it. Do you understand why I might object to that?
Social anxiety etc.
Once you identify that issue as important a social sport is better than a competitive solo sport.
Then you shouldn’t simply switch to a different word in discussions like this and basically ignore the point of the argument.
I am very much used to everybody being far too timid.
Timid is not the opposite of proudness. It’s the opposite of being timid is being confident.
Proudness is “Stolz” in German.
Both feeling loved by other people and feeling proud come with being confident. The person who optimizes for feeling loved usually plays positive sum games while the person who optimizes for feeling proud plays zero sum games.
The hugging at LWCW-EU makes people feel loved. It raises the social confidence of everybody involved. On the other hand someone who comes out of the event feeling proud that he hugged 50 different people is doing everything wrong.
I am not a big fan of noble savage theory. Seems to me the lives of ancient humans were more likely to be “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short” than “happy, fit, sexy, proud”. There are still some stone-age tribes around, you can take a look :-/
Going back to sport, there are some primal crossfit versions which basically try to emulate prehistoric “exercise”—you run, but not on roads or trails, you lift, but boulders instead of iron, you carry logs, climb trees, etc.
However I think you’re mixing up different things. There’s a hardwired pleasure in movement (which many people managed to suppress quite successfully nowadays); there is the competition aspect into which competitive sports like soccer (or boxing) plug into; there is the general fit = sexy linkage, so weightlifting is popular; and dancing is either pleasure in movement or foreplay with clothes on. You are not going to find a single activity which satisfies everything in here.
At this point, any tribe still living anything like a stone-age lifestyle is ipso facto very unusual and so shouldn’t be expected to be representative of actual stone-age lifestyles back in the Stone Age when everyone was living them.
(This remark is not original to me; I have a vague feeling I saw it years ago in a book by C S Lewis.)
A fair point, though I’m not sure I accept it fully. Yes, certain groups of people progressed to civilization while other groups did not. That, on the face of it, makes them different. However the jump to the conclusion that their lifestyle (and the degree of happiness and sexiness) back in the stone-age days was significantly different looks very tenuous to me.
That conclusion would be both too confident and in the wrong direction. The right conclusion would be: We aren’t entitled to much confidence that other groups, back in the Stone Age, had lifestyles similar to theirs now.
Hm. At this point I think we’ll need to distinguish lifestyle which is observable patterns of behaviour, and intangibles like “happy and proud”.
We clearly don’t have a clue about those intangibles (other than what we know about generic baseline humans) since we have any data. But lifestyle is largely determined by your surroundings and your technology. If you live, say, in the veldt (like the Bushmen) or in the tropical forest (like the Andamanese) and only have stone-age technology, there isn’t much variation on the lifestyle available.
The same surroundings and technology could be compatible with hunting/gathering or primitive agriculture. With a rigid social structure where everyone has a precisely defined and immutable place or with near-frictionless social mobility. With a society obsessively dedicated to serving and placating ancestral spirits or one unencumbered by such superstitions. With nuclear families, or extended families of several dozen living together, or no overt family structure at all (though the latter is probably psychologically unrealistic). With a culture of working as hard as possible in order to accumulate status-enhancing possessions, or one of doing the least possible and enjoying one’s leisure. Etc., etc., etc.
In any case, the point at issue actually was intangibles like “happy and proud”, no?
I am not a big fan of it either, but I see a non-zero chance that same brains with simpler environments can sometimes ponder or experiment with some problems more.
Any people who are still in stone age should be considered automatically huge outliers.
Now, as for sports, just from the top of my mind, competitive acrobatic dancing e.g. womens pole dancing would easily satisfy a large chunk of it. This is why I think there is a potential to optimize it.
Um, the general rule is that simpler environments lead to simpler brains. I don’t buy the whole “the current life is making us crazy” argument. Put someone smart in a very simple environment (e.g. an exile to a small village in the boonies) and while there is a non-zero chance he’ll write a genius book, I’ll bet on him becoming an alcoholic or sinking into the general dumbness.
It’s not a sport, it’s an occupation with the goal of making men stuff money into your underwear X-)
If you want a high-status full-body-development sport, try kite surfing.
Lumi, you are smarter than this, you must be trolling me now :)
Kitesurfing is a textbook example of the high-investment extreme sports that require the right location, expensive equipment, right weather, high pre-existing fitness and so on. It is not a generic applicable routine.
As a comparison, basketball requires a hoop, a ball, and at least one opponent. It has far more capability there, to be become a universal exercise sport.
Let me point out that you didn’t ask for a “universal exercise sport”. You asked for what kind of fun sport do “high-brow people e.g. Bay Area” do and kite-surfing is a valid answer to this question.
As a low-investment alternative, try parkour? :-)
This sounds good, actually. Is it popular there?
It’s an urban youth sport with a strong counterculture vibe. Not very beloved by authorities and property owners :-/
A bigger problem is that you’re guaranteed cuts and bruises, with broken bones not a particularly unlikely outcome.
Or a Buddha / Zen masta :) Let’s face it we both are speculating here. There is no evidence either way.
Yeah maybe try to stick to forming opinions about things you actually know about :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or-rf8jTvqE
Of course there is. Sending inconvenient (and sometimes smart) people into exile to the far corner of nowhere has been a pretty standard way of doing things at least since the Romans. I am not aware of any study which tried to systematize evidence, but there is data.
As to your video, I would call it “performance art with athletic elements” :-P
That’s not true. There are people who do pole dancing as recreational sport.
For some reason people are often surprised when I link this :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or-rf8jTvqE
Says a lot about prejudices and all too fixed priors :)
If you believe that your rain dance has to please the rain god, you won’t optimize your rain dance for muscle building or other physical benefits.
It will also be less effective for other people who copy the rain dance without believing in it’s significance.
Pole dancing isn’t ergonomic. It’s bad for joints. It doesn’t train good movement habits.
If you want acrobatic dancing there’s Zouk. Outside of regulated ballroom dances that have rules about feet touching the ground stage dancing also involves a lot of acrobatics.
From your list of goals I don’t think “Feeling proud” is a worthwhile goal. It’s better than feeling angry but I don’t consider it to a clearly positive emotion.
It does not differ too much from standard gymnastics, rings, bars, horse, vault etc. And while I am not sure what makes movement habits good or bad, to me gymnasts look like the kind of people who have perfected the mastery over the body.
Healthy level of self-confidence then. “Nerdy” people tend to have far lower than what is healthy. Social anxiety etc.
Rings are not the same thing as a static pole. Rings move. A pole doesn’t.
Having perfect mastery over your body when you are 25 isn’t worth having joint issues when you are 50.
But let’s look at Svetlana Khorkina who’s the top female medalists at the World Artistic Gymnastics Championships. The first interview I find is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaJ92uuKjpo . She has little body movement while talking. I think she’s simply trained to lock body movement instead of allowing her body to move freely.
Proudness is a real emotion and there are people who seek it. Do you understand why I might object to that?
Once you identify that issue as important a social sport is better than a competitive solo sport.
No, unfortunately not. Can you give a real or hypothetical negative example of proudness? I am very much used to everybody being far too timid.
Proudness = pride = one of the seven deadly sins in Christianity = antonym of humble, humility.
Maybe you mean self-confidence?
Then you shouldn’t simply switch to a different word in discussions like this and basically ignore the point of the argument.
Timid is not the opposite of proudness. It’s the opposite of being timid is being confident. Proudness is “Stolz” in German.
Both feeling loved by other people and feeling proud come with being confident.
The person who optimizes for feeling loved usually plays positive sum games while the person who optimizes for feeling proud plays zero sum games.
The hugging at LWCW-EU makes people feel loved. It raises the social confidence of everybody involved. On the other hand someone who comes out of the event feeling proud that he hugged 50 different people is doing everything wrong.