Everything :) It is not a good answer if we are about inventing something very new, but my secret hope is reinvent something very old, something that really fits out biological natures but was lost during civilization, and thus solves a lot of problems at once, a lot of problems that all stem of not living in an ancestral env. So I am thinking about somethng as fun as soccer, as fit making as deadlifts, as proud making as boxing and as sexy feeling as tango. Because I am hoping when we are not having fun, are not being fun, being timid or not feeling it will turn out it all comes from not living an ancestral life yet that can be simulated.
I understand it is a bit unlikely, as evolution does not optimze for having made a perfect golden age. But there is a small chance humans did i.e. 100K years ago with similar brain sizes but far simpler env, far fewer variables, they figured ways to live happy, fit, sexy, proud etc.
I mean how else can soccer be so much fun or dancing so sexy etc. if they do not tap into something in the brain that is really old? I don’t think they simply overstimulate circuits made for something else, maybe yes, but that is not the only option, the other option is that there were some ur-activities they all derive from.
So there is a hope that this is only a reinvention, hence the “everything”.
Even if it not a reinvention, optimizing for “everything” can still be salvaged if we show most elements are synergistic.
Finally, it is about what they are optimizing for, not me. Hence the question what is trending.
I don’t know anything about high-brow circles, but I am a big fan of swordfighting and weapon martial arts and would suggest trying that out. There’s been some resurfacing of the pasttime/art/practice in historical recreation groups though I got interested in it after getting a quarter of the way through Musashi’s Book of Nine Spheres and reading his assertion that it would be impossible to understand his book without practicing swordfighting yourself.
I’ve tried out rapier-fencing and kali stick fighting (a stick in each hand) and have found it very intellectually stimulating. It’s also been interesting to explore the areas of my personality and body that involve high physical activity, mobility, agression, and composure under pressure. Fighting effectively while using a weapon in each hand has been described to me as similar to a combination of chess and tennis. (I don’t think it’s quite that difficult, but I’m also not the best swordfighter in the world nor do I practice against said greatest swordfighters.)
Exposure to stimuli that add additional perspectives to everyday life helps as well. Real pressure in life doesn’t involve a spreadsheet deadline. It involves an angry large human attempting to painfully whack you over the head with a large stick (a remarkably refreshing experience) and attempting to deal with that situation as optimally as possible.
I think it ranks insanely high on the fun level but does it do anything for fitness, self-confidence or feeling sexy?
Also, have you tried empty-handed martial arts like boxing, wing chun, karate or bjj? How would you are empty-hand vs. weapon on these four axes: fun, fitness, feeling confident, feeling sexy?
HEMA/Fiore is the rapier-fencing stuff that I’ve been doing. I’ve enjoyed learning footwork from the more formal setting I’ve found with the rapier people I know.
The other stuff I’ve done (which makes up the majority) is more freestyle rattan dual-wielding and freestyle shinai fighting that uses a mix of japanese fighting (less kendo, more musashi), filipino stick fighting, and some HEMA twohanded sword fighting (this stuff is weird). This resembles the dogbrothers videos more than anything else (although we both don’t wear much padding and don’t hit anywhere near as hard as we could).
I’ve tried brazilian jiu-jitsu with a focus on very close sparring but I didn’t enjoy it very much at all and found it to have limited usefulness. I don’t think the place I went to gave very good instruction or had the right focus.
I would rate the above as follows:
Rattan dual-wielding
fun 10 (12 if i can go above 10 in the 1-10 scale),
fitness 8,
feeling confident 9 ,
feeling sexy 8?,
Rapier fighting
fun 7,
fitness 6,
feeling confident 3 ,
feeling sexy 6? (dressing in armor probably contributes for 4 points and the other 2 are from actual rapier fencing)
Rattan (kali stick) dual wielding wins by a large margin and is probably the most fun thing I do in my life. It accomplishes the all-important task among sports of creating a strong cardio and muscular activity that is fun to the point that you will do it for hours on end. It has also taught me a great deal about myself physically and about states of mind that I can use to achieve higher functionality when necessary. It has strongly boosted my confidence and gives a strong sense of physical empowerment (you might call this “feeling sexy”?) that has been a refreshing change in my life.
This is fairly awesome. I was actually speculating something like this. For some reason, I feel fencing / armed fighting is “more natural” than unarmed martial arts. This makes no sense—I think it is far more likely that it has no biological basis but simply a specific application of human generic intelligence / tool-using, I don’t think have evolved specific circuits for beating things with sticks in a skillful way. Yet, it does feel exactly so. I cannot really tell why, maybe just the effect of too many movies, but it does feel so that a human was “born” for holding a sword much more than for making a fist.
May I ask what makes rattan dual wielding so special? From a fitness point of view, they are lighter than metal weapons / feders ? And what makes it more fun? Is it the coordination thing? From my limited experience, I don’t really like that kind of one-handed fencing where I put the other hand behing my back, it is not natural at all. But holding a buckler, or using a two-handed longsword that feels natural enough. I never tried dual-wielding. What it is really like?
Dual wielding is strange, cumbersome, uncomfortable, and amazing since all of its starting flaws decrease as you build proficiency over time.
Dual wielding requires coordination and ambidexterity but you build both of them as you practice regularly. I do practice swings with both arms every day independently and then together. When you dual wield you need to be a proficient fighter with each arm independently and with both arms together. When you fight you need to be able to (attack-left defend-right), (attack-right defend-left), (attack-left attack-right), and (defend-left defend-right) with each mode all being the same mode and switched in between seemlessly. This is harder and easier than it sounds. It also has major psychological benefits when fighting someone since any sort of “mode” that gets adjusted to can throw them off significantly when you switch to another.
Idealy every movement involves both arms simultaneously. However,i’m not quite there yet so there’s a lot of switching between which arm is my attacking arm (with the other defending) back and forth. (With both arms attacking occasionally or when there’s an opening, of course.)
Dual wielding has a reduction in reach compared to a twohanded weapon but it also provides you a constant extra source of defending yourself and harming an opponent which most competent fighters will approriately be very careful against.
The actual experience of fighting with two weapons at once is likely beyond my abilities to describe. It’s quite different from everything I’ve put in my posts and may be very different for me than it would be for you.
Rattan dual wielding is more fun for me personally and complex in a way that is really fun. Kali stick fighting (which i have only learned informally) is interesting because it uses the rattan sticks as a practice weapon that can easily be replaced with something more dangerous (mace, axe, sword, etc.) or anything that you happen to find around you when you need it (pipe, stick, glass bottle, etc.). It builds coordination, control of your off-hand, and allows for a lot of creativity.
The rattan sticks are useful instead of a metal stick due to their light weight, grip, and how easily they bounce off of other rattan sticks. (They also have a very satisfying sound.) Lots of the practice drills i’ve done involve both people using them and executing repeated patterns (occasionally with slight deviations) over and over and over until you fully engrain the response in System 1 and can do it as an immediate reaction to a given stimuli.
Lots of things make it more fun than the fencing for me(which i haven’t done as much of). The extreme coordination, sensation of slashing rather than stabbing, and the strange moves i’ve learned to do with them are really fun. The creativity, spontaneity, the flow of body movements and impacts, the mental reactions, psychological warfare on the person opposite you (learning how to terrify people with a look or yell is fun), and entire experience is awesome.
The fencing that I’ve done was more historical in nature rather than modern fencing. It used a rapier and a dagger rather than just a single foil. I don’t know if I’d reccomend fencing with a foil. It looks interesting but kind of boring. (I would likely learn it just to know how, but not want to do it often.)
Dual-wielding itself is strange. I will have to write more about it a bit later.
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.
Way better for me; tango and soccer are practically dead to me; swimming is fun.
OTOH if you optimize for fitness benefits, I am almost sure swimming is not optimal: e.g. cardio training and weight lifting should be better.
You should really figure out what you wish to optimize for. If you want to optimize for ‘everything’ you should be fine doing ‘anything’ that looks like it helps it.
100K years ago with similar brain sizes but far simpler env, far fewer variables, they figured ways to live happy, fit, sexy, proud etc.
I doubt that such a paradise has ever existed. Happy? Fit? Sexy? Proud? Maybe “fit” can be estimated from the fossil record (what does it say?) but for the rest, how would we know?
I don’t find it very probable either, it is just a hope, that if people of similar brain sizes were not overwhelmed by a hugely complex social environment they could figure out a few things we so far didn’t.
I mean… do we have any explanation how could people 2500 years ago figure out things we often find insightful even today, such as Buddhism? I would say, it was simply because had a simpler environment and thus could dig deeper in a few things. Could reflect more. Perhaps.
do we have any explanation how could people 2500 years ago figure out things we often find insightful even today, such as Buddhism?
Not sure what exactly needs explanation here.
How could people 2500 years ago have insights about life? I guess the same way they do today.
Why do we find those insights interesting? Probably selection bias: those insights that were too culture-dependent were already forgotten, only the more universal ones remained.
Yeah, some people had life simple enough, so they could spend their time meditating about stuff. For example those born in royal families.
Everything :) It is not a good answer if we are about inventing something very new, but my secret hope is reinvent something very old, something that really fits out biological natures but was lost during civilization, and thus solves a lot of problems at once, a lot of problems that all stem of not living in an ancestral env. So I am thinking about somethng as fun as soccer, as fit making as deadlifts, as proud making as boxing and as sexy feeling as tango. Because I am hoping when we are not having fun, are not being fun, being timid or not feeling it will turn out it all comes from not living an ancestral life yet that can be simulated.
I understand it is a bit unlikely, as evolution does not optimze for having made a perfect golden age. But there is a small chance humans did i.e. 100K years ago with similar brain sizes but far simpler env, far fewer variables, they figured ways to live happy, fit, sexy, proud etc.
I mean how else can soccer be so much fun or dancing so sexy etc. if they do not tap into something in the brain that is really old? I don’t think they simply overstimulate circuits made for something else, maybe yes, but that is not the only option, the other option is that there were some ur-activities they all derive from.
So there is a hope that this is only a reinvention, hence the “everything”.
Even if it not a reinvention, optimizing for “everything” can still be salvaged if we show most elements are synergistic.
Finally, it is about what they are optimizing for, not me. Hence the question what is trending.
I don’t know anything about high-brow circles, but I am a big fan of swordfighting and weapon martial arts and would suggest trying that out. There’s been some resurfacing of the pasttime/art/practice in historical recreation groups though I got interested in it after getting a quarter of the way through Musashi’s Book of Nine Spheres and reading his assertion that it would be impossible to understand his book without practicing swordfighting yourself.
I’ve tried out rapier-fencing and kali stick fighting (a stick in each hand) and have found it very intellectually stimulating. It’s also been interesting to explore the areas of my personality and body that involve high physical activity, mobility, agression, and composure under pressure. Fighting effectively while using a weapon in each hand has been described to me as similar to a combination of chess and tennis. (I don’t think it’s quite that difficult, but I’m also not the best swordfighter in the world nor do I practice against said greatest swordfighters.)
Exposure to stimuli that add additional perspectives to everyday life helps as well. Real pressure in life doesn’t involve a spreadsheet deadline. It involves an angry large human attempting to painfully whack you over the head with a large stick (a remarkably refreshing experience) and attempting to deal with that situation as optimally as possible.
HEMA/longsword/Fiore/Marozzo.com/Liechtenauer/Wiktenauer.com/hroarr.com? That stuff?
I think it ranks insanely high on the fun level but does it do anything for fitness, self-confidence or feeling sexy?
Also, have you tried empty-handed martial arts like boxing, wing chun, karate or bjj? How would you are empty-hand vs. weapon on these four axes: fun, fitness, feeling confident, feeling sexy?
HEMA/Fiore is the rapier-fencing stuff that I’ve been doing. I’ve enjoyed learning footwork from the more formal setting I’ve found with the rapier people I know.
The other stuff I’ve done (which makes up the majority) is more freestyle rattan dual-wielding and freestyle shinai fighting that uses a mix of japanese fighting (less kendo, more musashi), filipino stick fighting, and some HEMA twohanded sword fighting (this stuff is weird). This resembles the dogbrothers videos more than anything else (although we both don’t wear much padding and don’t hit anywhere near as hard as we could).
I’ve tried brazilian jiu-jitsu with a focus on very close sparring but I didn’t enjoy it very much at all and found it to have limited usefulness. I don’t think the place I went to gave very good instruction or had the right focus.
I would rate the above as follows:
Rattan dual-wielding fun 10 (12 if i can go above 10 in the 1-10 scale), fitness 8, feeling confident 9 , feeling sexy 8?,
Rapier fighting fun 7, fitness 6, feeling confident 3 , feeling sexy 6? (dressing in armor probably contributes for 4 points and the other 2 are from actual rapier fencing)
shinai fighting fun 6, fitness 5, feeling confident 4, feeling sexy 3
brazilian jiu-jitsu (unoptimized dojo) fun 1, fitness 3, feeling confident 2, feeling sexy 0
Rattan (kali stick) dual wielding wins by a large margin and is probably the most fun thing I do in my life. It accomplishes the all-important task among sports of creating a strong cardio and muscular activity that is fun to the point that you will do it for hours on end. It has also taught me a great deal about myself physically and about states of mind that I can use to achieve higher functionality when necessary. It has strongly boosted my confidence and gives a strong sense of physical empowerment (you might call this “feeling sexy”?) that has been a refreshing change in my life.
This is fairly awesome. I was actually speculating something like this. For some reason, I feel fencing / armed fighting is “more natural” than unarmed martial arts. This makes no sense—I think it is far more likely that it has no biological basis but simply a specific application of human generic intelligence / tool-using, I don’t think have evolved specific circuits for beating things with sticks in a skillful way. Yet, it does feel exactly so. I cannot really tell why, maybe just the effect of too many movies, but it does feel so that a human was “born” for holding a sword much more than for making a fist.
May I ask what makes rattan dual wielding so special? From a fitness point of view, they are lighter than metal weapons / feders ? And what makes it more fun? Is it the coordination thing? From my limited experience, I don’t really like that kind of one-handed fencing where I put the other hand behing my back, it is not natural at all. But holding a buckler, or using a two-handed longsword that feels natural enough. I never tried dual-wielding. What it is really like?
Whoops. Forgot to post this:
Dual wielding is strange, cumbersome, uncomfortable, and amazing since all of its starting flaws decrease as you build proficiency over time.
Dual wielding requires coordination and ambidexterity but you build both of them as you practice regularly. I do practice swings with both arms every day independently and then together. When you dual wield you need to be a proficient fighter with each arm independently and with both arms together. When you fight you need to be able to (attack-left defend-right), (attack-right defend-left), (attack-left attack-right), and (defend-left defend-right) with each mode all being the same mode and switched in between seemlessly. This is harder and easier than it sounds. It also has major psychological benefits when fighting someone since any sort of “mode” that gets adjusted to can throw them off significantly when you switch to another.
Idealy every movement involves both arms simultaneously. However,i’m not quite there yet so there’s a lot of switching between which arm is my attacking arm (with the other defending) back and forth. (With both arms attacking occasionally or when there’s an opening, of course.)
Dual wielding has a reduction in reach compared to a twohanded weapon but it also provides you a constant extra source of defending yourself and harming an opponent which most competent fighters will approriately be very careful against.
The actual experience of fighting with two weapons at once is likely beyond my abilities to describe. It’s quite different from everything I’ve put in my posts and may be very different for me than it would be for you.
Rattan dual wielding is more fun for me personally and complex in a way that is really fun. Kali stick fighting (which i have only learned informally) is interesting because it uses the rattan sticks as a practice weapon that can easily be replaced with something more dangerous (mace, axe, sword, etc.) or anything that you happen to find around you when you need it (pipe, stick, glass bottle, etc.). It builds coordination, control of your off-hand, and allows for a lot of creativity.
The rattan sticks are useful instead of a metal stick due to their light weight, grip, and how easily they bounce off of other rattan sticks. (They also have a very satisfying sound.) Lots of the practice drills i’ve done involve both people using them and executing repeated patterns (occasionally with slight deviations) over and over and over until you fully engrain the response in System 1 and can do it as an immediate reaction to a given stimuli.
Lots of things make it more fun than the fencing for me(which i haven’t done as much of). The extreme coordination, sensation of slashing rather than stabbing, and the strange moves i’ve learned to do with them are really fun. The creativity, spontaneity, the flow of body movements and impacts, the mental reactions, psychological warfare on the person opposite you (learning how to terrify people with a look or yell is fun), and entire experience is awesome.
The fencing that I’ve done was more historical in nature rather than modern fencing. It used a rapier and a dagger rather than just a single foil. I don’t know if I’d reccomend fencing with a foil. It looks interesting but kind of boring. (I would likely learn it just to know how, but not want to do it often.)
Dual-wielding itself is strange. I will have to write more about it a bit later.
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.
… swimming? It never gets old.
Way better for me; tango and soccer are practically dead to me; swimming is fun.
OTOH if you optimize for fitness benefits, I am almost sure swimming is not optimal: e.g. cardio training and weight lifting should be better.
You should really figure out what you wish to optimize for. If you want to optimize for ‘everything’ you should be fine doing ‘anything’ that looks like it helps it.
I doubt that such a paradise has ever existed. Happy? Fit? Sexy? Proud? Maybe “fit” can be estimated from the fossil record (what does it say?) but for the rest, how would we know?
I don’t find it very probable either, it is just a hope, that if people of similar brain sizes were not overwhelmed by a hugely complex social environment they could figure out a few things we so far didn’t.
I mean… do we have any explanation how could people 2500 years ago figure out things we often find insightful even today, such as Buddhism? I would say, it was simply because had a simpler environment and thus could dig deeper in a few things. Could reflect more. Perhaps.
Not sure what exactly needs explanation here.
How could people 2500 years ago have insights about life? I guess the same way they do today.
Why do we find those insights interesting? Probably selection bias: those insights that were too culture-dependent were already forgotten, only the more universal ones remained.
Yeah, some people had life simple enough, so they could spend their time meditating about stuff. For example those born in royal families.