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Comment by verbin217 | Hacker News Reader

Lol. This was a fantastic comment. I love the ending. We really are living in strange times. It's as if everyone is utterly intent on working but can't find the time to figure out what they ought to do. Everyone seems increasingly scared. I may be projecting or just increasingly aware. It's like they know they don't know but can't face it or resolve it. They just keep doing the bullshit until they embrace it. Our potential is so ripe. It's sad.

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This is because the social contract still says we should all be working (and be rewarded for that work) but there is leas and less 'real' work around. So people invent 'work' like tracking marginal improvements, which may be helping with one small thing but completely missing out the big picture (we shouldn't be encouraging world class athletes to compete at such levels anymore as it is no longer healthy for them and sets unrealistic expectations for everyone else)

I love these sorts of negative assessments of greatness. I fucked over so many kids in math growing up. They came to believe they'd never be good at it because I worked ahead and they didn't realize it. Maybe I can't make up for the output I squashed. I'll never know. :(

>as it is no longer healthy for them

I'm not sure if this is sarcasm or not, but I'll go out on a limb and say that those athletes are far, far more healthy than the people slumping over their keyboards in an office all day (which is probably 90% of this message board).

Athletes are optimized to perform, but they can still be unhealthy in that many of them get injured, take unsafe risks, etc.

For example, bodybuilding is known to be relatively safe and healthy in terms of training injuries and average-case benefits of training, but top bodybuilders - and even marginal amateurs - are not healthy, they are pushing their body way out of balance for pageantry; just listen to this guy [0] go on for thirty minutes about his pre-contest drug program. Likewise, basketball optimizes for tall people who can move fast, but basketball injuries are an everyday event, because tall people who move fast overstress their joints and ligaments.

Where athletes are healthy, it's because health and performance happen to align together. There are plenty of people here who want to optimize their mental abilities, and will go to the same extremes as any athlete. Paul Erdős was known for running amphetamines[1] to aid his ability to concentrate. Today you hear about folks using prescription pharmaceuticals for the same reasons.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lF4zL_BdePc [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s#Personality

Whether it's true or not, I don't think we ask those sort of questions often enough.

Those NFL concussions don't seem so great.

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