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Comment by nickparker | Hacker News Reader

I really enjoyed a lot of the advice and thinking in this piece, but I have one nit: These biological analogies are terrible. They don't add anything to the persuasion, and actually detract significantly because they're wrong.

A) Biology is not inherently linear, at all. If I had to pick a single scaling function to identify with biology, I would pick the exponential.

B) "Biologically, we are sprinting beings, not marathon beings." is utterly untrue. We evolved as persistence hunters, we're woefully ineffective sprinters. Basically all large animals are dramatically faster than us.

Good article, but man do I hate woo bad analogies like this. It's almost as bad as the guys that talk about "Quantum" crap when I'm just looking for decent meditation help.

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> We evolved as persistence hunters

If you haven’t read about cursorial hunting, the Wikipedia article [1] is worth the time. Humans are one of like five known persistance hunters. Our ancestors (and certain Kalahari contemporaries) would literally chase their prey until they died of exhaustion.

From the perspective of the prey, it is uniquely horrifying. You outrun your predator. But every time you stop to catch your breath, before you’ve had a chance to cool down, they reappear, in the distance, on the horizon. Each time nearer. Hours or even days on end. Repeatedly until, finally, your legs or heart give out.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting

This works in business, too, if you have the stamina to persistently improve and compete.

> From the perspective of the prey, it is uniquely horrifying. You outrun your predator. But every time you stop to catch your breath, before you’ve had a chance to cool down, they reappear, in the distance, on the horizon.

Reminds me of the film "No Country for Old Men". One of the most thrilling movies I've ever seen.

Horses can run 30+ MPH, and humans have a tough time getting to 15 MPH. Still, over a long race, humans are faster than horses -- just need a race of several days! Lots of tribes in Africa discovered such things long ago.

There's a race between humans and horses every year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon

Definitely need to have a look in to this. It seems inconceivable a human on foot could outpace a rider on horseback!

The point is endurance, not speed!

Basically after a few days the poor horse gets totally exhausted and just stops.

Might make a claim that a human walking on two legs is especially efficient use of food energy.

To increase the amazement, supposedly the US military has discovered that on really long exercise, say, all-out exercise over several days, say, walking 100 miles through deep snow, women have more endurance than men. The explanation is that the women start out with more fat reserves and are able to use them. So, too soon the men run out of fat and, thus, out of energy.

So, maybe in running down a horse, African zebra, or antelope, female humans might be better than male humans!

Huh, interesting. This Quora answer[1] claims:

Some horses do have tremendous endurance capabilities, but not many. The average companion-horse probably would not comfortably go 56km / 35 miles in one day. The average rider would find 35 miles too far, as well!

The Wikipedia article referred to up-thread talks about the Human vs Horse race being 35 km / 22 miles, with the humans on foot having a 15 minute head start.

I always assumed those movie sequences where a bunch of folk on horseback go after a person on foot, who had a few minutes head start, were a dramatisation. Turns out it's probably more realistic than I thought, with the person on foot having the advantage of being able to traverse terrain a horse would have to go around.

1. https://www.quora.com/Horseback-Riding-How-long-can-a-horse-...

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