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Comment by gooosle | Hacker News Reader

> Think about these fantasy sports gambling apps, your coworkers who distract themselves from the drudgery of work by discussing sports, the financial institutions that take a transaction fee from money being passed around, the infinite scroll of content on social media, all because of athletes.

I don't see how you can claim gambling, and pointless discussion about some arbitrary game you (they) don't even play are positive. Financial transactions for the sake of financial transactions are also completely pointless.

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> I don't see how you can claim gambling, and pointless discussion about some arbitrary game you (they) don't even play are positive.

By choosing different basis vectors? Not everyone's values match yours.

Your argument amounts to a meaningless tautology - 'everything that exists is good and valuable'.

Yeah, maybe, but that's neither useful nor interesting.

'Heroin addition is good and valuable to society - if you disagree it's because the addict's values just don't match yours'

> Your argument amounts to a meaningless tautology - 'everything that exists is good and valuable'.

It's unclear how this is related to what I said.

> 'Heroin addition is good and valuable to society - if you disagree it's because the addict's values just don't match yours'

What does it mean for something to be "good and valuable to society"? What is the "society" that is passing absolute judgement here? I think of society as a collection of people, and collections don't have values, individuals do.

Is it surprising the the values of someone choosing to take actions you consider repulsive are different than yours?

The main discussion point of this comment chain is around the practical benefit to society of the NFL.

Coming in and saying 'we can't judge the practical societal value of anything because groups of people don't have values' is both incorrect and does not argue either for or against NFL as having a practical value, or introduce any new argument or data into the discussion.

> repulsive

Spare me the poetics, you're the only one to talk about repulsiveness in this comment chain so far.

I wasn't really arguing about benefit to society though. I just said the gears of the economy turn on the back of such "distractions".

Benefit to society becomes a philosophical argument. Personally I don't value most forms of entertainment, gambling, etc. Humans only need food and whatever basic needs there are. I enjoy classical music but I would even argue that music is just noise at the end of the day. On a scale of heroin to Chopin, I'd put the NFL closer to Chopin.

Nevertheless, these seemingly "worthless" forms of sense-stimuli are supporting a huge portion of our livelihoods at the moment.

By the way Saquon Barkley can squat 600lbs. Surely that's of value, no?

> Nevertheless, these seemingly "worthless" forms of sense-stimuli are supporting a huge portion of our livelihoods at the moment.

'supporting' in what way?

> By the way Saquon Barkley can squat 600lbs. Surely that's of value, no?

It could be of value to him, not really of value to others or society at large.

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