Heroin destroys lives, dragging not just the users, but those around them down. Similar to TBI.
And in that case, if an "extreme heroin" player published a mathematics paper, I still would be impressed.
Agreed, football is worse: we actively encourage and reward modern day gladiatorial combat such that otherwise brilliant people feel the need to participate. NFL players publishing papers and having successful academic careers afterwards are not the norm.
It really doesn't do anything to further the discourse.
I think that pivoting the framing from a known known (look at these guys who have brain damage and are killing themselves) to a known unknown (have we really accounted for all the variance?) is risky, because you're then flirting with confirmation bias.
I think that if one guy wants to fly through a canyon in a wingsuit, it's one matter. But when you have an entire nation cheering this behavior on, it starts to make us introspect and say... wait.. exactly how hedonistic are we? Is this really the kind of behavior we want to teach our children? The reductio is that it could lead to us selecting against ourselves, as a species. Go Team!