110 N.F.L. Brains • Hacker News Board

Re: 110 N.F.L. Brains

#181

Post by alistproducer2 » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 10:30 PM UTC

kendallpark wrote: post #172

alistproducer2 wrote: post #87

Historians will look back at American Football as our analog to the Roman's gladiatorial games. A lot of people don't realize that during the Imperial era of Rome fights to the death had become uncommon.[0] The games were watched in an arena and primarily sold hard-hitting violence between members of the lower castes of society and sometimes people got killed or horribly maimed....sound familiar? I stopped watching A…

Honestly (as a former football player) I find this opinion to reek of pseudo-academic snobbery. You know why football is such a popular sport? Because people love football. More importantly, people love playing football. I understand that not everyone sees the appeal of the sport and it's their right to have their own preferences. But to simply dismiss the passionate pursuits of hundreds of thousands of players acros…

I'm not really accosting the sport itself - which I played as well and have always enjoyed. The NCAA and the NFL are the primary targets of my ire as at least the NFL has long known about this and has only begun to pay lip service to fixing what it can because of public scrutiny. So based on that, yes rich old white guys paying young poor (mostly black) guys to go brain themselves for America's entertainment does feel like en exploitative "caste regime" as you put it.

Re: 110 N.F.L. Brains

#182

Post by abecedarius » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 10:34 PM UTC

noxToken wrote: post #13

jordache wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>might only change youth and amateur level competition. Professional leagues will probably continue apace, even amid full disclosure of well-known hazards. You don't see a direction link between the grassroots levels to the pro level? If you kill the interest, or participation at the grassroots level, there will never be a compelling pro league to source from. Good riddance to a lame game of consisting of mostly low…

I feel like you're really not giving credit where it is due. Yes, the trope is that football consists entirely of meatheads. The infamous movie The Blind Side comes to mind where they falsely treat Michael Oher like moron in spite of his capability does nothing to put this to rest. However there is a lot of strategy from the coach picking the play to the individual match-up right on the field. And to say that it is l…

It looks like average IQ in the NFL is lower than among programmers, but not too low, by this proxy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderlic_test#Median_score_by...

Google shows some online Wonderlic tests if you'd like to find your own score. (I haven't tried any.)

Re: 110 N.F.L. Brains

#183

Post by ilaksh » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 10:55 PM UTC

artursapek wrote: post #9

I think people take for granted now how good the Times is at these interactive, zine-like layouts for their feature articles. I just want to say another job well done on this one. Each one of these I see is a work of art that clearly took a lot of time across the team.

It only loads the first paragraph on my Nexus, and desktop mode on Nexus shows just a bunch of icons.

Re: 110 N.F.L. Brains

#184

Post by grillvogel » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 10:56 PM UTC

alistproducer2 wrote: post #87

Historians will look back at American Football as our analog to the Roman's gladiatorial games. A lot of people don't realize that during the Imperial era of Rome fights to the death had become uncommon.[0] The games were watched in an arena and primarily sold hard-hitting violence between members of the lower castes of society and sometimes people got killed or horribly maimed....sound familiar? I stopped watching A…

why do people take issue with highly paid nfl players getting injured doing something they enjoy, but have no problem with military members getting killed and maimed for 20k/year? some people are just more violent/aggressive than others, football provides a relatively peaceful outlet for that.

Re: 110 N.F.L. Brains

#185

Post by bhouston » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 11:02 PM UTC

bisRepetita wrote: post #167

bhouston wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Heading soccer balls is proven to at least temporarily reduce IQ. I've never let my kids play that sport. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2016/1... http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/01/health/soccer-headers-concussi...

Do you let your kids play football? Honest question, bc at the end of the day, beyond all scientific studies, it is parents who will define which sports are popular and actually played.

Football is also no. Also probably no to rugby and contact hockey. I would prefer to avoid all sports that involve a lot of knocks to the head. They are just sports, it isn't worth it.

Re: 110 N.F.L. Brains

#186

Post by andrewsyc » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 11:09 PM UTC

As much as I love boxing and other sports, they are terrible for one's brain. The worst thing one can do is cause any damage to your brain as that dramatically effects quality of life.

Re: 110 N.F.L. Brains

#187

Post by kendallpark » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 11:19 PM UTC

alistproducer2 wrote: post #181

kendallpark wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly (as a former football player) I find this opinion to reek of pseudo-academic snobbery. You know why football is such a popular sport? Because people love football. More importantly, people love playing football. I understand that not everyone sees the appeal of the sport and it's their right to have their own preferences. But to simply dismiss the passionate pursuits of hundreds of thousands of players acros…

I'm not really accosting the sport itself - which I played as well and have always enjoyed. The NCAA and the NFL are the primary targets of my ire as at least the NFL has long known about this and has only begun to pay lip service to fixing what it can because of public scrutiny. So based on that, yes rich old white guys paying young poor (mostly black) guys to go brain themselves for America's entertainment does fee…

So this exact thought has crossed my mind on several occasions in regards to the NFL and NCAA. There's something about the optics of the rich white sports owner looking down from their box office as teams of mostly African American men smash each other to bits. That being said, just because something creates a visual analogy of a caste system, it doesn't mean that the actual workings of that system are in fact, caste-like.

First, NCAA and NFL is composed of a range of races and economic backgrounds. Your third-generation legacy QB is getting sacked all the same as your QB from the projects. And the rich white patrons don't care either way.

Fact #1: Most NFL players are black. Fact #2: Most NFL owners are white.

Does this speak more about systemic issues at the player level, or the owner level? I'd say the owner level. There is no lack of white athletes trying to make it into college and pro ball. I don't think recruiters are recruiting a disproportionately high amount of black players compared to white players because they want to spare the white race from long-term injuries. They're just picking the best athletes. In contrast, it's easy to explain why there are less black NFL team owners.

Secondly, I'm a bit confused as to why "poor" seems to be equated with "black" in your scenario. Yeah, we can easily look at NCAA players on TV and visually confirm that over 50% are black. But how do you know what percentage of players is poor? There are lots of poor rural white kids in the NCAA. There are lots of suburban middle class black kids. And by the time you're playing in the NFL, no one is poor.

Re: 110 N.F.L. Brains

#188

Post by et2o » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 11:46 PM UTC

richardwhiuk wrote: post #97

et2o wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CTE is a post-mortem phenotype. Dementia related to degenerative brain disease is common but not often measured (autopsies aren't done very often for senile patients with an obvious cause of death, especially for autopsies that disfigure the skull). The idea that There are related common problems in my field of biomedical research. I am a published author in Alzheimer disease, although it is no longer my primary focu…

"The idea that (In fact, it's possible that all CTEs diagnosed in this report would be classified as purely dementia in the general population).

Yes exactly.

I also think the general population prevalence estimates for dementia are too low, for reasons not worth going into here.

Re: 110 N.F.L. Brains

#189

Post by warcher » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 11:51 PM UTC

ggreer wrote: post #166

warcher wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't say that. Here's the quote I believe you skimmed and misinterpreted. "About 1,300 former players have died since the B.U. group began examining brains. So even if every one of the other 1,200 players had tested negative — which even the heartiest skeptics would agree could not possibly be the case — the minimum C.T.E. prevalence would be close to 9 percent, vastly higher than in the general population." T…

As I said before, that's in the 10th paragraph of the article. The first line people read is: > A neuropathologist has examined the brains of 111 N.F.L. players — and 110 were found to have C.T.E. It's incredibly disingenuous to lead with that. It makes readers think that the rate of CTE is almost 100%. Readers have to get through nine more paragraphs (including profiles of two NFL players) before the truth shows up.…

110/111 testing positive for CTE is insanely high, even with selection bias. This is a big, big deal, and should be treated like a big, big deal. This is not hyperbolic in the slightest. If a chemical plant was suspected of causing cancer, and you got those test results, same experimental bias and all, it would be shut down instantly.

Boyoga!

Re: 110 N.F.L. Brains

#190

Post by kendallpark » Tue, Jul 25, 2017, 11:54 PM UTC

mikeh1010 wrote: post #12

I want to push back on the "every sport is dangerous" argument I'm seeing in here. There's a difference between "you might die right in the middle of this very fun activity" and "you might die slowly and horribly years from now when you're retired and in the midst of raising a family." I ski pretty aggressively, and of course I might die doing that. But every day I go home and know, "well it wasn't today! Today was j…

> I ski and snowboard and I'm not planning on stopping, I think the benefits outweigh the risks. I'd say that about most sports but I'm not about to let either of my kids play football or box.

That's interesting because the accidental insurance (that I took out during the football years) had separate premiums for skiers and snowboarders. The most serious concussion that I ever got was from snowboarding.

> There's a difference between "you might die right in the middle of this very fun activity" and "you might die slowly and horribly years from now when you're retired and in the midst of raising a family."

It's kinda arbitrary to draw these lines of "my dangerous sport is superior to your dangerous sport." It's all risks and benefits. Skiing/snowboarding is pretty dangerous for catastrophic accidents AND it still has a high concussion rate.

0.37 = American football concussion rate per 1,000 athletic exposures

0.2 = Skiing/snowboarding closed head injury rate per 1,000 mountain visits

You're not incredibly far behind football in terms of risk, my friend.