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Comment by mathattack | Hacker News Reader

There is a strange dichotomy here... I do believe that exercise helps thinking, but when I was growing up, very few of the smarter people were involved in sports, either formally or informally. Perhaps 1 in 20 was on a team, and few were that active otherwise. The link to drama and music was much bigger.

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Probably because you're talking about academic success which is only loosely correlated to intelligence, and almost entirely not correlated to "brain health."

"Brain health," as it's used in this article, would also contribute to coordination, muscle control, and various other things that would benefit athletes in ways that are totally opaque to you or me.

The article doesn't say exercise makes you smarter, and even if it did, "smarter" is an awfully vague term.

Fair point. I guess by smart I'm thinking "least work for best grades" but that's a very loose definition.

Also - it's a very small sample size. And if I look more broadly... 2 of the seemingly "dumbest jocks" I knew in college went on to become doctors, one at the Mayo clinic. So perhaps their intelligence was showing in other areas until they got out of school.

Similarly, one of the 'dumb jocks' from my high school just graduated with a PhD from Harvard, which means humans are awful at estimating the intelligence of others.

Or, more specifically, humans are awful at estimating the intelligence of others when they assume those with a special degree are more intelligent.

Or, you know, someone obtaining a PhD breaks the "dumb jock" mould without necessarily being more or less intelligent whomever it is that you are referring to.

Anyone who wasted precious time to get Phd is a retard in real world brosky.

Anyone who wasted precious keystrokes to type a word like "retard," never mind "brosky," is in no position to speak down to PhDs.

So many people in this thread trying to figure out reason for the evolutionary connection between excersize and brain health... And you hit it so effortlessly... Seems obvious

One more thing is emotional health, it's already pretty known that exercise helps with anxiety and depression. But I disagree about your assertion about intelligence, I think it plays a huge role in academic success.

There are plenty of people with above average intelligence who enjoy below average academic success, and inversely plenty of people with below average intelligence who enjoy above average academic success.

This can happen for a variety of reasons: poverty, nutrition, "misaligned" interests, etc.

Intelligence plays a role in that someone with an IQ of 80 probably isn't going to Stanford, but there are ostensibly plenty of people with IQs far above your average Stanford student who will never set foot in a university.

Percentage of high school seniors who participated in various school-related extracurricular activities, by sex: 1990 and 2001 - https://nces.ed.gov/programs/youthindicators/Indicators.asp?...

If artistic ability has a strong influence on intelligence compared to athleticism, then P(intelligent | artistic) >= P(intelligent | athletic). We know that P(athletic) > P(artistic) from the data.

By Bayes' theorem:

P(intelligent | artistic) = P(artistic | intelligent) * P(intelligent) / P(artistic).

P(intelligent | athletic) = P(athletic | intelligent) * P(intelligent) / P(athletic).

Ignoring P(intelligent) for a sec, we find

P(intelligent | artistic) ~ P(artistic | intelligent) / P(artistic)

P(intelligent | athletic) ~ P(athletic | intelligent) / P(athletic)

If we accept the assumption that artistic ability is a bigger influence, then

P(artistic | intelligent) / P(artistic) > P(athletic | intelligent) / P(athletic)

Because P(athletic) > P(artistic),

P(artistic | intelligent) > P(artistic) * P(athletic | intelligent) / P(athletic)

P(artistic)/P(athletic) must be less than 1, so we get

P(artistic | intelligent) > P(athletic | intelligent)

I'm not really sure where I was headed with this, but it was neat to think about. If anyone spots an error please just correct me.

But did you run the numbers? I can't go through the link.

There is nothing in the data that says that participation is exclusive, "other" bucket is larger than "performing arts". So the whole thing is invalid. But most importantly participation doesn't mean ability. There are plenty of people in both camps who clearly are not able.

Is it possible kids maintain a higher rate of metabolic activity just by growing thus offsetting some of the activity you don't see in children with above average intelligence?

It could be. Also could be a low sample size. :-)

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