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Comment by whenwillitstop | Hacker News Reader

Why arent athletes the most intelligent then? Generally in society there is considered a negative correletion between people that exercise/play a ton of sports and intelligence. Whether this is true or not is up to debate, but stereotypes exist for a reason...

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I think most professional athletes are highly intelligent, but some never learned to apply it to anything other than sport.

Watch Kobe or LeBron on the court. There is an incredible awareness of the shifting context of the game and the available moves. In the greatest athletes it is faster and more fluid than in most athletes.

It's a constantly shifting analytical mode that leans heavily on training and instinct, but is full of novelty. Consider that opponents spend weeks watching tape in hopes of understanding how to anticipate what Kobe will do.

In terms of physical metrics (size, speed, etc.) professional athletes are pretty close to average. I think it is a combination of intellect and general desire to win that makes some people become great athletes.

Because of what I like to call Cartesian Blindness (viewing the world through the mind/body duality) we assume it's simply a matter of great athletes having superior muscle fibers, etc.

Do you have a source for your statement that professional athletes are pretty close to average in "physical metrics"? By most accounts, there's been a recent Cambrian explosion in college and professional sports where larger pools of participants has resulted in a higher frequency of genetic outliers gravitating towards the sport for which their body is best suited.

David Epstein's "The Sports Gene" covers this topic with some depth.

Many people are brilliant, talented, and have a strong desire to win but lack the physical aptitude to support that at elite levels of play.

grandalf speaks of team sports and situational awareness, complex planning, reading the floor, and other mental aspects of sports.

The examples in the "Sports Gene" are mostly about the kind of genetics that allow some to run micro to milliseconds faster than others, oxygenate slightly better, and so on. These things might help in the olympics where such minor distinctions matter but are certainly not a key or deciding factor in many sports.

Aside from certain pathological cases (gymnasts need to be short and thin, offensive linemen need to be freaky massive), the difference genetics makes is pretty small in the grand scheme of things compared to proper training and mindset. Definitely less than 10% of total performance (with the exact number depending on the specific sport). Of course, at the very top, 10% is often a bigger margin than between first and last place.

While I completely agree about awareness being a form of intelligence, professional athletes (for the most part) are really on a different plane when it comes to physical metrics. An average person will never be able to attain a 4.4 40 for instance.

> An average person will never be able to attain a 4.4 40 for instance

Totally, true, but the number of people who are good at professional football is a very tiny subset of the people who can run a 4.4 40.

Athletes score very highly on specific measures of intelligence:

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

http://discovermagazine.com/2010/apr/16-the-brain-athletes-a...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligenc...

While I don't think athletes are the most intelligent, I think the stereotypes of dumb jocks is simply a type of bias. If you were an athlete with potential, you would put more focus on your sport instead of academics. If you were bad at sports you would typically spend less time doing them which would then allow you to focus your time on other things like academia. In America, when all you need to do to get As in like highschool is to put effort, the ones who weren't great in sports tend to get higher grades which is perceived as having a higher intelligence. Thinking that athleticism is negatively correlated to intelligence is just ignorant.

Athletes aren't exactly a random sample. They are people who have self-selected to spend time on athletics.

I also don't think the stereotype is accurate. We tend to confuse interest in pursuits that are perceived as intellectual with actual intelligence.

It takes a lot of hard work to be exceptional at symbolic manipulation/"smart". It also takes a lot of hard work to be an exceptional athlete. Unfortunately, there is only so much time in a day.

You might be surprised to learn that there is a negative correlation between obesity and IQ.

It depends on the sport. Check the average GPA for any top level university gymnastics team. It needs to be a sport that invokes complex coordination of a wide variety of muscle groups.

The basic idea is that while you are learning to do challenging gymnastic (or other physical) skills, the brain is releasing growth hormones to learn the skill. But they aren't targeted. It's hard to grow the part of the brain that does a cartwheel on a balance beam without also growing the part of the brain that does calculus.

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