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Comment by _5meq | Hacker News Reader

This is cute, but with what we now know about CTE, I can't help but find boxing, football, etc disgusting.

I'm not just being a pretentious nerd, I actually like sports and I used to love watching boxing / MMA.

It is so so so much worse than what we thought. Dave Mirra, Chris Benoit, Aaron Hernandez, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NFL_players_with_chron...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/07/25/sports/footba...

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Boxing at amateur level does not produce any noticeable changes in the brain: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2034739/

Please find boxing enjoyable again. ;)

Considering that we now know that repeated subconcussive hits over time can result in CTE later in life, and that even amateur boxers during sparring will suffer many of those, my priors are strongly in the other direction. It’s going to take many more studies coming to the same conclusion to convince me otherwise.

Part of my priors is my exposure to amateur MMA, and training and sparring with people who fought amateur MMA. You take a lot of hits in sparring, and some of them are hard enough to disorient you, even thought it’s not a concussion.

As a follow on, if the hit is hard enough to disorient you, it is likely doing damage. If I understand correctly, most of the accumulated damage in CTE comes from subclinical impacts.

> This is cute, but with what we now know about CTE, I can't help but find boxing, American football (handegg), etc disgusting. FTFY

Seriously the rest of the world calls 'Soccer': 'football'

"Unqualified, the word football is understood to refer to whichever form of football is the most popular in the regional context in which the word appears."

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

...though association football does not have a concussion problem the way American football does. I'm not aware whether Australian or rugby football have concussion issues as well.

Soccer does have brain trauma issues, from people bouncing the ball off their head. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2016/1...

HN isn't "regional" though.

I feel like I could have written your comment.

Even without the long-term damage associated with CTE, there is limited intellectual value to any sport that involves hitting others in the head.

What do you mean by "intellectual value"?

I find it interesting to watch combat sports, because it's like an experiment in human physique and psychology that reveals of what kind of self defense is actually effective and how humans function under extreme conditions. For me, that is valuable even if I never got in a fight for the rest of my life.

God forbid someone not spend their life minmaxing for "intellectual value" (whatever that means).

Without going to boxing I never would have developed the discipline and endurance necessary for my university degree. How's that for intellectual value?

Likewise (MMA in my case).

Learning to fight generalizes beyond actual fighting.

There is such thing as value that is non-intellectual.

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