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Comment by svrtknst | Hacker News Reader

Without prediction, we wouldn't have goalies.

A puck can pretty easily travel something like 30-40 m/s, and shots are regularly taken 4-5 meters from the net.

Goalies have, what, 1/10th of a second to track and evaluate the shot and make a qualified save. If that was pure evaluation and reaction we would be far too slow.

I also think most people who've played goalie in any sport know that you get a _sense_ for where the shot is going. High, low, left, right etc so it's not just guesswork and statistics either.

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Without prediction, we wouldn’t be able to _walk_!

There is a lot built into the biomechanics of your legs too. The relevant term is “passive dynamics”.

And a lot of unconscious thought for the biomechanics of the body.

https://radiolab.org/episodes/91524-where-am-i

The section on Ian Waterman.

Another article about him - https://mcneilllab.uchicago.edu/pdfs/IW_lost_body.pdf

> Mr. Ian Waterman, sometimes referred to as ‘IW’, suffered at age 19 a sudden, total deafferentation of his body from the neck down—the near total loss of all the touch, proprioception, and limb spatial position senses that tell you, without looking, where your body is and what it is doing. The loss followed a never-diagnosed fever that is believed to have set off an auto-immune reaction. The immediate behavioral effect was immobility, even though IW’s motor system was unaffected and there was no paralysis. The problem was not lack of movement per se but lack of control.

https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-man-who-lost-his-body/

Fascinating stuff, thanks for sharing!

>you get a _sense_ for where the shot is going. High, low, left, right etc so it's not just guesswork and statistics either.

It is guess work and statistics. Just because it happens at the level of neurons rather than as a conscious series of mathematical steps does not change what it is. It may manifest as a "feeling", but "feeling" is just a way for the conscious mind to have a referent object as the source of information which comes from subconscious thought processes.

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