Comment by pj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pj | Hacker News Reader

"The solution to the problem is, without a doubt, education," the adviser says. "Change won't happen until grown men start wanting to learn."

That sums it up right there and by "it," I mean "all of it." The problem. The problem with our society. The problem with the educational system. The problem with our national debt. With our dependence on foreign oil.

Why don't people want to learn anymore? I don't understand why it seems so easy, so obvious, that "this" just isn't the way.

Am I the only one frustrated by the continued bad decision making? We sell these poor athletes, and I mean poor in every sense, the illusion of wealth and fame and happiness and then rip the carpet right out from under them. It takes years, decades of dedication to a dream and then they are bankrupt. Not only do they not have the millions they were "promised," but they have no education, no skills applicable outside sports, their bodies are too old to do the only thing they can do.

Why do we keep doing this to people?

It's really sad. It makes me really sad.

What's going to happen? I can't see anything good coming from this. I can't see any good future down this path. It feels so much like the wrong path. I feel like I'm being taken down this bad path against my will. I don't want to go down this path, but it's like I'm stuck in this huge pack of people all stampeding toward a huge cliff and I don't want to run over the cliff. "There's a cliff ahead!!" I yell and no one hears it, they're too busy running, not even knowing where they are going.

What am I supposed to do? What are people who don't want to go off the cliff supposed to do?

"Why don't people want to learn anymore?"

Most of these athletes never did.

They are the opposite of us. While we were misunderstood for all those years working our butts off in anonymity, they were getting their butts kissed. From the time they were toddlers. All the way through school where they were promoted along whether or not they ever went to class.

When you have nothing left for the ass kissers to kiss, then what are you going to do?

I was shocked the other day to read that basically really good athletes at a top-tier sports schools are basically professional athletes. Boosters lease SUVs like Cadillac Escalades, give the athletes the keys to the car - and it's all quasi-legal because the Boosters aren't technically directly affiliated with the athletic program.

When in the States there is so much societal pressure to be athletic/look athletic/enjoy the spectacle of sports, I think we are in trouble where Asian tigers like China have societal pressure and strong peer approval to study hard and aspire to become engineers.

When in the States there is so much societal pressure to be athletic/look athletic/enjoy the spectacle of sports, I think we are in trouble where Asian tigers like China have societal pressure and strong peer approval to study hard and aspire to become engineers.

The strongest push in the US (and it's not even close) is to make money. The intense materialism here will insulate the country from most of its truly dangerous fools simply because capitalism works so well. Tocqueville, back in the early 19th century, made a note of the anti-intellectual streak in the US and said that a scholar would generally be happier in Europe unless they could occupy themselves with the challenge of earning dough.

Times have not changed. Except for a burst of scientific enthusiasm at the peak of the Cold War (1946-1964), commerce has driven most innovation.

Sports programs in US schools are quite remarkable. They clearly bring in a lot of revenue for the schools and it seems to me that's a good thing.

The bad thing is everything having to do with the student athletes.

So why not just make college sports professional. Just like the NFL and the NBA, this would simply be another league, made up of college branded teams.

Ah, but we can't do that, we can't call a spade a spade. Society has to maintain a charade. It's like collectively we're in the closet. And we're very passionate about college sports but we just can not get out of the closet and say fuck it, just make the sports program professional.

Only a few schools make money off the football team, for example UTexas and Duke. Most lose money on sports.

I'm not sure this is true. I asked someone in my university's donation department and they said whenever the football team wins, it's like a hurricane of donations coming through the door.

I suspect that many externalities, both positive and negative, are ignored (sometimes selectively) when schools make statements about the profitability of a sports program. A few months ago, I was surprised to learn that the daughter of my wife's friend was not accepted to Ohio State. She was an in-state resident with a 23 on her ACT. Hardly a stellar score, but above the National average. Back in my day (15 years ago), she would have been rubber-stamped. Apparently, OSU was able to parlay its success on the football field into lots of undergrad applications. So, they were able to become more selective. This may be the start of a positive feedback loop that results in a reputation more like U of M than some random state college.

[No, I don't think reputation is everything. But, if that's what they wanted to improve, sports may have been a very efficient mechanism for all the wrong reasons.]

The important thing for geeks is to find a good peer-group. I know that, personally, if I didn't keep myself up intellectually, I would fall behind my group of friends, and wouldn't be able to keep up in conversations.

This comic: http://gibsonandlily.com/comics/index.cgi?id=13

sums up what I mean (sortof).

For me, I have tech. or politics, or science to keep myself occupied. That is what my group talks about. While group B is having a spirited debate about the one team of ball-throwers vs another team of ball-throwers, we might be having a debate about one group of politicians vs another.

Its the same thing.

For a technology standpoint, my friends and I all support one another. If I'm having a problem with a specific thing that one of my friends is particularily good at, I go to them to help me with it (there was a project recently where a friend was working on a REALLY large data set of climate information and was having trouble walking around in it. I, luckily, have a friend that works in the Computer Science department of a local Univ. specifically on these sorts of problems. She was the one that I asked to help us).

Some people have friendships based on skills in basketball, I have friendships based on skills in technology. It is the same thing, my friends just have much less luck with the ladies :(.

Usually you have very productive posts on here, but I'm down-voting this one because it's BS.

There are extremely few elite athletes who can simply step into their sport with little training and discipline and perform to their max, in the same way that very few startups ever take off on pure luck and little work. For the majority of athletes, however, they apply the same level of startup-like discipline and drive to their sport to maximize their own individual talents, and I think it's ridiculous for you to claim that the attention they get is somehow undeserved or out of place. You certainly wouldn't be shouting about undeserved attention and "butt kissing" if a YC startup was acquired for millions and had tons of PR coverage.

In the same fashion that you chose to sacrifice athletic achievement to delve into learning, some athletes chose to give up some learning to dive into athletic achievement. Regardless, this whole nerd vs. athlete nonsense really needs to stop. Both are simply two groups of people who have been given different talents who are working equally hard trying to maximize those talents.

Ouch.

I never meant to imply that athletes don't work. Quite the contrary. My apologies.

But I stand by my "butt kissing" remarks.

Nobody ever paid much attention to me or anyone like me just because someone else was bigger or taller and could do cool things with a ball. Make no mistake about it: hero worship of athletes is way out of whack. They're so used to having their butts kissed, they simply do not know how to function in any other environment.

"You certainly wouldn't be shouting about undeserved attention and "butt kissing" if a YC startup was acquired for millions and had tons of PR coverage."

Maybe. Maybe not. The difference is that the butt kissing would be because of the money, not the work, which few people understand anyway.

Excuse me while I paint my face, jump up and down, and act like an idiot while I watch the guy in the next cubicle crank out a bubble sort in one loop :-)

I think you're missing the spirit of this comment.

They (he, I'm assuming) wasn't implying that athletes dont' work, what he was implying is that those that DO get lots and lots and lots and LOTS of recognition for it.

If a geek accomplishes something extraordinary...nobody outside of his or her industry really cares beyond "is this going to help me get to espn.com faster?". Its sad, but it's true. It is cliche' because it is true.

Start a parachute company

clever, thanks for that. I need a laugh in this state of mind. :)

There are always options. There are always solutions.

Sometimes we're not the ones who come up with them, and sometimes we just suffer while somebody else is busy solving problems, but that's life.

I look at it like this: taken at an individual level, each person is a precious gift: unique, special, etc. Taken as a group level, as a generic, people are really stupid. Over and over again I've seen really smart people do really dumb things. It's amazing. So when a bunch of PhDs or other smart people do idiotic things, it's not surprising that some hoop-shooter or pigskin jockey would be the same way. We're all stupid, just in different ways. : ) Somehow the race keeps on solving problems anyway.

In all seriousness, w/rt your state of mind. Going by this rant and the one in the other thread.

You keep talking about herd mentality - "our" society, "this huge pack of people" etc. Who are these people? I don't particularly feel like you and I are associated in any way. "We" aren't doing anything to anybody. If you feel like you are contributing to an unethical enterprise, and you don't feel good about that, then stop doing it.

Likewise, if you feel like you aren't producing value and doing the hard work and learning anymore, then this is a problem that you must fix. I'm over here producing value and doing hard work and learning. I can't speak as to whether what you're doing is worth anything - that's your problem.

These people are us. They include me, you, America, the world. It's not just my problem, because what I do, what you do, what everyone does affects everyone else. I can produce tons of value and our society can still crumble because of greed and mistakes (and I too make lots of mistakes) made by other people.

The question, more generally, is how do we change society's definition of value. How do we convince the world to spend more on teachers than it spends on athletes? Did you know in ancient Greece, philosophers were exempt from taxation because they were so valued by society? In the past, thought was valued above all.

We need to go back there and revive thinking as a valued contribution to society.

Society's definition of value - there is no such thing. If something is valuable to you, then you can pay for it. There's no secret magic underlying economics. When the supply of people willing to teach is lower than the number of available teaching positions, the value of a teacher rises.

Editted - forgot I wasn't on /irc/ =]

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