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The title should be "Why are the people who love endurance sports rich?" There's no evidence presented that a majority or even a significant percentage of peop

• deleted 8y ago
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• puranjay 8y ago
  Endurance sports, by its very definition, implies the availability of time. You can't be an Ironman competitor if you don't have hours to train every day.
  • JamesAdir 8y ago
    This.In ancient times rich people were pale and that suggested they didn't have to work. Poor people had tan. It's the same now - If you've got time you can train and have photos of you running marathons in different places in the world each month.
  • sametmax 8y ago
    David Goggins and Scott Jurek were definitly not rich when then won their first important ultras. And according to their bio (didn't fact check it though), they trained AND had a job, which means either waking up very early, or going to bed very late. I'd rather think that if you can run a 100K, you have the mind to overcome amazingly hard situations, and to keep trying, again and again, being in the game for a long time. Which increases your odds of success, so bigger probability to get rich in the end.
    • katzgrau 8y ago
      I'd agree with this, but I don't even think it has to be that extreme. An endurance sport requires patience and overcoming a certain level of discomfort in pursuit of a goal. I know people who stop pursuing whatever it is they want at the first signs of discomfort or adversity. They want the good things to just happen them, and they rarely do.
      • rusk 8y ago
        That's funny, I know people who pursue the path of least resistance and are quite well off actually, and good things do just happen to them (by virtue of their talent lets say, or other innate qualities). But that's just my own anecdata. I do know some people like what you're talking about too, but then again I know some people who are big into endurance sports but aren't really go-getters in other spheres either ...
        • zimpenfish 8y ago
          > I know some people who are big into endurance sports but aren't really go-getters in other spheres Same. Although I suspect for a lot of them it's because go-getting in other spheres would impact on their ability to do the running and they're happy in their situations as they are.
    • 2muchcoffeeman 8y ago
      I know several ultra runners who are definitely not rich. If anything, they ought to spend their money more wisely and not on more and more gear.
    • jriot 8y ago
      David Goggins was (is) a Navy Seal, so he had a strong baseline/foundation.
  • bko 8y ago
    I don't know if its true that the median wealthy person has more leisure time available to them. > According to the Census Bureau, the average wealthy household (defined by the IRS as the top 20% of income earners in the US) worked five times as many hours as the average poor household. The cause? Single-parent households and high unemployment among poor households. [0] Although I imagine they may spend less time doing household chores or running errands [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/common-myths-about-rich-people-2015-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/common-myths-about-rich-peop...
    • alistairSH 8y ago
      Counting work hours by household seems a bit weird. I'm married, my wife and I work fairly typical 40-45 hour weeks. So, 80-90 for the household. My son is single. He works the same 40-45 hours. But, by the metric above, my household works twice as much. Sure, we literally do, but we have twice the manpower and twice the income. And still have the same amount of leisure time per person.
      • iguy 8y ago
        Indeed it's an odd measure. But still, a factor 5? It can't be common for top-20% households to contain more than two full-time workers.
        • alistairSH 8y ago
          In a sibling comment, somebody linked to an article [0] that describes the wealth/free-time paradox. Basically, poor people are extremely underemployed (particularly young white males) and frequently stuck in part-time jobs (or unemployed completely). If a poor person is only able to find 10 hours/week employment, I'm at 4x that. If the poor person is single, my household is 8x because there's two of us. 0 - https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/the-free-time-paradox-in-america/499826/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/the-fre...
  • mruts 8y ago
    But rich people have less time because time is more valuable to them.
    • Steve44 8y ago
      I'd say they have the same amount of time, the difference is how they choose to use it. Going away for a weekend is great use of their time if they enjoy it and also get a benefit (both physically and mentally) out of it. Doing the sport is valuable to them.
    • dmos62 8y ago
      Isn't that debatable? Actually, it's debatable what your statement means. What's value? How much you make per time unit? Or, if you live pay check to pay check, maybe time is more valuable than when you're rich, because if you don't invest that time unit, you won't be able to pay rent?
      • simonsarris 8y ago
        It's pretty well studied that poor people in the US have more free time/leisure time than rich people. Ex: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/the-free-time-paradox-in-america/499826/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/the-fre...
    • puranjay 8y ago
      I'd say that rich people time is more "stretchable" Time is a fixed quantity for poorer people. If you don't show up to your 8AM Walmart job on time, you'll get chewed out. But if you're a senior VP, you can move meetings around to fit your schedule.
    • alistairSH 8y ago
      Not sure I follow. First, the article doesn't appear to talking about actual rich people (billionaires, etc) but upper-middle-class white-collar people (i.e., they still have a day job and can't live off savings & interest). But, we can call them rich to keep it easy. In a literal sense, rich people have more time, as they tend to live longer than poor people. In the sense of day-to-day free time, I'd argue rich people have more. Both in absolute terms - they rarely have to work two jobs, though they might do occasional OT. And in their ability to time-shift work obligations. Take a software dev - typically they have flexible work hours, might have some ability to schedule their own meetings, and nobody blinks if they duck out early once a week for a long run/ride/whatever.
  • cafard 8y ago
    Many, many years ago, I ran a fifty-miler. I was not, by US standards anything like rich, in fact I was in between two ill-paid jobs. My running commitment amounted to something less than ten hours per week. Now according to Wikipedia, the American average for TV watching in 2017 was about 28 hours/week. I have no idea what it was in 1982, but at even half the rate, I spent less time running than my average fellow citizen spent in front of the tube.
    • ragazzina 8y ago
      >I spent less time running than my average fellow citizen spent in front of the tube Time watching TV is not time spent sitting "in front of the tube". People cook, eat, clean the dishes, iron clothes, play with their kids, while the TV is on. If you are running, you can't be doing anything else.
      • cafard 8y ago
        Yes and no. People can cook, etc. while the TV is on. They certainly get in some time just plain watching. Also, some of my running time amounted to commuting: knock 45 minutes off the 90 minute run. Running can be a social activity. Those who care to can run listening to their iPods (then, Walkmans). Etc.
      • jtuente 8y ago
        Unless you're on a treadmill in front of a TV, or wearing headphones listening to the radio, TV, podcasts, etc.
        • lozaning 8y ago
          I dont have cable at home, so the only time I watch broadcast TV is when i'm watching it on the TV at the gym while running.
    • gtowey 8y ago
      Now imagine coming home from a day of hard physical labor on a roadwork crew when it's hot as hadeys outside and then consider how much you may feel like spending your free time running. Not being rich isn't the same thing as being poor, or being blue collar. Most of us being knowledge workers, have advantages beyond earning power.
• Kenji 8y ago
  > Is there a name for this sort of statistical error? Because it's everywhere. Yes. It's called not understanding Bayes' theorem. Bayes' theorem is precisely about how the probability of "B, given A" (P[B|A]) relates to the probability of "A, given B" (P[A|B]). In our case, that would be "rich, given love for endurance sports" =/= "love for endurance sports, given rich". It is immediately obvious from Bayes' equation that the two are, in general, not the same.
• coldtea 8y ago
  >only that most of the people who love endurance sports are rich That sounds totally compatible with the article being titled "Why Do Rich People Love Endurance Sports?". It doesn't have to be most or all of rich liking endurance sports. It's enough that endurance sports are mostly liked by the rich. The article is not titled "Why do MOST/ALL rich people love endurance sports". In other words, X doesn't need to be a characteristic of most rich to ask "why are rich drawn to X" -- it just has to draw more rich than non-rich.
  • imgabe 8y ago
    If being rich is simply a requirement to participate in the activity, but most people rich people don't engage in it then it really doesn't tell you anything about "rich people" as a group. If 99% of rich people don't participate in endurance sports, then it is not a characteristic of rich people in any meaningful sense. You might as well ask "Why do rich people love helicopter skiing?" I'm sure everyone that does that is pretty rich, but probably most rich people don't do it. I'm sure there's a ton of not-rich people who would also enjoy it, but they simply can't afford to do it.
    • coldtea 8y ago
      >If 99% of rich people don't participate in endurance sports, then it is not a characteristic of rich people in any meaningful sense. That doesn't follow. If 1% of rich people do X, and only 0.0001% of non-rich do it, then X is very much a trait of rich people. It's not of most/all rich people, but it is predominantly of rich people.
      • imgabe 8y ago
        Personally, I wouldn't consider anything that only applies to a tiny percentage of a group to be a trait of that group. You could say that being rich is a trait of people who participate in endurance sports, but not vice versa.
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• exhaze 8y ago
  That's funny, because the URL slug (why-are-most-endurance-athletes-rich) for the article literally is that headline. I think the authors probably intentionally chose that headline because it's more clickbaity. Given the less clickbaity title is in the URL, mods, how about updating the headline to "Why Are Most Endurance Athletes Rich"?
  • nabla9 8y ago
    Authors generally don't choose the final headline for online articles. It's the editor who does that. Sites can show multiple headlines for the same article and settle for the one that gets most clicks. The url of the article can sometimes reveal the original headline authors gave. It's basic modern media literacy to ignore the headline of the article.
  • mcv 8y ago
    Maybe the title should be: "Why is there a positive correlation between endurance sports and wealth?" Cause, you know, correlation and causation and all that.
• schrodinger 8y ago
  My favorite professor used to describe this statistical error as a major cause behind racism. E.g. it may be true that most criminals in an area are of a certain race; that says nothing about the probability of a single person of that race being a criminal. Same with Islamaphobia–even if most acts of terrorism were performed by Muslims (which isn’t even true!), that’d say nothing about the likelihood that a randomly chosen Muslim person you meet is a terrorist. Edit: changed likelihood to probability
  • alexis_fr 8y ago
    That’s what I believed. Until my daughter got raped.
    • rco8786 8y ago
      I’m sorry to hear about your daughter. But don’t let an anecdote change your mind about the field of statistics.
    • mj_olnir 8y ago
      As someone who has also lived through that nightmare - I'm deeply sorry for your daughter. However, you have to remember that this is an anecdote - you don't want to throw people into boxes they don't fit.
    • deleted 8y ago
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    • grkvlt 8y ago
      Which goes to show how terrible people are at dealing rationally with anything when they are affected personally or emotionally.
  • sokoloff 8y ago
    I am interested in the stats error here. If there are 100 balls in a bag, 10 of each rainbow color and 30 blank, and I tell you 3 of the green balls have property X, while 10 total of the balls in the bag have property X. You blindly draw a ball from the bag; do you know anything about the likelihood of that ball having property X? You now inspect it and find it’s green. Do you now know anything different about that likelihood? If I offered you “pay $100 to win $900 if you drew a property X ball, with the option to double your wager after seeing the color”, you would be happy indeed to see that you’d drawn a green ball and would double your wager. Regardless of the colors, ratios, and desirability of property X, it seems to me like you do know something new about the likelihood after learning the color. It also seems to hold if there are 300 million balls, 10 balls with property X, and 3 of those are green, just at a strong cause to believe “this specific ball does not have property X” overall (such as the case in the people examples you gave).
• mcv 8y ago
  Also, people in sedentary (white collar) jobs have more need of exercise. If you work on the land all day, maybe you prefer to sit down after work, instead of getting more exercise. Although farmers do seem to be overrepresented in marathon skating.
• GreeniFi 8y ago
  This article for me seemed to miss the obvious point of endurance sport as status display. This also highlights the limit of the research methodology, because very few people will acknowledge that they participate in these events to display evolutionary fitness, or are even aware of this compulsion. So what you may have in these results is some confounding of drivers: people more inclined to display status want both to earn more money, and look fitter to display evolutionary status. The phenomenon described in the article could be correlation not causation, and I’m a little surprised this was not investigated.
• EForEndeavour 8y ago
  I think this statistical error is called confusion of the inverse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusion_of_the_inverse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confusion_of_the_inverse Confusion of the inverse is the assumption that the probability of A given B is equal to the probability of B given A. In symbols, the fallacy is falsely assuming P(A|B) = P(B|A). You have to use Bayes' Theorem to convert from a conditional probability to its inverse: P(B|A)⋅P(A) = P(A|B)⋅P(B)
  • paultopia 8y ago
    The error has a name! I never knew! I just tell my students "you can't flip conditional probabilities like that."
  • imgabe 8y ago
    Thank you! I knew it had to do with Bayes' theorem. So much confusion in the world seems to come from the fact that people don't understand conditional probability.
  • astazangasta 8y ago
    Sticking my frequentist nose in here, this is maybe better described as the Base Rate Fallacy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
    • EForEndeavour 8y ago
      Nice, thanks! Though that page mentions and uses Bayes' Theorem a lot ;)
  • handedness 8y ago
    This type of faulty reasoning also frequently takes the form of affirming the consequent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent (P→Q,Q)→P It happens often when people have a limited consideration set of possible causes, often due to a natural degree of ignorance or lack of experience relating to the subject matter area, e.g., a small child sees a wet sidewalk and assumes it rained, because they aren't yet aware of sprinklers (or garden hoses, etc.) (If rain→wet sidewalk, wet sidewalk)→rain The title alone might be clumsily restated as: (If amateur endurance athlete→rich, rich)→amateur endurance athlete
• throwaway98434 8y ago
  Michael Crichton calls these "wet streets cause rain" stories in his piece "Why Speculate." http://larvatus.com/michael-crichton-why-speculate/ http://larvatus.com/michael-crichton-why-speculate/ From his article: Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I refer to it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.) Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
  • mcv 8y ago
    I remember when I started noticing that the occasional time a newspaper wrote about something I knew something about, they usually got some vital details wrong, that really undermined my trust in that newspaper. I've got a better newspaper now, but that first one is generally regarded as a pretty decent one. But when they always get the details about stuff I know wrong, how well can I trust the articles about things I don't know? Of course it's also possible I only remember the times they get it wrong, and I don't notice the many times they get it right when writing about something I know something about, leading me to underestimate the paper's accuracy. I'm sure somebody somewhere is willing to make up a name for that effect too.
    • Vraxx 8y ago
      I think that's just confirmation bias working in tandem with the amnesia effect described, but certainly it is a valid point. To me, the hardest part about this problem is that trust tends to be stored (at least in my brain) as a binary yes or no, though possibly with a fuzzy border and some room in the middle. It's tough for me to read something and internally modify my trust of the source by a proportional amount for getting things "right" that I "know" when even what I know is uncertain because I could be wrong. The end effect is that I tend to double check just about any source, but I still have a handful of sources that I have strong reason to believe their motives are compromised on various topics where I expect their motive to conflict with the motive to tell the truth. It's still not great though because sources rarely move up in this system and frequently move down, which leads in a general inability to find information considered trustworthy. This works fine on things where there is a general consensus because I'll be able to find a varied set of sources saying the same thing, but not so great on hotly debated topics with lots of nuance. Also sometimes my brain is lazy and I don't do any of this processing because I'm an imperfect human.
• scott_s 8y ago
  Agreed. And they don't even consider the other angle, which is do rich people love endurance sports more than other sports? That is, of the rich people who participate in sports, how many are in endurance sports versus those in other sports?
  • alistairSH 8y ago
    True. I used to race cars. The same logic applies there - you have to have money and free weekends to race cars. Even better if you have flexible work hours so you can practice on Fridays (before weekend events) and fix the car in the evenings (because they break, wear out, and get crashed).
• ww2 8y ago
  your title is more eye-catching in addition to more accurate.
• whiddershins 8y ago
  I am terrible at formal statistics so maybe I’m wrong, but I think you are taking issue with the wording of the headline rather than a statistical fallacy. If I wrote “why are wealthy people over represented in endurance sports” would you be ok with it? If say ... 1% of the population is wealthy but 20% of participants in marathons are ... that would be potentially of statistical interest, no?
• gamblor956 8y ago
  I think the title is fine as is. I know plenty of rich people, and I know plenty of people into endurance sports. The % of rich people who enjoy endurance sports tends to be pretty high. The % of people in endurance sports that are rich tends to be pretty low, triathletes excluded because triathlons are #$#@$ expensive and so that population is cash-gated.
• droussel 8y ago
  It reminds me of a funny argument I had a while back. My then girlfriend old apartment had cast iron plumbing and a joint in one of the pipe had a very small leak that smelled pretty bad. One night, at a family gathering of her, someone said that "it leaks because it smells"; which made me laugh obviously. I thought it was a slip of the tongue and said "yeah, it smells 'cause it leaks" and they started arguing that "it means the same thing"... To this day, I still can't understand how someone can believe that "it smells because it leaks" means the same thing as "it leaks because it smells".
  • chmod775 8y ago
    Generally you're using language "correctly" when the vast majority of people understand what you were trying to communicate. In that way and in that context it's a "passable" statement. Don't view everyday life and sentences through the narrow lens of mathematics/logic. If you're lucky that'll make for some dinner conversation, if you're unlucky you'll just be annoying. "I know this must be leaking because it smells." is fine in an everyday context, even if not strictly and always true.
    • droussel 8y ago
      It wasn't meant in the sense of "I know it leaks because of the smell", it was literally said as "The leakage is caused by the smell". The conversation was in French so I have to translate here :D. I wasn't trying to be an ass at the time, I was just... surprised at their twisted understanding of basic logic.
• sullyj3 8y ago
  I've heard it called base rate neglect.