Thank zeus for this article. Sports is a 4 letter word in a lot of social circles (academia, tech to a decent extent) and it usually just reeks of pretentiousne

Thank zeus for this article. Sports is a 4 letter word in a lot of social circles (academia, tech to a decent extent) and it usually just reeks of pretentiousness. I find myself having to be unusually careful not to bring up sports when talking to anyone in tech I don't know well, whereas I rarely have that issue outside of it. Congratulations, you dismissed the entirety of American football as "roid rage violence". You also have an encyclopedic knowledge of internet memes, so I'm not sure I really trust your judgement vis a vis what qualifies as a worthwhile endeavor. > Sports aren't intellectual > Sports talk is glorified tabloid talk Go to a sabermetrics conference and prepare to be baffled. Nate Silver got his start as a baseball writer. > Sports are overly violent So is GTA 5. Watching sports doesn't make a person any more violent than playing video games does. Sports-related violence is semi-frequent and deplorable, but blaming sports for causing drunken boorish behavior is just like blaming Doom for Columbine. Most professional athletes are well aware of what they're getting into these days [1], so I don't buy arguments about "protecting the athletes" as a reason to ban sports entirely either (augmenting the rules to decrease injury rates, sure, absolutely). > I'm not going to pretend to like something I don't like That's fine. Just don't be a pretentious asshole about it. I can't even begin to count the number of times a conversation has navigated to sports one way or another, and some jackass decides to one-up the group by going on a 5 minute monologue about how ignorant they are of sports because they're too busy with "intellectual pursuits". [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JMsWtObHhE#t=30s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JMsWtObHhE#t=30s