In general, I think people care about their kids, and will have different levels of risk sensitivity.
http://www.espn.com/espn/otl/story/_/page/popwarner/pop-warn...
Examples:
- People with red hats on are my friends
- People that like chocolate ice cream are idiots
- People who let their children play football are Trump voters
It's true that a HackerNews thread has a lower global-political impact than, say, a presidential tweet or a Supreme Court ruling. But that shouldn't prevent anyone from thinking through their HN comments. Words matter.
The comment we're both responding to [1] was unnecessarily divisive -- which partially obscured the commenter's otherwise good points (that team-thinking can obscure rational thinking). And that's particularly important on a website like HackerNews.
Original divisive comment: "[Has football joined the list of] values that separate members of the Red Tribe from the Blue Tribe? Football is a red-state pastime." [1]
The comment you responded to: "You're creating [divisive] discourse [by posing divisive questions]." [2]
I think your response, pointing out that a comment on HN usually won't "create" a nationally divisive discourse [3], is missing the point. If you look at the rest of the thread you can see that it created a divisive debate within HackerNews. I think the point you're missing is that divisive language creates divisions wherever it is used and it's worthwhile to point that out -- even if you think you're only talking to yourself.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14867048
(It's extra-funny because all right-thinking people know that it's obviously better to have it hang over the front of the roll. Sheesh!)
But maybe you're making the subtle point that "it matters if HN comments abuse quotation marks."
You have become what you hate - you are the one who introduced the subject. Its like "Has anyone compared $TOPIC to Nazis yet? This subject has a tendency to be Godwinned".
People are quite a bit more complex than that, and these kinds of arbitrary binary divisions get in the way of finding common ground.
Also anecdotally, I had a Lyft driver who was also a high school football coach who was well versed in how many concussions occur in soccer. He wanted to tell me that football is as safe/dangerous as any other sport. That type of denialism--believing that mounting evidence can be safely ignored--is found in other "red" issues such as climate change, coal jobs, and Russia-gate.
[1] High schools are closing football programs. https://www.si.com/mmqb/2015/11/23/high-schools-dropping-and...
[2] Soccer is possibly a blue state thing. http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/jul/10/...
[3] NFL doctors downplayed the dangers. http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2015/03/18/nfl-doctor-s...
Norway banned professional boxing over thirty five years ago for this reason, and it only returned very recently when a more conservative PM took power, and it happened amid plenty of controversy: https://www.thelocal.no/20161004/how-a-boxing-match-turned-i...
But certain sports carry too high a risk for me to support my child getting into them before 16ish. They must have a glimmering of a perspective on what life means before choosing to engage in activities that are significantly likely to permanently damage themselves for life. Particularly for football, there are brain effects. Implication here: for boys, football is off the table. For girls, competitive gymnastics. There are likely other sports that could be found as way too high permanent risk.
For perspective on how I'm choosing: soccer is also risky and carries CTE risk, but less so than football. If boy wants to do skiing, running, or mountain biking, that is fine; crossfit, not so much (too aggressive). A certain amount of physical damage is far more acceptable than neurological damage. Things happen though; a friend of mine had his very young daughter fall into a pool and drown a few years after being preemie. That's this life on earth, sorrow and joy. I will give as much responsibility as I can, but the parent's responsibility to is to shape and limit around the ability of the child to react and foresee. Permitting choosing sports which have lifelong damage likelihood, when they are too young to understand the consequences, seems to be poor choice on my part.
Perhaps it's not a red or blue split, but those sports you listed are definitely on one side of a major class divide. Basketball and football are moving towards the other. And while I understand that a competition between some farm hicks and big-city boys can bring two groups together, access to sports like skiing is fairly exclusive.
I wouldn't be bothered if my kid did baseball or cricket. Bored, perhaps, but not bothered.
Let's see, espn.com. Hockey can be super violent, but I'm probably ok with it, gotta check the numbers. Golf, boring, whatever. Fighting games - wrestling, MMA, etc, I'm probably ok with after a reasonable age. Certainly I would have no issues taking kiddo to Krava Maga.
(Personally I will go to Sounders (MLS) and Reign (NWSL) games, and I'm curious to see men's gymnastics at U of Washington this fall. It might be just a little Seattle)
e: The "red state" crew are, I think, more comfortable with idea of casual violence (and thus football). It's not as much of a Big Deal to them, often life is more rough and tumble IMO. I grew up in Idaho, so I do have some Life Experience in what I'm saying.
I like who I am today, even if I might have a higher risk for any symptoms, and I believe football played a key part in my development.
I'm happy you like football, but I don't think you can say it forms character in a unique way, it's just a team sport and there's tons of team sport where hitting people with your head aren't the bread and butter of it.
Try volleyball, if you have to fuck up something I would rather go with the knees and hips rather than the head.
Different sports are different. I don't think that's hard to believe.
I ran track and cross country for 9 years. Those are team sports but there was no camaraderie. People were friendly, sure, but there was no team spirit. There was more camaraderie in the half a year I spent on a rowing team than I experienced in either of those sports.
It's a bit ridiculous to me to suggest that there is nothing like football when it comes to training, teamwork, and camaraderie. That's easily not true.
No other sport works you as hard as Football does. Between three-a-days (practicing 8am to 8pm) for weeks, and each practice primarily consisting of basically playing football (running play after play, at 100%, for practice, with tackling), Football works you harder than any other sport.
I'll get told by some this is just my opinion, but the vast majority of other sports are not shear tests of strength the same way Football is. If you're a lineman in football, every play is practically you bench pressing another player your size over the field. And it's the same for every lineman, and anyone on offense has to do the same.
So yes, I believe Football works character differently due to the sheer difficulty of the sport physically.
This was while classes were in session.
During the winter training trip, we would do the same, but also swam sprints in the middle of the day.
Sometimes other teams, including the football team, would try to use the pool for off-sport workouts. We would crush them. But when we ran, they would not outrun us.
And that's just one sport I have personal experience with. Please do not discount what other athletes are doing--any sport is an intentionally competitive environment, everyone is looking to gain advantage: that push to go harder is present and is not exclusive to football.
Also, hitting each other repeatedly. Or, well, directly competing at all with someone else.
Not really worth arguing if you don't see it.
You might change your opinion after a week playing Water Polo. You've got the same level of energy required for sprints and man-handling your opponents as football, but then throw in the added bonus of getting repeatedly squeezed/kicked in the groin (on purpose!), scratched all to hell (no pads!), and the constant attempts at opponents trying to (almost) drown you. You don't just have to be physically strong to play, you've got to be mentally iron-willed to want to get in the pool with the other lunatics.
Because it's possible to experience the benefits of camaraderie without the risks of brain damage, it's sensible to question if football is too dangerous for children.
Basically, Football works you harder physically (strength), which makes the camaraderie that much stronger (you all overcame the same adversity).
Also, everyone from the marching band still remembers marching through Disney World in 100+ degree heat in full marching uniforms. It was tough and it was a memorable bond we all shared.
Minus the brain damage.
You should know the scientific method from the science club. ;)
"Eliminating heading for children 10 and under
Limiting the amount of heading in practice for children between the ages of 11 and 13"
Other sports, like football, present a much harder challenge. Even if you remove direct head contact as a variable, most aspects of tackling can result in concussions. The reason football is uniquely controversial is that minor concussions are mostly inevitable and severe concussions are commonplace.
By contrast, the most likely way to get a concussion in soccer is to head the ball, which isn't fundamental to gameplay. In any sport, you might run into another player at high speed but that's not typically a core part of the gameplay. Football is controversial because it's hard to fix.
FWIW, though, I've not heard that point either.
Tennis, golf, swimming, weightlifting, etc - probably have a pretty low incidence of concussion. Stuff with teams and fast movement are probably most suspect; hockey and football would intuitively seem like the worst offenders.
"Based on the national estimate, the majority of concussions resulted from participation in football (40.5%, n = 55 007), followed by girls' soccer (21.5%, n = 29 167), boys' soccer (15.4%, n = 20 929),..."
So 40.5% of concussions in football and 36.9% in combined boys/girls soccer.
source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2140075/
In addition to concussions, football players are also believed to receive repeated microtrauma from running into each other repeatedly, which contributes to CTE.
Football is a full contact sport. It is inherently more dangerous. Collisions in soccer happen accidentally. They happen intentionally in football.
In addition there are new restrictions on heading the ball in soccer for younger kids, which will likely make the game a bit safer.
I don't have stats available for middle school, but earlier than that the players don't hit nearly as hard, as they have considerable lower mass and speed.
Not sure where your 3x number comes from, but I don't think we need to include YMCA recreational league soccer any more than we need to include flag football.
I didn't see that your study was high school and college only.
It seems that girls suffer much higher rates of concussions in all sports likely do to less developed neck muscles according to this [1].
So you'd have to compare concussion rate in football vs boys soccer to get a real comparison.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/recruiting-insider/wp/20...
>So 40.5% of concussions in football and 36.9% in combined boys/girls soccer.
If 21.5% of girls (~6270) and 15.4% of boys (~3223) get concussions then 9493 (6270 + 3223) received concussions out of 50096 (20929 + 29167) total participants. 18.9% (9493 / 50096) for soccer vs 40.5% for football.
Or, if you can figure out the relative difference between the number of boys and girls who play soccer, you can do a weighted average of the percentages.
Either way, adding the percentages is completely incorrect.
EDIT: http://www.usyouthsoccer.org/media_kit/keystatistics/ suggests that the split is roughly equal -- in 2008 it was 52% boys and 48% girls.
With that said, the correct weighted value is more like 21.5x.48 + 15.4x.52 = 18.3%, which is significantly less than the 40.5% you quoted for football.
55007 for football - 40.5% of 135901
20929 for boys soccer - 15.4% of 135901
29167 for girls soccer - 21.5% of 135901
50096 combined soccer
50096/135901 = 36.9% of all concussions were from soccer.
So if I have something wrong here, please educate me. I am willing to learn. And see my other comment, n isn't a sample size, at least not in that paragraph.
Yes, submitting irrationally to power is bad, and so is purely tribal thinking. But as it turns out, human beings are a bit more complex, and many are fine maintaining critical thinking skills while simultaneously having a sports team they identify with.
To the extent that such a list can be said to exist (some of them are Boolean values, but if it's a long list, it's only long because you are including lots of things that individually loosely correlate with tribal membership rather than separate it), attitudes towards kids playing football have been on it for decades.
(It also correlates with race, welath, and other socio-economic factors in a way which aren't what you'd expect if you thought it was simply a matter of left/right political tribal identity.)
I was raised in Texas and was more the thin runner body than the football build, so I never played, though lots of people do play high school football there. It's interesting imagining that 1/4 of them could be walking around with CTE.
Of course, keep in mind the study is biased by the fact that these brains were specifically donated for evaluation for CTE. It seems probable that CTE findings would be lower in the general population.
> But 110 positives remain significant scientific evidence of an N.F.L. player’s risk of developing C.T.E., which can be diagnosed only after death. About 1,300 former players have died since the B.U. group began examining brains. So even if every one of the other 1,200 players had tested negative — which even the heartiest skeptics would agree could not possibly be the case — the minimum C.T.E. prevalence would be close to 9 percent, vastly higher than in the general population.
The real issue would arise if they can somehow test high school students and find similarly high percentages (90+ percent), but since you can't test right now until they are deceased (from what I understand), that would be extremely hard to do.
I think that's seriously downplaying the issue.
Let's say hypothetically HS football players are developing it at 10% vs 1% in the general population. That alone would be a massive discovery, and grounds for seriously reworking or even eliminating HS football. You don't need these rates to be in the 90% range for this to be game changing, so to speak.
[1] http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/schooled_in_sports/2012/12/lo...
[2] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/high-school-footba...
[3] http://www.tsn.ca/a-possible-breakthrough-on-testing-cte-1.2...
[4] http://www.traumaticbraininjury.net/why-concussions-are-so-h...
[5] http://www.gq.com/story/the-concussion-diaries-high-school-f...
[6] https://www.forbes.com/sites/tarahaelle/2017/07/26/is-footba...
I don't know about younger kids, but high school players die every year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_issues_in_American_foot...
So it seems that right now it is weakly associated with blue tribe.
Of course as Grey Tribe I can't do anything but slowly shake my head at these college teams.
If not, I think it's inevitable that it will. Someone will try to get their school to close its football program, someone else will complain that the health dangers are exaggerated by the liberal media because football is a red-state passtime, and pretty soon it'll be "Why do you hate America and apple pie" vs "Why do you want children to suffer and die".