After I started riding a motorcycle, hearing this explanation started to get a serious eyebrow raise out of me. Not the explanation itself, but the thought process behind those who accept it.

The last thing I want to do is just let my helmet do its job. I'd rather do almost anything else to prevent that if I can, because there's a point when I realized that it simply keeps me alive. It doesn't save me from everything. A broken bone heals, road rash heals, CTE does not heal. If my options are to go head first into a car or lay down and take a slide, I'll take the slide every time.

I treat my helmet as just another line of defense, one of many that includes e.g. body gear, situational awareness, keeping up on riding ability, and things like that.

In case it's not clear to anyone reading, yes, I wear a helmet and gear when I ride. I'm not arguing against wearing helmets, only the incorrect assumptions made about them.

Football players purposely spear other players with their helmets with full force. They had to make rules against doing this, and it still happens, although with less frequency. They are not using their helmets as a last line of defense like your motorcycle helmet. They use them as weapons.

It's not happening much at all in NFL football, since it's a major penalty if caught, and it's hard to hide.

I do hope helmet technology improves to handle inadvertent contact.

Disagree, it happens all the time. Its a 'major penalty' in that you get fined many thousands of dollars, but I'm pretty sure the team pays it anyway, and that is a drop in the bucket.

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2757235-rob-gronkowski-sa...

And furthermore, in that article Gronkowski is quoted as even preferring to take dangerous hits in the head like that, instead of risking re-injuring a bad knee. Not a great policy.

This is exactly true. Technically there are rules against it, but this happens on essentially every play.

side note: can you imagine anybody ever purchasing a self-driving motorcycle?

i. would. never.

Just like boxing gloves make boxing far more dangerous and even deadly than UFC, despite UFC having a more violent appearance.

Something I was told when I was new to training in martial arts is that lighter gloves used in MMA and, for example, traditional karate dojos (simple cotton gloves with light padding -- same design as many MMA gloves, just different materials) simply protect your hands, not the other person's face.

Boxing gloves, by contrast, can and do cause the same sort of faulty reasoning as football helmets when education isn't properly included: there's padding, therefore I can hit harder. Except, no, it (clearly) doesn't work that way. Certainly not when mass is a variable in the equation.

There isn’t a lot of long term evidence that suggests the hitting in UFC is less damaging than the hitting in boxing.

It is just as likely that the brain trauma differences are due to the dramatically less number of hits taken. This has more to do with the rules than the gloves.

We can be reasonably sure of that because boxing could change the glove types trivially and haven’t even in places that have changed other rules for safety (youth & Olympic boxing).

> This has more to do with the rules than the gloves.

How did you arrive at that conclusion? It's fairly well established that boxing gloves have dramatically increased both number of punches to the head as well as the force of the punch. You don't bare-knuckle punch someone in the skull much, it hurts the person doing the punch not just the one being punched. Gloves change that dramatically, resulting in not just more punches to the head but also harder punches to the head (more weight behind the punch from the gloves themselves if nothing else).

Boxing hasn't changed back to bare-knuckle because it would make the sport more gruesome visually even though it would almost certainly be safer for the participants.

I arrived at it simply by looking at the evidence. There is virtually none that indicates that given the same number of punches, glove size matters much.

any change that would bring the head punch count down to ufc levels would likely have similar safety improvements.

The evidence is really sketchy but early research indicates Thai boxing has a bigger incidence of brain trauma than western boxing than ufc and boxing do. The glove is essentially the same.