It is true that someone being athletic has no bearing on whether they are intelligent, but to suggest being athletic automatically assures intelligence is... interesting.
Unpopular opinions go here
- Thread starter Whizbang Dustyboots
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Campbell
Relaxed Intensity
There is a difference here in possessing athleticism and being a high-level athlete as displayed through on field performance. The knowledge, discipline, processing speed and attention to detail required to perform as an athlete require a significant amount of intellect. This is particularly true for complex team sports with a lot of moving parts like football and basketball.
Will high end athletes tend to possess the level of intellect as high-end physicists? Absolutely not, but Patrick Mahomes, Jason Kelcey and Amon-Ra St. Brown are definitely a standard deviation above the baseline.
Even at the lower end, outside of freak levels of athleticism, someone who is not at least of average intelligence is unlikely to excel in athletics. Savants do exist, but they are outliers. The trope of dumb athlete is just not very reflective of any locker room I have ever been a part of.
I think this is pretty dubious. Practice matters more than anything else when in comes to, well, to most things, but especially competitive endeavors (physical or otherwise).
Plus, any discussion that hinges on the definition of "intelligence" is doomed anyway because it isn't actual a thing. The term is meaningless because if anything there are a wide variety of "types of intelligence" and even that doesn't actually fit reality.
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
Due to the size of the Baby Boom generation, they got a lot longer reign than 20 years, essentially continuing on through what should have been Generation X's window. The moment we finally stopped seeing commercials of former Easy Rider actors talking about how Baby Boomers were reinventing retirement, the marketers switched to the Millennials, who have handed off their torch to Gen Z after their "normal" period of being the marketers' darlings was over.
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Willie the Duck
Hero
I think you misunderstood me. I didn't say that generations impact extend through their first 20 years. I said that Boomers 'got a solid 20 years' in that the date range of the DOB for the usual definition of the generation is usually demarked as those born 1945-1965.
Regarding when generations have an impact, there's no specified duration. People have impacts when they have impacts. I posited in my post that the Boomers had an (often oversized, based on their demographic weight) impact from 5 to 65.
Regarding D&D -- I guess it depends on what D&D Gen Z is nostalgic for. TSR-era D&D was mostly created by younger Greatest Generation types like Gygax, Arneson, Holmes, and Cook (Zeb), but definitely popularized by a lot of later boomers and Xers (the 'schoolkids' that Gygax didn't expect in his wargame spinoff). WotC D&D started with one boomer (Williams) and a bunch of Xers -- Cook (Monte), Tweet, Noonan, Redman, etc. and went on from there. Who was the bread and butter of the early WotC gamerdom seems to by something people seem to fight over (at least that one survey that didn't include certain generations caused quite a stir), but if Gen Z is nostalgic for it, I guess they were part of the crowd.
I think you misread me. I said GenXers are currently making D&D because they, GenXers, have nostalgia for its heyday. They are making it for GenZ.
Willie the Duck
Hero
You're right, I misattributed the pronoun and kept on going.
I think the issue is that this is mixing scope. The 'big dumb jock' is everything from the football team in the high school each of us attended to professional athletes to the guy at the gym who is never not there pumping iron.
If your premise is that professional athletes usually aren't dumb, well, yeah. Most successful people are at the very least not-dumb. That's true of athletes, musicians, and even the celebrities that are marketed as vacuous or clueless (think Paris Hilton or the Kardashians). It takes too much perseverance and savvy to have a high likelihood of making it in such high-stakes competitive fields.
'Big dumb jocks,' on the other hand, definitely exist. There are lots of athletic people, and half of them are likely below average. Whether that means anything, of course, is another question.
Perhaps more useful, IMO (and proceeding off the software developer comment), is the stereotype of 'the big dumb jock who spends their time picking on the stereotypical nerds' is a stereotype not particularly well represented in reality. I've been a programmer for decades, and then managed programmers and IT personnel for more than 15 years. Many of them do have picked-on-as-teens complexes. Thing is, a whole lot of them it's their older brother, or a guy/girl they had a crush on, or that other person at math league. It sometimes is one of the highschool athletes, but not the majority of the time. Frankly, from what I can tell, no one is worse to nerds than other nerds. The dynamic that it is always a football team member seems to be a cinematic shortcut.
Too true.
Jd Smith1
Hero
Tony Vargas
Legend
What, is that an unpopular opinion?
overgeeked
Open-World Sandbox
As a medium, American comic books are dying. The largest companies in the industry could learn so much from the manga industry. But they refuse to learn. They are stuck, frozen in time. And refuse to change.
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