Ask A Genius 135 – Sports & Consciousness
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: You look at sports or being a sports fan. A team often has nothing to do with you. Yet, your happiness depends on the happiness of the team.Particularly in times when other things suck.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: It is genetic too. This stuff, this culture, attracts men more than women.
RR: We look for things to make significant to keep our interest going. In the early 80s, I was having one of my first big boyfriend-girlfriend relationships. But I knew this was during the age of Wayne Gretzky, and also before the Internet. When you wanted to know what Gretzky did that night, you had to wait for the newspaper the next day. I knew that even if I had a shitty night with my girlfriend that Wayne Gretzky would deliver me some juicy statistics.
Some possibly record-breaking numbers. I would look forward to that. Similarly, like right now, I look forward to the Yukon Women’s Basketball team, if they can extend their 110 game streak to the end of the season and into the subsequent season. I am looking at Russell Westbrook to see if he can tie or break the record for triple doubles in a season. These people have nothing to do with me, but their performance makes me happy.
SDJ: We can relate this back to evolution and survival. Men as a strong statistical tendency in primates build a system, create a hierarchy, compete in the hierarchy. Women select men in that hierarchy. I think the sports-attraction, which seems obviously overwhelmingly men in most or all sports comes from that same drive. It is a system with hierarchy and men competing, or men identifying with that hierarchy and that competition if they watching.
So this is deep, deep in us.
RR: There is also the attraction of narrative. Where we are paying attention to a story…
SDJ: That’s a good point.
RR: …the division between us and the participants in the story tends to go away. We are watching a movie or reading a book. We identify with people to the extent that we forget that we’re not the people, which is both computationally efficient—because if you’re immersed in a book or a movie, it does you no good to be constantly reminded that you’re not part of the book or the movie. People get annoyed when something takes them out of a book or a movie like a jarring thing, like a continuity error or something from the past that you find out of place.
Something like from the 60s. You want the pure experience of being immersed in that world. I just watched Hidden Figures, which is set in 1961. There’s a lot of action that takes place in parking lots. One thing that took me out was that the parking lots were full 1957 Chevys. The ’57 Chevy was the most beautiful car of its era. It is a very familiar looking car. That was the era of tailfins and elaborate break lights.
The ’57 Chevy pulled off the fins in a subtle beautiful way that the other cars messed up. When they wanted to make the movie, they needed cars from that era. So they got a shitload of ’57 Chevys because those are the cars that survived for years. Other cars haven’t made it that long. So they put out a call for cars and got a bunch of Chevys. I noticed that. It took me out of the movie.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
In-Sight Publishing 