It's exquisitely sad and funny to me how a fair few cryptid hunters, flat Earthers, etc. could probably accomplish a lot in niche, underserved fields of study if they were similarly dedicated. Not all, of course – someone experiencing psychosis that tells them the other side of the flat Earth is a mirror that deflects Jesuit sterilization cannons probably wouldn't help much – but the people who really go out and try to find evidence surely could. Top of their field? Almost certainly no. Capable of documenting a new species of insect in a way they could present to a taxonomist for description? Abso-fucking-lutely.

I think about this all the time. We lose so much intelligence to stuff like this and* sports stats. And poverty.

Is one foot bigger than the other on that sumbitch or if not why don’t they call him Bigfeet?

Same reason they don't call you astronuts.

But most of them do think I’m nuts!

I need you all to suspend your disbelief for a moment

I know some of you are already boiling with rage just reading the above but please hear me out

preface: I don't believe in Bigfoot

all I'm saying is Les Stroud has an entire life doing outdoors television series where he camps on his own and he's done a series on Bigfoot. Its genuinely very interesting even just from a cultural perspective. It's all free on YouTube actually

Second this. Les Stroud is a Canadian treasure.

I wouldn’t call sports stats a loss of intelligence for people that like thinking about it, any more than any other math based hobby. Poverty for sure though.

Nah I think we lose a great deal of autists to sports, but that's just based on my personal experience.

If baseball and model trains didn't exist, we'd probably have colonies on the moon by now.

So if bigfoot had made them, he'd have fucked them up?

Would we need model trains if we funded trains properly?

Sports stats are better than Movie/TV aficionados or even D&D munchkins. Because at least behind Sports is a real person. It's a hobby. Everything doesn't need a purpose.

And I say this as someone who was Moss from the IT crowd until I was well over 30.

Love this kinda guy. Not incompetent - not dangerous - just crazy.

Tycho Brahe spent his life documenting planetary motions in an effort to prove everything moves in perfect circles.

His assistant Johannes Kepler waited until after Brahe's death to take those records and draw a dang oval.

Right. And I had always thought we had plenty of poverty. But now I'm thinking how much more we could have by now if we had ever bothered to fund it properly.

I met a guy who just loved spelunking.

He went to Laos and found a weird spider in a cave and he sent the picture to an acquaintance who was a biologist, and apparently it was an unknown species so he got to name it!

Pretty cool to have a species named after you.

We what? We lose autists to sports...?

also fintech

There are so many hobbies that are leagues more important and productive than knowing who won which game of what when. I'm sorry but I think even media / pop culture knowledge edges out sports. Your example alone; Moss is a cultural touchstone we can use to further quantify and share an understanding of the human experience. Creative writing is done by real people, and exploring the lives of fictional people or elements of fictional worlds is how we explore our own lives and world. It's art and art is integral to humanity. I'm sure play is too and if you get enjoyment out of watching people play ball then more power to you! And I agree that not everything we do needs a purpose, but I don't think that contradicts my initial comment. I think most would agree that some hobbies further you as a person, some further humanity, and some are mostly just a time and productivity sink.

I mean, it could come from archaeologists and biologists just embracing it. Bigfoot hunters may be jamokes but to your point a lot of them are the type of crazy that goes deep into unexplored woods for weeks at a time.

If we just had an institution that was like "haha, yeah, wild, I hope you find Bigfoot. By the way, while you're out there, if you could just keep an eye out for these anomalies and send us their location if you find them that would be swell. We won't report it if it's trespassing or whatever." They could do a lot of good.

Big foot is one thing, it's more of a cultural phenomenon. Flat earthers fundamentally believe that all authorities are lying to them so it would be a lot harder to get them to play along.

Isn’t it good he didn’t touch them though?

Why not? Sports are full of systems, patterns, routines, statistics, and explicit rules, and can be used to mask socially.

If playing d&d and watching/collecting/learning about TV/movies aren't hobbies, what do you call them? And how does that decrease their social value? Real people are behind every facet of human culture, otherwise it wouldn't be human culture.

It's not a loss for them, it's a loss for society, since they could be doing something (more) productive.

Dude I don't think they spend their entire careers on bigfoot lol

More like some eccentric hikers that probably contribute to society in a number of other ways.

While I get this point I think its also valid for people to have hobbies 😅 people can and should spend energy on things that are "frivolous" if thats what makes them happy.

Poverty denying people's contributions to the world is heartbreaking, but people pursuing their joy important in its own right, and the world is better for people doing it :)

Look at the flat earthers who successfully replicated experiments to measure the rotation of the earth through the very very very minor local effect on optics. If they could drop the obsession they could do real science, rather than just be stuck trying to figure out new ways to deny what they see

I agree with you. Unfortunately science has a lot of gatekeeping and elitism in it… often people are ostracised for their beliefs if you don't agree and go along with "the general consensus" at the time. People like this aren't very good at going going with the general consensus.

Half of science is also your reputation. If a random newbie says they saw a new species in this part of the woods, literally nobody will believe them. You have to be good at writing reports in the style and language expected, and knowing where to submit these reports. You can't just use normal people words and upload it to wherever.

It's a shame, because I think there's a huge amount of people that would love getting into the "leg work" of science, which many desk jockeys dislike, but they aren't book smart so they're not allowed. These kinds of people will never get a PHD, it's not their path. But it's hardly difficult to point a DSLR camera or take samples.

I know someone who goes up into the "mountains" for a week once a month, sets up camp, and fossicks for gold. Often for longer periods of time. Imagine if they were paid to look for fossils or take geology samples or other science-y stuff? I know for a fact these people would absolutely love playing with a new toy and learning how it works. How many scientists go into the field that often? Multiply that by like 100 because they have this whole community of fossickers.

As far as actually doing good work, the willingness to find out you're wrong and change your mind is more important.

Technical excellence just lets you state something is true confidently, and with well crafted evidence. It is not useful if it does not come after a genuine effort to find the truth.

Yeah unfortunately the guys he's talking about just shrug and blame the equipment in the video after they successfully prove the earth is curved lol

What do you mean every nickle spent reinforcing the social order is funding poverty. Its expensive to have both billionaires and homeless people.

They are all hobbies. They don't need a point just like sports fans. I still don't have any interest in sports. I currently follow world cup because my children are into it. I'm still Moss. But I understand that it's ALL hobbies and saying that someone is "lost" because they follow sports is ridiculous.

Moss is a cultural touchstone

If we both knew more about sports or history I could have used a real person instead of a fictional character created in a writer's room.

Your paragraph about reputation is wrong: the thesis statement of this paragraph is: half of science is your methodology. And that's not really gatekeepy, it's what's needed to be recorded to actually verify what was observed. So we don't have another Piltdown man or microraptor.

Have you looked into citizen science projects? There are many many projects set up so the average joe can contribute in some way. They may not be discovering a new species like some Edwardian British Naturalist, but they are helping contribute in significant ways.

I have actually already contributed a decent amount to iNaturalist over the years: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?user_id=zarobi

But that's kind of the extent of "citizen science", in my area at least — some variant of taking photos and dumping them into a public database. Which is still helpful of course, but I was talking about working more intimately with specific research, or even being employed to do certain tasks.

Right now you have to be "in" to be "involved", which has it's pros and cons. In this thread we were mostly discussing the cons. You might call it quality assurance and preventing micro-raptors, but at the end of the day there is still a gate being built and maintained there.

Am autist in fintech, can confirm

hur dur hur sportsball amirite

I absolutely fucking abhor people who say shit like this. To the extent that I've multiple times made a point of feigning genuine curiosity about their own interests and then shitting on them in the same over-simplifying fashion.

more important and productive

I'm so sorry, I will strive further to spend every waking moment creating value instead of doing anything that makes me happy

Exactly.

Like this one?

I wasn't the one who said that. I was just curious why you think "sports stats are better than movie/tv aficionados and d&d", which you failed to clarify here. From my pov, the way sports are helpful to society is they can help expose us to other cultures, which I believe is paramount in breaking down toxic cultural barriers. However, the inherent competitive nature of sports can also lead to reinforced toxic cultural barriers, so it's kind of a wash. TV and movies can also break down those barriers but without the unavoidable competitive factor. D&D is just collaborative story-telling, so basically the same as TV and movies, but more personal and private generally. Again I fail to see how that's "worse" than watching sports.

What a tactic, changed any minds that way?

Can confirm

Shouldn’t have to suspend disbelief. Disbelief in something is just as blind of a conviction as belief in it. What is unbelievable is that before the internet existed, we have separate accounts of hairy forest hominids on every single continent, and the oral tradition on these non-human beings is surprisingly consistent. That seems like a statistical improbability to me. But I don’t have first hand experience with the forest cryptids so I remain open to either possibility. Either humans have a collective mass global hallucination, spanning millennia of experiences (which is on its own intriguing), or there really is a magical forest cryptid. Holding either position doesn’t improve or detract from my life. So there’s no reason to believe, or disbelieve in Sasquatch or Yeti or Yowie or Mapinguari or any of their other names.

It's occurred to me that, if Bigfoot exists, Palantir 100% has proof of it by this point and we need to have the Bigfoot conspiracists storm Palantir for that information.

Maybe they'll find the Insulindian Phasmid.

Again I fail to see how that's "worse" than watching sports.

Do you believe that studying history as a a hobby is better than watching Game of Thrones?

Sports isn't just the team winning. People that are into it follow the lives of the players. It is a real person where the drama is from overcoming their personal challenges and inherent skill in the sport. Whereas fantasy is contrived drama. It's invented by the author or by committee in the writer's room.

I personally would rather watch a Trek rerun for the 10th time than a live baseball game. But I'm aware that the baseball is real rather than fantasy. The ending isn't scripted to create the most drama to get viewers to watch and sell ads.

To get them to stop shitting on people for arbitrarily different sets of hobbies? Yes, in fact.

I'm just confused about the "losing them" part. As if they're some sort of rare mineral. Also it's autistic, not autist, it's not a profession. Also also, surely they can decide what they want to do themselves?

Also also also, can you give an example of an autistic person playing in the NBA or soccer or something?