Emulating Dangerous Sports - True or False

a credible study would require a well-funded, scientific approach, likely by a well-known university

How many of you out there have been duped or encouraged into doing dangerous shite that you never would have done otherwise save for trying to emulate your "heros?"

Quantifying the number, if any, of people emulating Honnold, Potter et al would be a nearly impossible task. Someone would have to say...."I'm going out to do just what so and so did."

I'm not saying that I think people do or don't emulate extreme sport legends....I'm just saying establishing a metric would be extremely difficult.-Donini

"Clif Bar’s decision (to withdraw sponsorship from Potter, Honnold, etc.) was a controversial one that came under heavy critique by the climbing community, who noted that Potter and the other dropped athletes were some of the most incredible and innovative athletes on the planet, the people who take sports to new places and offer a glimpse into what is possible. Others expressed support for the idea that a company shouldn’t be promoting activities – especially in an age of YouTube and viral videos, where young people might seek to emulate and copy the stunts they see their heroes doing – and which have such a high risk of death."

The implied message here is that Cliff Bar feared...

That's the stated reason. I don't see anything elsewhere. If they were worried about emulation, I'd expect them to say that -

Ken M -- "That would be Potter and Hunt, to choose the most recent example.

They must have been inspired by someone doing something.

They were both wrong, and played above their level of skill."

As Kalimon just said: There is practically no evidence of the monkey see, monkey do dynamic going on here. It takes so much time and dedication to achieve the levels currently being practiced by the elite athletes of these disciplines that very few from the "mainstream" population can even imagine starting on the road to such endeavors.

To suggest that those in this elite level are there only by dint of peer pressure or through trying to ape their mentors seems unlikely to me and is nothing I have ever seen.

IME, there are various modes of understanding. There is a discursive understanding that looks at components and associations and functioning or at any rate various computations. This is a kind of instrumentational take on something. It is objective because what the instruments tell us is apparently conjured by the instruments, not our sense data. Our sight is limited for, say, microscope work on proteins. A microscope, greatly enhances our ability to accurately deconstruct a given protein into relevant components, and go from there with our symbolic wranglings (numbers, words, etc.).

Another kind of knowing is direct experience, or direct encountering. Whereas the first mode provided the topo map, the second involves actually climbing the wall as our sentience absorbs the totality of it in real time. In the later, we come to "know" the wall in ways not possible from the discursive perspective, just as the discursive can tell us things about the physical nature of the wall not evident while actually climbing it.

The experiential mode is not an attempt to do the work of the strictly discursive, nor is the discursive an attempt to understand the experiential. They are two side of the same coin - human reality - but each is a perspective with angles impossible to see from the opposite side.

JL

again noobs are going to do crazy shit