

Viewers vs. Doers: The Rise of Spectatoritis - dcaldwell
http://artofmanliness.com/2011/08/28/viewers-vs-doers-the-rise-of-spectatoritis/

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mechanical_fish
As a student of history, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to make of this odd
philosophy that there's something wrong with watching other people do things
that you will never do.

Living vicariously is the essence of being human. It's why we have language,
and stories, and imagination, and all the wetware required to support these
things. Dogs can't tell stories about other dogs in such a way that their
canine audience is moved to weep or cheer. Whereas humans line up to hear
stories about three-thousand-year-old semi-mythical events. Then they draw
practical conclusions from those stories.

I don't see why it's so terrible that I'd rather watch, say, a deep-sea
fisherman risk his life than try deep-sea fishing myself. We have no shortage
of deep-sea fishermen -- in fact, what we have is a shortage of fish. And the
same principle definitely applies to soldiers: Every real soldier who can be
replaced by a Team Fortress player, or a History Channel viewer, represents a
net win for humanity.

~~~
pnathan
You are using a cherry-picking argument.

There is a big difference between the mentality of the creator and the
consumer. This should not be news.

Hacker News, exists, in part, as a monument to creating.

At this point, I thought it was a forgone, forknown point, _especially here_ ,
that being a creating being is better than a consuming being.

~~~
prodigal_erik
The popularity of iOS around here, a consumer-centric platform blatantly
hostile to tinkerers, makes clear we don't have such a consensus now if we
ever did.

~~~
pnathan
Okay, I'll bite. :-)

It's important to separate the ethical, technical, and business concerns and
look at them one by one.

iOS offers me a few things. As a _user_ , it offers me a smooth widget
experience, no hard crashes, and a ginormous store full of toys and a few
useful widgets. As an appliance, it is sterling. My music player works as
reliably as my toaster. _Exactly_ what I want, actually. I have no need to
tinker with my appliances; they do exactly what I want, and I free my mental
cycles to do things like work on my Master's without fiddling around with
configuring my toaster. As a _developer_ , it offers me a simple delivery
platform, delivered to people with spare cash who have been trained to
purchase software. It's a pretty sweet gig, in my opinion.

Apple _really should_ open up the hood to tinkerers, in the ethical sense. It
does us as a society no good to have a society of 'couch potatoes' and
spectators. We need doers & thinkers, people who can get the job done and also
reflect on their existence. I strongly believe that Apple should incorporate
that awareness into product policies: there should be something like a 'enable
tinkerer mode' in my iPod system settings. However, their corporate DNA goes
against that, from the early 80s on. They really want to provide a unified and
'beautiful' experience for their customers. Tinkerers open up the hood and
cause variety and divergence from the norm. (Think all the weird kludges in
Windows because it has to support such a variety of hardware).

------
forbes
I used to spend a lot of my weekends watching my AFL team, Collingwood,
losing. Then I saw the episode of Seinfeld where he did his bit about sports
fans:

"We're a little too into sports in this country, I think we gotta throttle
back. Know what I mean? People come home from these games, 'We won! We won!'
No, they won - you watched."

"They won, you watched." It really resonated with me. I was spending quite a
bit of cash to watch a bunch of fit guys try to kick a ball better than
another bunch of fit guys in different coloured jumpers. If 'my guys' won I
felt good and if they didn't, I didn't. It seemed ridiculous to me. If they
won, why should I feel happy? I don't even know them! And if they lost, why
should I feel upset? It wasn't my fault.

I haven't really been to an AFL game since then and barely watch it on TV. If
Collingwood makes a final, like they did last year, then yes, I want them to
win and I will watch the game on TV. But it doesn't go any further than that.

Giving up on the spectating didn't make me go out and play football myself,
but I do mostly spend my spare time being creative rather than just
spectating.

~~~
smokeyj
i came away with a similar sentiment after reading this blog, and it really
articulated a similar notion in my head -- for me, wasting precious free time
online, living through the success stories of fellow entrepreneurs.

~~~
forbes
Yeah, it is inevitable that we will do a little spectating. I got my insight
into the pointlessness of watching spectator sports from watching Seinfeld,
watching TV, another spectator activity. I still enjoy comedies and movies and
they don't make me depressed like watching professional sport. I try to limit
my time on sites like Hacker News for the same reason I try to limit my TV.

Anytime I think of the masses of creative output of greats like Beethoven,
Picasso, Edison I think to myself - "The amazing power of not watching TV for
four hours a day."

------
_delirium
I'd like this article a lot more if it weren't sort of gratuitously about
gender in a strangely jarring way.

The underlying point about spectatoritis is interesting, but I don't see what
it has to do with what it means to "become a man" or developing a "manly
'philosophy of leisure'". Surely plenty of people of both genders are
suffering from spectatoritis, and not only in spectator sports (and even
there, there are plenty of female fans as well).

Nash's book is not explicitly gendered in that way, though it was written in
1938 and so does have a more implicit built-in assumption that it's probably
addressing men (and it does use "man" and "men", but in the now-old-fashioned
sense that's sort of gendered but ambiguously so and might also mean "people
in general", depending on context). But it's not really accusing its readers
of being insufficiently masculine; it's accusing them of being too passive,
which seems more to the point.

~~~
mkr-hn
<http://artofmanliness.com/about-2/>

It's a gender-specific blog. A good one, too.

~~~
_delirium
This article isn't gender-specific, though, except in a very lazy way that
just gratuitously throws in the word "man" and "manliness" a few times in an
article that has nothing to do with them, unless you count some vague
reference to old-fashioned ideas about what constitutes a "real man". It would
require changing about four sentences, and not even changing them a lot, to
make this a completely gender-nonspecific article.

The blog overall, from a brief skim, seems about 50% sexist nonsense, and 50%
obsessed-with-old-accoutrements-of-masculinity hipsters (I expect to find some
fancy moustaches and pipes). If it matters, I'm a man, and I find this kind of
stuff trying to tell me what it means to be a "real man" pretty offensive,
backwards crap.

~~~
FlemishBeeCycle
Unless you have a specific example, merely omitting mention of both genders
hardly qualifies as "sexism" to me? There are plenty of gender-specific
magazines for females that do the same thing all the time. I don't see why
everyone must now pepper their prose with "he or she" and use an exact 50/50
proportion of examples using both male and female names (actually, you
wouldn't need an equal proportion, as it seems that sexism only applies to
men) lest they be labeled _sexist_?

Secondly, just because it's popular today to think of men differently than the
"old-fashioned way" doesn't mean that modern thought is "more correct" as to
what defines a man, nor does it mean that people who disagree with the modern
idea are "wrong" (I'm not suggesting that the "old-fashioned way" is in anyway
correct either, but still people have different opinions - and the popular
modern idea is just one more).

But I digress, the blog is quite self-aware and I've always read it with a
sort of tongue-in-cheek sense of humor; the "gratuitously" throwing in of
"man" and "manliness" is part of the writing style.

~~~
Hawramani
It's ironic that many authors resort to using the blatantly sexist 'she' to
avoid being called sexist.

I would love to see any evidence that the usage of 'he' somehow harms females,
and I would support any evidence-supported solution that is suggested (for one
thing, I wouldn't want it to harm my wife and daughters), but so far this
whole issue seems to be completely locked in the realm of hypothesis, and it's
without the feeblest suggestion of evidence.

~~~
zasz
It's not that using "he" is sexist, so much as it's an indicator of a society
where being male is the "default" setting, and it's always a little bit
surprising to see a woman doing something. So I would argue that no, it's not
really sexist to use "she" as a pronoun, if you're doing it to be rebellious.
It isn't about putting down men. It's about encouraging the visible presence
of women.

The pronoun thing is probably a minor issue in the gender wars, though. That
"he" is the default pronoun isn't a problem so much as, say, that the vast
majority of scientists are men, which sends the message to young girls that
science is not for them.

There's some interesting studies and anecdotes in this page:
<http://people.mills.edu/spertus/Gender/pap/node6.html>

~~~
Hawramani
Why is the small number of women in science a problem? To call this fact a
_problem_ good evidence is needed.*

Usually when this is called a problem it is done along with making the
implicit or explicit suggestion that men in scientific fields are sexist and
somehow discriminate against women. But I, like most men in science, would
severely reprimand anyone who treats women unfairly. Therefore I find it
extremely unwarranted and unfair that feminists think it is OK to accuse us of
sexism without evidence. And I find it saddening that not more men have the
courage to speak up against these accusations.

I'm sure there have been cases of discrimination against women in science, but
this in no way proves that it's widespread, or that it's affecting the number
of women in science.

[* The logic goes that since men and women are identical, there should be just
as many women in science as there are men. But this conclusion is unwarranted
because the premise is unsupported by evidence.]

~~~
zasz
Countries with more gender inequality have more female IMO contestants:
<http://www.pnas.org/content/106/22/8801.abstract>

If you change the gender of a name and leave everything else constant on an
academic CV, acceptance rates go down from 70% to 45%.
[http://dimer.tamu.edu/simplog/archive.php?blogid=3&pid=1...](http://dimer.tamu.edu/simplog/archive.php?blogid=3&pid=1738)

If it were actually the case women were inherently less interested in science,
sure, I wouldn't care, but discrimination exists. Much more subtly than it
used to, but it's still there, and hence still a problem.

------
pkananen
I'm always amazed by the number of 20 and 30 year old men who'd rather watch
football than play it.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Are you talking about American football? The sport where you need a suit of
armor just to lower your risk of neck, knee, and brain injury to the point
where you can survive a two- or three-year career in the pros before being
forced to retire?

I'll watch, thanks.

~~~
clistctrl
There's always tag football.

~~~
arethuza
Or Rugby - which would seem closer to American Football but without the fancy
outfits and all the standing about. ;-)

~~~
robryan
Rugby is also a terrible sport to play casually with high impact tackling.

When you think about it even more casually, going down to the park with a few
friends, rugby and american football are both hard to replicate. Sure you
could pretend to both be quarterbacks and pass the ball back and forward but
it's really nothing like the actual sport. Same with rugby which is mostly
backwards passes.

Taking the American sports angle you can see why it's much more common to
seeing friends playing basketball casually as getting a few friends together
you can mostly replicate the game.

~~~
pyoung
Most major american cities have one or more rugby clubs. It is great way to
unwind after a long day at the office. You should definitely have good health
insurance, and be prepared to accept some longer term consequences, but unlike
football, there is a fairly active (albeit small) adult population that
engages in the sport.

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rudyfink
My dad always described television as watching other people live life. It was
an observation I'd forgotten. Thanks for posting this article and reminding me
of it.

------
swlkr
I loved this article. Mostly because I see a bunch of "spectatoritis" around
me all of the time. I swear that the inland empire is just a bunch of
passionless zombies living their lives waiting to die. I really don't see any
get up and go or any enthusiasm for much of anything and this article mirrors
my observations perfectly.

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canistr
What about video games?

------
maeon3
If 95% of people were not fraggles, sheep and spectators, then a lot of things
in this world would not get done as quickly as they do now. People think that
the innovation phase of a project is the hard part, but in some ways, it's
just the seed, you need an army of autonomous humans to do the mundane work to
make the innovation take root and flourish.

If everyone on Earth had (and acted upon) Earth-shaking visions like Elon
Musk, Bill Gates, and Ford, then the world would be full of amazing ideas that
never get carried out to their potential. We need the drones, workers and the
queen. Too many queens and the hive dies.

~~~
aMoniker
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a
hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a
wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act
alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a
computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization
is for insects." - Robert A. Heinlein

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AndrewMoffat
894 likes, 35 +1s, 160 tweets

~~~
pigbucket
Your comment was looking a little grey under the collar when I read it, which
I think raises the irony to which you allude to another level.

