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MichaelVassar comments on Don't judge a skill by its specialists - Less Wrong
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Physicists are fairly visibly and obviously good at sports compared to typical people and also compared to typical scientists.
Is that true?
Wouldn't one expect biology to be more useful than physics for most sports? Classical mechanics has been well-understood for long enough for domain-specific knowledge about how to apply mechanics to sports to be translated into terms that even a sub-par phys-ed coach can understand and repeat, but there are new discoveries every year about how the body responds biologically to different kinds of nutrition and stressors.
It took a bit of an outsider-- a mediocre swimmer who was nuts about the sport-- to apply physics to swimming, and he didn't start by thinking about physics, he started by noticing that naturally good swimmers didn't look the same in the water as naturally bad swimmers.
There may still be plenty of low-hanging fruit left to apply physics to sports. Or maybe not-- that site mentions that, because of the high drag from water, efficiency is more crucial in swimming than in other sports.
Maybe you meant this link?
You're right. Thanks. Corrected.
I was talking about physicists, not about physics. It's a casually obvious fact about them.
I also expect low hanging fruit everywhere, such as the one Nancy mentions below.
Hm. Well, one person's casually obvious fact is another's unverified anecdote.
In my experience, physicists are typically skinny, toned, and in reasonably good cardiovascular shape, but not necessarily "good at sports compared to typical people" after adjusting for education and free time / flexibility of work hours. They tend to be good at running, swimming, pushups, karate, and Ultimate Frisbee, but not necessarily at tennis, football, wrestling, soccer, golf, basketball, or skiing. Again, that's just my biased set of estimates based on a nonrandom sample of about 10 physicists and 20 people with comparable lifestyles but other careers. I wouldn't expect it to be at all representative of national or global trends, and I'm surprised that you feel confident about your assertion.
Wrestling I may not put in the negative category - simply because it is a skill that would be incidentally improved by the general tendency for martial arts training.
That sounds right on all points. My guess is that you are just using an unrealistic baseline. Typical people really are shockingly bad at everything.
Lol. Yes, that is indeed one of my more prominent flaws. When I was younger, people thought it was cute and called it "idealism." Now people just feel judged. I'm trying to learn how to maintain high standards and deep hope with less of a compromise to my epistemic rationality, i.e., less bias introduced into my baseline. Wish me luck!