My other fave was an adult blocking little kids shots repeatedly in basketball. Jfc dude.
(Now your own kids when they get to be good enough you gotta teach them about “man’s game”— besides at that point they are only a couple years away from kicking your ass so gotta get your licks in while you can).
We tried to teach our kids to be good winners by having a “winner cleans up all” rule. Great for games like risk with lots of pieces. You can gloat (a little) but if you want help putting the game away you might try a little graciousness.
I didn’t want to pick my own kid as I knew he was a ringer (ended as starting CF on varsity 3 years) but once the other capn pulled that shit all bets were off.
I wanted him to sit on the board a bit before being taken.
I won first pick by the standard bat toss, hand over hand method. I intentionally picked a weak player first. I’d have kept the spirit if the other guy responded in kind.
Now put a bunch of men out there and it’s go time. This was not that.
Kind of related, Sean Carroll has Stanford Prof and author of the book Behave Robert Sapolsky on his current podcast. Sapolsky’s ideas and book have been discussed here before.
If it’s not too big a spoiler, he doesn’t believe in free will. So like if we don’t cut the assholes a break, we’re the assholes.
He says eventually we might come to think of people behaving badly (assholes was my choice of word, perhaps unfair) as due to human evolution, history and chemistry instead of choice. He compares the situation to what people with epilepsy faced when the condition was considered to be caused by consorting with the devil instead of something they couldn’t control, as we now know is the case.
I’m not fully convinced but it might not be up to me.
Sometimes things are funny partly because they’re ambiguous. There’s a French term for it.
Anyway, my memory was jogged such that I remember now you mentioned books about primate behavior, which is something Sapolsky studies so you might be the guy who told me about Sapolsky so haha.
Just to be clear I’m not saying the study’s conclusions aren’t clearly relevant to rich people’s sense of self-importance…but come on, if someone is literally forced to sit through a game of monopoly against you where they are handicapped to the point of having no chance and you don’t spend the whole match talking shit and clowning on their broke ass and then insisting in the post-match interview that you just have a good sense for business deals there is something fundamentally wrong with you.
If you add environment to this list (how they were raised, their current circumstances) then I’m totally on board with this. In general, I’m not in any position to “judge” any person for any behavior I disagree with - from robbing liquor stores to putting immigrant children in cages. But that shouldn’t and doesn’t prevent me from wanting them to stop harming other people and taking actions in furtherance of my beliefs, which are also a result of human evolution, history, chemistry, the way I was raised, and my current circumstances.
He does that. He looks at a behavior and asks what preceded it, in detail, from milliseconds before back through evolutionary time. Behave is nearly 1000 pages so I’m not doing it justice.
