lsc84 t1_iuglagk wrote on October 31, 2022 at 4:00 AM

Professional football players and boxers have a 100% chance of suffering traumatic brain injury during their careers (literally--a study of the brains of deceased football players showed that all of them had CTE). They still do it. Money, fame, glory, the belief in young people in their immortality, are probably all contributing factors.

As in modern sports, medieval athletes took steps to protect themselves. The goal wasn't to kill each other. They wore special armor and used blunted weapons.

Of course, sometimes people died, but people die in modern sports, too. To say nothing of the severe and debilitating brain damage they suffer from repeated concussive injuries.

Clannishfamily t1_iuh0dd5 wrote on October 31, 2022 at 7:19 AM

I’m glad to see someone talking about CTE. I’ve only just become aware of it from a Ted Talk and it’s horrible.

sighthoundman t1_iuhzz3z wrote on October 31, 2022 at 2:10 PM

>Professional football players and boxers have a 100% chance of suffering traumatic brain injury during their careers (literally--a study of the brains of deceased football players showed that all of them had CTE).

We really can't consider this proven. (Admittedly this is a technical quibble.) The players who were studied had some reason to fear they they had CTE. The NFL has done a pretty remarkable job of deflecting both science and common sense from this issue. (Although it's common sense from their point of view to emulate the tobacco companies and try to avoid paying damages to the people they've injured. They apparently didn't look at the end game in the tobacco case.)

It's also hard, looking at the chain of causality, to figure out how the chance might be less than 100%. But we really haven't showed empirically, yet, that the probability is 100%.