Dumb jocks are so dumb...

Click to enlarge: Gene Rayburn, host of Match Game in the 1970s and one of my all-time favorite game show hosts, often introduced a question with "Dumb Donald is SO dumb...," upon which the audience would shout back, "How dumb was he?" Rayburn would then repeat the the statement and add a clause with a blank that star panelists and guests had to fill. Eg, "Dumb Donald is SO dumb, when he wanted to meet girls he went into the blank." A suitable answer for this would be something like "the girl's bathroom." Questions often had obvious double entendres. See this page on Game Show Wiki >

Overheard on NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, April 27, 2013:

"People keep telling dumb jocks they're dumb so they don't apply themselves and the cycle of failure continues."

That, from a study conducted by my old alma mater, Michigan State University.

What's that mean? Well, to me, it says positive reinforcement is needed to make academics out of athletes.

But it doesn't work the other way, does it? Eg, why don't people tell me I'm a great athlete so I apply myself on the field?

Nope. I'm a lousy athlete and a lost cause when winning counts. And for some reason that goes unchallenged like some sort of moral axiom, along the lines of "don't complain if you don't vote" or "brush and floss before bed."

It only works one way because "dumb" is more often manufactured and athletic competence more often constitutional.

It other words, it's okay to remediate poor performers in the college classroom but not on the college playing field.

And that's because, sadly, poor athletes costs schools more than poor students.

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Click to enlarge: A pigeon in a Skinner Box.

Pigeons in a Skinner Box

Who most often shows up at motivational meetings? (aside from former generals and politicians and CEOs still descending in golden parachutes): Coaches and athletes.

Because they connect viscerally and reinforce the perception I referred to above.

No one really wants to hear from a linguist, for example, that cognition is relative to our socio-linguistic communities; or from a string theorist that we occupy only one of innumerable universes and in another universe you are poor and destitute, or a serial killer, or never born; or from a preacher that we are totally depraved and all that matters in this life is what's done for the next; or from a behavioral psychologist that we are little more than pigeons in a Skinner Box pecking for food pellets; or from a philosophical evolutionist that morals have evolved and have no fixed ethical source. Because in each of those views of the human condition, winning is relative or irrelevant.

And that doesn't sell beer.

[2013-05-02]

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