Comment by 827a

unhealthy fumes in the garage!!

Its mentality. When told "Tennis is likely to have amazing health benefits", you could respond by saying "Sick, I'll integrate more tennis or sports like it into my life". In fact, one might not respond at all, and just do it. But instead, some people have this bug in their programming where they feel compelled to respond with a variant of "well, ahktually, tennis is popular among rich people so there's confounding factors at play which means you can't actually claim...."

The source of this bug is the same reason why when someone says "I wake up at 4:30am to go on a run", you'll 100% always get someone to respond "adequate sleep also matters, what time are you going to bed, you're missing out on important life events that happen after 8pm" etc. The cardinal sin is jealousy; getting up at 4:30am is hard, playing tennis multiple times a week is hard, the opposing side feels jealousy because they aren't doing something that's hard, so they need to find any way to minimize that hard thing they're doing to feel like equals.

Even you're doing this, and you don't realize it: "What's wrong with running at a normal time?". Nothing at all. Literally, seriously, no one even remotely implied there was anything wrong with running at a normal time. Someone choosing to run at 4:30am does not mean not running at 4:30am is bad; but you think it is. Why? Because it is true that running at 4:30am is harder. Harder doesn't always even mean better, especially when it comes to getting up at 4:30am, but it does definitely mean Harder. So: You minimized their strain by asserting that running at 4:30am is "not normal".

This isn't a university, and you're not a test subject. You're a human, who needs to take care of their body. Arguing about the minutia of the results of some research paper is Mindset; its forest for the trees. Literally, no one who adequately exercises would care that much about studies on tennis which adequately control for confounding factors, because they're too busy actually playing tennis, and they've seen and felt the positive effect it has had on their body and don't need a research paper to tell them its healthy.

(I'm just using tennis as an example here; there's plenty of other sports that follow this vein)

One can find a reasonable rebuttal for anything. The point is that pattern only emerges over time—this guy hates exercise and has a knee jerk rationalization to suggest any exercise is bad.

> But these seem like pretty reasonable arguments? At the very least you should retort with a study that at least tried to control for confounders.

I disagree. The fundamental premise here is that regular exercise has profound health benefits. Tennis is simply one example.

The rebuttals to tennis here ignore the obvious truth -- there are limitless ways to get regular exercise; you just have to have some time and be willing to put some effort in. With very few exceptions there is nobody in the world for whom it's not a realistic goal.

People who simply do not want to can come up with endless excuses to rationalize it.

We have a saying, something to the tune of: who wants to do something, seeks the ways, who does not want to do it, seeks the reasons why it can't be done. Those points don't need addressing.

Sure; I would enjoy talking about these confounding factors, on the tennis court after a round.

My point is that it seems like the only people who bring up trivia like "maybe tennis isn't as good for you as you think it is because there's survivors bias in the population of people used to do studies on the sport" are people who never play tennis. Similarly, if you're a runner you've probably multiple times had people say, directly to you, "oh I could never do that to my knees, running is so bad for them!"

You're explaining micro-gravity in orbit to an astronaut [1]. Leave the science and the confounding factor enumeration and the hypothesis to the academics. Just go play tennis.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GY3sO47YYo