On the contrary, it doesn't surprise me at all. Many people on HN are young and successful which often means they overestimate how confident they should be in subjects outside their area of expertise. It's not just simple mechanics either, it's everything.
Many people, including myself, find exercise to be mind numbingly boring, and intellectually insulting. (Pick up a weight and put it down? That is quantitatively zero work, buddy. No thanks.) Never underestimate the motivation to find a quick fix.
> Many people, including myself, find exercise to be mind numbingly boring, and intellectually insulting.
I used to think the same way but decided one day that I was going to walk/jog ~10km every day and eat healthy. Now, I really enjoy walking. It gives me a chance to think about the problems I've been trying to solve during the day, what I'm going to do tomorrow, etc. And at some point I actually started enjoying the _feeling_ of doing exercise. It's hard to describe, and I know that myself from 12 months ago would believe me but I definitely wouldn't want to stop exercising.
So my recommendation is to spend your time while exercising thinking about whatever was bothering you during the day. It's quite relaxing, frankly. To be fair, my exercise routine doesn't include the gym but the same logic applies there.
> (Pick up a weight and put it down? That is quantitatively zero work, buddy. No thanks.)
While true if you're using the strict physics definition of work, its not true if you use the common meaning of the word.
I get utterly bored with new sports within 3-6 months. This has happened with every sport I have tried, no matter how much I loved it at the beginning.
Some people enjoy repetition. Some... really don't.
For me the challenge is to keep finding new interesting sports.
I've been boxing almost every day for almost 6 years now. The more into it I get, the more there is to discover and the tougher my sparring partners get. It really doesn't feel like repetition at all.
So maybe you just haven't found a sport you liked yet. Or haven't given them enough time to reach a level of mastery where it doesn't feel so repetitive anymore.
On the other hand, sitting in a chair all day could be construed as physically insulting. Two counters:
1) There's no reason exercise by nature has to be boring or free of intellect. Physics greatly applies to freestyle snowboarding, for instance, and the adrenaline is top-shelf. Not to mention the scenery and vitamin D! Gymnastic and weightlifting activities in general encourage a practical understanding of leverage, torque, moment arms, etc.
2) Even without choosing exciting sports and applying your scientific knowledge to them, why not walk on a treadmill while you work, or sit on a recumbent bike as you watch that 3rd convolutional neural net video? It's an easy way to up your circulation while taking in knowledge and alleviates boredom.
As far as I can tell, typical snowboarding gear consists of a thick jacket, long trousers (or somesuch), with goggles and a snow hat. To produce Vitamin D the light has to actually come in contact with the skin.
there are much cooler activities than that, and ones you can actually do all year around, not just few weeks if weather/snowfall permits (realistically it shrinks to couple of weekends/a week for most people).
- sport climbing - you wouldn't believe how cool and stimulating the sport is, switch indoor/boulder when weather is bad. cool people in community too
- mix of backcountry skiing in winter and hiking anytime else will give you huge amounts of nature that is very relaxing on the mind (easy rule - the more mind works daily, the more body workout it needs to relax, and vice versa)
Another super fun, pretty intellectual form of sports/exercise is climbing. It always seeming like the physics and engineering types gravitate towards it, and I can attest it's another excellent way to get some exercise and to have some fun working on "problems".
As tech workers, I think I would even beyond sitting in a chair all day being physically insulting, to say that it's perhaps one of the greatest (and really a non-trivial one) occupational hazards we face.
While I agree that exercise can become repetitive and boring, it is far from an intellectually sterile endeavor.
You are literally hacking your own body. Also, since no two people have the same genetic code, determining a fitness regiment is a highly experimental process optimized for you. Since this is a highly quantifiable process, you can make the development as data-driven as you choose as there are all types of variables to measure. There was a popular HackerNews post about applying Machine Learning to a ketogenic diet. See https://github.com/arielf/weight-loss
this statement is both technically wrong, and stupid because of your inane try-hard elitism. with google you can calculate down to several sig figs how many joules of work was done by picking up a weight, and putting it down.
I agree that the statement is elitist, but since gravity is a conservative force I think that the strict definition of "work" from physics (W = \int_a^b{\vec{F} \dot d\vec{s}}) would mean you get as 0 a result.
The position doesn't matter, as gravity doesn't act along the surface of the Earth -- it only acts radially. So the work is only affected by the height above the ground (or radial distance from centre of the Earth if you prefer).
So if the person puts the weight on the floor where they picked it up from they will have done zero work on it. Your attempt at pedantry was misdirected -- I would've said that because of the change in density of the Earth's crust that technically the force of gravity does change and thus is not an entirely conservative force.
Also, I wasn't getting pedantic. I was quoting the definition of work, which I believe that GGP misunderstood.
The overall work done by a system is the integral of the force vector dot product the direction of movement. If you have a conservative force setup (no friction) then any motion that takes you back to where you started does no work. We did this in first year physics at university (we also did it in high school, but other school systems probably don't work the same way).
You're confusing work and energy. Energy is expended, but work is not. Work relates to the change in potential energy of a system -- which will not change in a conservative system (assuming you return to the original point). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_(physics)
however, you will never, ever, achieve a zero work vector in a weight room, whether you're off by a micron or a mile. give it a shot, tell me how it goes.
you're arguing for an impossible result using textbook definitions, pretty much what i would call 'useless pedantry'.
that's just sad approach to life... well your body will come back with receipt for this behavior later, it always does. what you will do then, take more pills?
and exercise can be anything physical that makes you sweat, why the need to take only weightlifting into account?
My guess is that you are very unimaginative with your exercise. I find the gym boring as anything, but I do some fairly extreme whitewater kayaking when I get the chance to and mountain biking with a fair bit of hard downhill. I cycle to work and around the city (as its the fastest way to get around - it doesn't even seem like exercise when you incorporate it into your routine like that).
Boring is definitely not the way I would describe the way I exercise.
>Many people, including myself, find exercise to be mind numbingly boring, and intellectually insulting.
The supreme irony of this thread is that the exact mindset you're describing here would probably be alleviated by the stimulants being debated as an alternative(?) to exercise.
I suspect this plays no small part in the historical use of just about every stimulant under the sun including cocaine, amphetamine and modafinil by athletes looking to get ahead. Said athletes were probably still literal leaps and bounds healthier than the average member of the population.
Of course, no drug is an alternative to exercise and good sleep, and nothing about those two things would preclude you from taking any drug I can think of. It's a false dichotomy that breeds silly arguments.
That said, the use of such things is probably not strictly healthy. However, rather than worrying about winding up on a 'faces of meth' poster[0] I would consider how much one is really benefiting from use. The stimulant drug classes are infamous for their ability to persuade people that they're receiving much greater enhancements in ability than is really the case.
"Cocaine produces, for those who sniff its powdery white crystals, an illusion of supreme well being, and a soaring overconfidence in both physical and mental ability. You think you could whip the heavyweight champion, and that you are smarter than anybody. There was also that feeling of timelessness. And there were intervals of ability to recall and review things that had happened years back with an astonishing clarity." - The Autobiography Of Malcolm X, pages 137-138
"Like their British counterparts, the American scientists evaluating amphetamine for the military consistently found that, by all but a few measures, amphetamine did not objectively improve or restore performance lost to physical exhaustion, lack of sleep, or low oxygen any better than caffeine. Users certainly felt that the drug boosted their performance, but subjective impressions seldom reflected objective performance. Even where measurable gains were occasionally produced these were largely or entirely due to increased optimism and persistence in the contrived test conditions." - On Speed: The Many Lives Of Amphetamines, Nicolas Rasmussen, pages 81-82.
You are after all paying quite a cost on multiple levels for whatever gains are alleged, so you had best be sure they're real.
[0]: It's important to keep in mind the order of magnitude(s) difference between therapeutic doses and the mega-doses used by tweakers. In the latter case you should definitely be worried about winding up on a 'faces of meth' poster.
