[remarkEon]

>I love sports, but every time I watch or support them I feel like I'm destroying civil society and undermining democracy and helping to destroy the last vestiges of effective public education.

Hyperbole. In a lot of ways, sports can bring a city or group together in ways that other events can't.

I feel like this is where I have to make the usual acknowledgement that yes of course the NFL is run by a bunch of morons and yes of course head injuries when you're a young kid are a bad thing.

[SapphireSun]

It's the coming together / tribalism part that unnerves me. There's no rational reason for people to get so excited about it, so it rubs me the wrong way the same way most political rallies do. Small scale sports don't have quite the same effect on me, but large heavily marketed ones do as there is a pressure to conform (i.e. care, participate, hold certain opinions that positively reflect on the enterprise).

[remarkEon]

>It's the coming together / tribalism part that unnerves me.

Why? Is community bad? I need that argument to be unpacked a bit more, because for me my experience living in several different cities as their teams make a playoff run has been a fun, electrifying experience. Neighbors are hanging out. Kids are having sleep overs watching games. There's a (usually very) healthy bump to the local economy. For all the room-for-improvement there truly is with managing the sport, the sense of community is what's actually valuable to me.

[SapphireSun]

I think those effects are good, but I also recognize that because these effects are unmoored from anything real we're dealing with nearly pure social signaling amongst a mass responding to tribal tendencies.

Of course, having something that serves as a community focal point that crosses faith boundaries is invaluable - nearly any time new people meet powerful things happen.

However, I take issue with your point about the economy: A local bump means that there was a withdrawal from somewhere else in the economy. If it came mostly from savings rather than from shifting consumption from other locales, then it generated increased consumption, which depending on the macroeconomic condition, could be good or bad (though during the latest recession, inducing an overall increase in consumption sounds like the right thing to do). It's not clear whether this is a good thing or not. Why should I prefer the shop owners in your town versus some other town to temporarily enjoy increased profits? There might be a good reason, but for a disinterested third party, odds are it's a wash.

[lovemenot]

Your argument is cogent and expresses my own thoughts well.

>> having something that serves as a community focal point that crosses faith boundaries is invaluable

This is true up to the point that team allegiance is weaker tribalism than faith. Growing up in Manchester and not swearing fealty to red/blue, admittedly less so than orange/green in Belfast, was still more troublesome than it needed to be.

Yet all this seems a matter of identity development. My younger brother felt the opposite pressure of having to grow up in a family uninterested in sports. Each of us were yin surrounded by yang (or vice versa). I feel the article's writer may have given up something more valuable when he arbitrarily adopted another identity for the sake of broader communication. Unless he had a latent need to belong to a group more deeply and is merely rationalising it in the article.

>> There might be a good reason, but for a disinterested third party, odds are it's a wash.

That's the nub of it. Tribalism in any form wants adherents to reinforce that there are no disinterested parties. You are either with us or against us. Depending on your starting assumptions, that's either valid or completely spurious.

[remarkEon]

I think that's a very sad and depressive way to look at sports fans, and indeed I think the argument that they're part of some fascist tribal conspiracy is silly and immature. I guess my experience growing up as a baseball fan was less "tribal" than football fans in Europe, but I don't think that's reason to decide that the whole experience is without value...which I think is what's being implied here and elsewhere on this thread: that if you haven't experienced this terrible tribal nature of sports fanatics then you've been duped and don't know it yet.

On the whole, I think everyone is reading into this wayyyy to deeply. If anyone wants to enjoy a beer and a hotdog at the ballpark of their choosing, let's do it. 20 days until pitchers and catchers report.

[lovemenot]

I deliberately delimited my position to mitigate counter-arguments like this. We do agree that, to the extent following sports is low or completely non-tribal it is innocuous. Presumably, baseball was/is like this for you. I also allowed that for some people such as my brother and, perhaps for the article's writer too, belonging is a deep need which can be satisfied by some form of tribalism.

My next point might be a bit of a stretch, but I would invite you to consider the possibility that your comment is itself a weak exemplar of the tendencies I disliked growing up in Manchester.

"othering" the others :

>> I think that's a very sad and depressive

Appealing to the in-group for emotional support :

>> If anyone wants to enjoy a beer and a hotdog at the ballpark of their choosing, let's do it. 20 days until pitchers and catchers report.

deliberately misrepresenting outsiders and making a loud noise doing it :

>> the argument that they're part of some fascist tribal conspiracy is silly and immature

[mgkimsal]

re: "less tribal"

Baseball is... much slower than european football. I grew up as an american baseball fan, but could never understand the fascination with american football. Ever. It's just a weird game, but it tends to be faster than baseball, and certainly more physically intense (tackles, etc). And soccer, basketball and hockey are even faster. The speed tends to hype people up, I think.

It feels easier to watch a baseball game from the stands without getting "worked up". I can easily watch a bb game and be relaxed. I never felt able to relax at a basketball game (by comparison). I imagine it's easier to relax at a cricket match vs a soccer/football match too.

[beeworker]

I also have the same reaction, but not so much for the irrationality of being excited. Generally it feels good to win, and it feels good to watch someone you like win, regardless of why you like them. What I really really dislike about the affair is group signaling. (Which is a signal of my belonging to the small group of people who detest group-signaling, but nevertheless...) Enjoy watching the game all you want, even as a crowd, but the moment the "we" comes out I have that reaction. I see so many society-wide problems stemming from mere classification of people into groups, and the so-natural next step of individuals of those groups making the group part of their identity. One of the creepiest social experiments I know about is the Robber's Cave experiment: http://lesswrong.com/lw/lt/the_robbers_cave_experiment/

[jpindar]

Is there a 'rational reason' for anything animals do by instinct? Perhaps you are entirely rational, but most homo sapiens are not so different from our primate ancestors who lived in tribal groups.

[spydum]

I have the same almost instinctive reaction. I think we're probably guilty of it as well, just not as aware of the shape it takes (just look at the emacs vs vi folks, perl vs php, .net vs j2ee).

[pjwal]

"tribalism part that unnerves me... it rubs me the wrong way the same way most political rallies do"

Jr, ear muffs! "U! C! L! A! Fight! Fight! Fight!"

Yeah...I'm not quite getting how this invokes visions of Nuremberg, may I politely suggest a bit of therapy perhaps?

[SapphireSun]

You said Nuremberg, not me. ;) That's an extreme case.

It's more that when I see that effect, I have an uneasy feeling that a trigger could set things off the rails or shut off critical thinking or modify social standards for certain acts. I'm a bit of a contrarian at heart, so it's something of a non-specific mental immune response.

In fact, at (EU) football events, soccer hooligans are widely known for being violent. In the US, commercial and government propaganda are often dispensed in a socially validated environment. An alarming trigger (or a home-run that lands in the stands) can cause a stampede at stadia. I recognize that the more extreme examples are relatively rare occurrences, but they are more common than on say the street per square foot.

The irrationality of the crowd is something that unnerves me. I've been to games, so it's not like it's some paralyzing anxiety, but I feel some creepy crawlies at times.

Let me give you an example of a cohesive social situation that wouldn't creep me out: A town coming together for disaster recovery, where the people signaling cohesiveness are actually directly affected or are participating in the recovery effort. On the contrary, when people that are totally unaffected come together, it feels more uneasy to me because they are responding to a story being told on the news and are in a condition where simple manipulation is possible as they are not responding to advance their own interests (so certain sanity checks are disabled) and they do not have a good way to verify the story they heard.