He seems to not want to have to look away from the target between shots, but his quiver is placed out of view and he has to look toward it after his fifth arrow. He also subtly repositions his stance after the third arrow. In general, I'm surprised at the amount of motion in his body compared to the stillness you see with say precision rifle or pistol shooters. e.g. 10m air rifle:
You can also see how he's really fast. This is a completely different style of archery from Olympic, which has stabilizers and a sight. Olympic style archers "aim a lot".
Lars shoots a different style, which is basically "draw and loose" with very little "aiming". The aiming done in that situation is to basically "look at what you want to hit".
Here's a Smarter Every Day episode that shows some of that. You see Byron Ferguson there already putting the arrow on but there's no aiming. When the mint is thrown in the air, he just looks at the mint and instinctively aims and shoots it in mid air.
It's amazing how well this works if you don't need to hit a mint and no worries of shooting a person and even without exactly spined arrows and with just a stick and a string for a bow. Source: I do this for fun (with larger targets).
> Lars shoots a different style, which is basically "draw and loose" with very little "aiming". The aiming done in that situation is to basically "look at what you want to hit".
Reminds me of a friend's bachelor party out in the woods where we were shooting guns. A couple friends brought big revolvers and so I tried shooting them at some targets. Missed every one. I decided if I wasn't gonna hit anything, I should at least have fun, so I took two of them and did a Yosemite Sam impression firing them akimbo at the targets in rapid fire and I heard a PINGPINGPINGPING of 4 shots hit in a row from 2 different guns fired in tandem.
US military had a training program for this some decades back (Viet Nam era?) called, IIRC, "Quick Kill". Gun was held well below shoulder level, and pointed by whole-trunk motion.
If video game experience is of any relevance, I noticed that taking shots on the move with no time to react yields better results than consciously aiming.
There are times where I have time to line up my shot and track the enemy in my sights and yet in some cases I miss all my shots (I actually end up being out of sync with the enemy’s lateral moves, essentially lagging behind).
On the other hand, there are times where an enemy surprises me and I move my mouse in a sudden motion, shooting while it’s still moving - I manage to land the vast majority of those shots (sometimes shooting twice in panic, but the first one turns out to be a hit - this is on PC so no aim assist as far as I know).
Not that I would like to “prove” this hypothesis in actual combat, but I wonder if taking shots “by feel” is actually better than doing so carefully and consciously.
You’re just describing carefully designed video game mechanics for adaptive hitboxes.
The game is effectively giving you a way more massive hit box when you’re not scoping than when you are. In turn you are more likely to hit something but you usually do lower damage and bullets will prefer the torso hit box, so you’re unlikely to get a head shot.
Yes. Adaptive hit boxes are a staple of FPS games for time immemorial.
Since you emphasized PC I assume you’re also thinking of aim assist on consoles. Those are related but different techniques to help gamers.
Aim assist moves the reticle closer to a hit box centre in screen space. However it doesn’t increase the hit box size because you’d often have overlapping hit boxes in screen space.
Adaptive Hit boxes exist in world space and grow and shrink accordingly to user aim mode.
> Lars shoots a different style, which is basically "draw and loose" with very little "aiming". The aiming done in that situation is to basically "look at what you want to hit".
Indeed, it's closer to a field athlete (basketball, soccer, etc) shooting/throwing a ball.
It’s call instinctive in fact, because, as he explain himself he’s not aiming in the traditional sense. Practicing this style is harder than using an Olympic bow with a visor, but you gain a lot of flexibility in 3D shooting, tricks shoot and other techniques where the distance is not known.
As my teachers explains to me, your whole body is used instead of your eyes.
Lots of "muscle memory". Kind of like someone else mentioned, throwing a ball. You don't have a sight you aim with when you throw a ball. You look at what you want to hit and throw. You don't do that very consciously though. Your body and subconscious just do it for you.
Not sure if that was in that video or another one but he trains every day. He's got a deer target right outside his door at a typical range for hunting and every time he walks out he just takes a shot at it (plus a really nice outdoor 3D course right on his property).
Reminds me of my preteen years when shooting rubber bands was a useful skill to have if you wanted to show off. We made up all kinds of competitions and would hit different targets. I even did it at home (practice). I felt like I got pretty good at it. The quick release method was almost always better for me. I had associated the draw and the aim as a fluid motion. If I drew then took time to aim, it was as if my brain would over analyze the situation trying to account for wind/gravity/etc and I had a higher miss rate because of it. I somehow accounted for these things intuitively better than intentionally. But it does take practice to get there.
there's a great trick I learned for shooting rubber bands, when you pull back to shoot, twist your pullback hand 180 to put a twist in the rubber band, it makes it fly so straight.
my sister when she was in college was incredibly good at hitting small things across the room by finger snapping bottle caps.
There’s a similar form of pistol shooting I like to call “point and click” involving using your middle finger for the trigger and your pointer finger pointing down the barrel. Basically finger guns with a gun.
The first time I saw that killed any interest I might have had in 'serious' archery (I was into it as a kid). It's like watching a weightlifter use an exercise machine.
Sorry, I know that part was ambiguous. I meant shooting my bow using an instinctive aiming technique. I don't throw things in the air usually. Just regular or 3D targets ("3D" in archery terms meaning fake animals).
People that do shoot moving targets from what I've seen might just use frisbees or the like. You kinda need a barn full of straw behind it.
If you want to learn more about instinctive archery, here's something on that from Clay Hayes ("Alone" season 8 winner): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mzWQ5_1bXtM and the whole channel is full of (serious - not stunt) archery stuff.
Nitpicking your comment but that's not Olympic archery, olympic archery doesn't include compound bows, only recurve bows(also the Olympics specifically uses 70m distance only).
Recurve and compound archers are also typically shooting up to 90m (for men). FITA distances are 90, 70, 50, 30m. You’d be surprised how well you can do at the shorter distances and then everything falls apart at 70 to 90m. Instinctive shooting won’t get you far at the long distances.
But getting the shots into a keyhole even at a relatively short distance is very impressive still.
This guy Lars Anderson is fascinating, doing so much more with arrows. He has a great video, trying to rediscover or recreate the Comanche capabilities. Well worth 5 minutes of your time if you have any interest in historic military or the abilities of humans to do amazing things. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liHlCRpS70k
Bone chilling. My family was terrorized by Comanche raids to the point that their fates are documented in history books. Even Amerindians have nothing positive to say about them.
People do this all the time in these things. That way now you can win another award for 8 shots next year or whatever. Pretty soon you are the top winner of awards for XXX.
Otherwise you just get one award you can never beat.
Maybe there are only 7 keyhole arrows in the entire world, and each one costs a zillion dollars to make, and you have to wait three days before shooting one again, to let it cool down. Maybe not.
I’ve been saying for years that someone needs to reign in Big Keyhole Arrows but the regulators have been asleep at the wheel as per usual. Thanks a lot, (Congress)/(Brussels)/(Obama I guess).
It would be the same for pole vaulting. You can enter the competition at a lower height and continue to clear as the height increases. Once you fail at a height you still have the highest height you did clear for the competition which you can still win with. That was probably a horrible explanation - my apologies if so.
"Once the vaulter enters the competition, they can choose to pass heights. If a vaulter achieves a miss on their first attempt at a height, they can pass to the next height, but they will only have two attempts at that height, as they will be out once they achieve three consecutive misses. Similarly, after earning two misses at a height, they could pass to the next height, when they would have only one attempt.
The competitor who clears the highest height is the winner. "
So, it takes some planning, and some athletes start at heights that they know they will clear easy, just to guarantee them 2nd or 3rd place. Then they continue their attempts at higher bars. Once they know they have won they have 3 more attempts to try and break the record.
Right?! They only had 7 setup from the start. If you are breaking a record why would you ever quit before you were spent? If I was ever in a position to break a record I would go until I failed to ensure the record held as long as possible.
Soviet athletes were paid a premium every time they broke some world record. So it makes perfect sense to break your own records incrementally, by as little as possible.
He started setting records in the 1980s when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, so it very much was a Soviet thing. After Ukraine left he then competed under the Ukrainian flag, but I would expect many Soviet practices to have continued (at least for a while).
Btw only the last four of his outdoors records and two last indoors records were made under the Ukrainian flag. Interestingly, he also was a part of unified exUSSR team on 1992 Olympics, competing under get Olympics flag, and somehow didn't even win.
Also, his last record set in 1994 stood for mighty 20 years and was finally broken on 15 Feb 2014, in Donetsk, of all places. ...
... I don't think we'll see international pole vaulting events in Donetsk in the next 20 years.
Maybe he shot a hundred, and he finally did it with the last 7, and missed the next one, after collecting his arrows.
Or maybe he had to stop because the arrows break down when passing through the hole. For example, I don’t think it’s good for the fletching (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fletching)
Or he had 1000 arrows, fired them all through they that keyhole 10 times in a row and they cut out the first 9,993 hits because that made the video boringly long ;-)
Lars was heavily involved in the Robin hood movie production, the one with Taron Edgerton from a couple years ago. Despite how incredulously "blockbustery" the action sequences looked, the archery itself was all heavily grounded in reality and research from manuscripts of that era. I gained a lot of respoect for Taron Edgerton for his dedication to pulling all that off without resorting to stuntsmen or cgi. Wish the movie did better, so all their work could have had more exposure.
I can't stand the tone of this video, so couldn't watch the whole thing but skipped through, and afaict it's debunking the idea that people ever really did this in battle? Not that the stunts in the video are fake?
Kind of a misleading thing to say it's 'thoroughly debunked' when it's very clearly for entertainment and just says they're 'myths'.
I agree, after watching both videos it seems plausible that at least some historical warriors could have used a style like Lars and been very effective with it. I don’t think that claim is really “debunked”.
They seem to have attacked the least charitable interpretation of his video. For example, I don’t think he was seriously claiming that warriors would routinely catch opponent’s arrows and fire them back in combat, I thought he was just presenting that as a cool trick.
Your correct. Lars isn’t faking his feats. But his narrative that he “rediscovered the ancient true way of archery” is fake, and originally before his rise to fame, that was his “claim to fame” he was a snake oil salesman who ended up being successful because even though his claims about the product where false, people still genuinely liked the product just for what it was, impressive archery skills, no need to wrap it up in claims about ancient lore or some modern conspiracy to “suppress true archery”.
If you are selling A as A-prime, you can be a snake-oil salesman even if you are supremely skilled at A.
In Lars' case, he is from what I can see a supremely skilled instinctive archer. There are some historical documentation, from some regions ,documenting feats that Lars is capable of doing.
But, "feating" and "combat skills" are very different things (well, they are for sword disciplines, I will blithely assert the same is true in archery). Yes, both require skill. Yes, training one discipline can improve the other. but they're not the same. Just like how writing Haskell (or Lisp) can make you a better C programmer.
> If you’re actually good I don’t think you can be called a snake oil salesman exactly.
Of cause you can. Every single social media body builder who’s obviously on Steroids but is claiming they got to they are by eating whatever the latest marketable product they come across(see referral link in bio) is, are snake oil salesmen’s, even if they are objectively and impossible as muscular as their viewers want to be.
Lars got really good at archery doing what every other archer does… the big dumb secret you ask? He practiced. But it’s difficult to sell pratice, even expensive one on one tutoring only gets you so far. So he invented a narrative where “Big Archery” has been conspirering since the Dark Ages to teach archery wrong, but if you follow his cult of the true archery (click link for details on the subscription pricing), then you too will instantly become an archer supreme, capable of firing several arrows through keyholes!
Given the amount of effort he spends to find what actual ancient texts, ancient pictures, and reproducing exactly that, I think he has a pretty good claim to be trying to reproduce actual specific historical styles.
In later videos he talks about not just historical archery, but specific styles used by specific people with references.
That’s not how the sciences work. Historians don’t invent a narrative and then go through ancient texts trying to find pictures and snippets they can use to back up their narrative. You start from the source, study it and try to deduce the truth, and you can try to craft a narrative that portrays that truth as accurately as possible.
> In later videos he talks about not just historical archery, but specific styles
Yes he talks a lot about it and everything he makes up gets quickly and thoroughly debunked. He might as well be claiming that aliens invented archery. He’s a fraud who’s good with a acrobatic trick shots with bow and arrow, not a historian.
I've seen his version, and I've the attempts to debunk. I've also seen his attempts to debunk the debunkers, and so on
I am emphatically not convinced by the attempts to debunk.
Furthermore there is a situation where Lars clearly did start with a source, and attempted to reproduce exactly that. In other words he did what you say he didn't. Does he know what the thing he found is the way it was actually done? He doesn't, and says so. But it is one way it could have been done, and reproduces the historical feats of archery.
It started when a group of Native Americans pointed out in https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/videos-lost-and-found... that they have maintained an archery tradition that Lars had ignored. However after Lars talked with actual Comanches, he found that they had lost the technique by which the Comanches fired so quickly. A technique which, according to both pictures and books, was completely different than the style that Lars had figured out based on Arab and Asian sources. They could still make and shoot the bows an arrows, but not at the speed described in history books.
And so, working with a Comanche archer and with authentic Comanche bows and arrows, Lars experimented until to find a method that fit the historical record. He was able to achieve historical speed and accuracy with a very different technique than he used before. Yes, he did it from from horseback, and whoed it could be done while hanging off of horseback. (He doesn't appear to be good enough to actually do it at speed while hanging off an actual horse, but that is a question of horsemanship, not of archery.)
If you're a glutton for punishment, he explains himself at length in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4mqt69VZ28. And you get to see what he thinks he got right, what he thinks he got wrong, and the limits of what he claims to know.
The most interesting point for me is that practice with shooting moving things interferes with shooting at a stationary target, and vice versa. This "two related things interfere with each other in your brain" is something I've personally experienced with Go vs Chess. But it is fascinating that it happens with archery.
Superficially impressive? Those archery trick shots were amazing! Obviously nobody was doing 360 no-scopes with arrows in the Battle of Crécy, I didn't take that as the thesis statement of the 'debunked' video.
I don't trust any youtube video that claims to be a source of information but hides comments or likes/dislikes, it's a strong signal that the video's ideas don't hold up to even the most surface level scrutiny.
I think you're getting downvoted for the use of the word superficially (what he does and is impressive and the video you linked doesn't debunk the trick shooting itself except for the split arrow), but this is an important contribution. His historical claims struck me as off, and this video does a good job of explaining why.
"How did the Saracens measure seconds?" — My thought exactly!
I think the claim is that surviving texts about training archers describe shooting an area is a certain distance and loosing two more before the first hits the ground (with some extra requirement that the first not be aimed at some high angle). You can then go back from the kinds of bows they had and turn that into an estimate.
Friendly reminder that guineas book of records is a company you pay a lump sum of money to, and they stage an event to give you an award for publicity.
So it begs the question. How much did Lars pay to put on this event, of all the possible arrow related records he could have made up, why make up this particular one. It seems obvious that it would have been a more honest record to look at consecutive bullseyes or arrows split or something like that, but perhaps the established records from regular competitive archers where to hard for him to beat. And naturally, why is he trying to create a social bus now? Does he have a book coming out or something like that?
Apologies if that's just a spelling error, but if it's an eggcorn / mondegreen, I feel duty-bound to point out that it's Guinness Book of Records, as in a pint of.
Coming this spring, only on the Discovery Channel: Keyhole Archers. A new reality series following the men and women on the "shooting arrows into really teeny-tiny places" circuit as they shoot for fame and fortune, attempting to win the prestigious "golden arrow".
Guinness world record and world record are just completely different.
Usain Bolt have a world record, anybody can have a Guinness World Record if you have money, and challenge things like most helium balloons tied to a paddleboard while paying Guinness staff to fly around and some big fee to put it in their books.
This one from Lars is actually one of the 'better' ones.
I find it vexing when publications treat 'official world record' as a synonym for 'Guinness world record'. They have no official capacity. They just have very good PR to be able to capture the term for themselves and for us to be able to ignore their novelty Christmas book associations and friendliness with despots.
That's no different than sport records, though. For instance 100m running. Some agency has decided their rules (equipment, drugs, wind etc), but someone could run it faster in a non-sanctioned event not following those rules. Which one to claim as WR?
Sure, but if we take same discipline, they align into same effort. Its just that Guiness corp makes making up disciplines stupidly easy I guess for their own profit/promotion. And nobody sane cares about Guiness world record on 100m for example
I don't think it's that much of a difference. I can say that I hold the world record in replying the fastest to your comment in this thread. But for the world record to actually mean something it needs to be backed by an organisation, which is what Guinness is doing just as World Athletics is doing for Usain Bolt's records.
The important bit is how many people are competing for the record not who is keeping track.
There are any of a thousand of video game speed runs you could probably beat with a week of solid effort, but breaking the Mario 1 speed run is a different league.
Even in video game speed runs “hello you absolute legends” there is a kind of “that seems good” that can be reached - where people knowledgeable recognize that the run must be interesting, even if nobody did it before.
And of course on the tracking sites one of the best ways to get noticed is beat a famous record by a bit, or beat an unfamous one by a lot (because a large beat likely means it can be improved more, and so people will try).
This is also why record runs In track mania for example often “calm down” until a new path is shown to work (even in a tool assist) and then there’s a flurry of interest.
This YouTuber reminds me of another who is linked here frequently — Sabine Hossenfelder. Why is that? They both seem to work with a high degree of independence from their mainstream fields? They are both very intelligent and talented while also having few official credentials to verify their credibility?
I don’t mean to impugn either YouTuber, but I’ve been burned too many times by equating “wow this is cool material” with “this is correct”. I’m almost ashamed to admit that my desire to root for the underdog biases me in their favour precisely because they are outspoken, with disastrous outcomes. Well known examples of this which I’ve seen — although much more serious than arrows and stars! — include Andrew Wakefield (MMR maverick, much lauded as a “whistleblower”, later shown to be a hoaxer) and David Irving (maverick second world war historian, much lauded, later shown to be an anti-Semitic white supremacist.)
The keyhole stuff is objectively cool but how do I know the historical takes aren’t just “fake news” for nerds?
Well, actually to prove you're the legal husband of Penelope already. Not having an universally acceptable form of ID led to some major inconveniences...
Some say that the old stories about the vikings (and others from other cultures) clearly weren't true or weren't even possible, but examples like this shows it is easy to wildly underestimate what is possible.
We vastly underestimate what can be done if someone dedicates insane amount of time to something. People often mistake “really hard for me to imagine doing” with “actually impossible”.
The Olympics have a completely different style of archery than Lars practices. Just look at the bow and compare. Also distances that come with it. You won't even see compound bows at the Olympics, only Recurves but with stabilizers, a sight and such. Lars mostly does Traditional Archery, meaning a stick with some string and "trick/stunt archery" on top of that (see his other videos). There are of course also recurves that aren't all highly engineered pieces of metal.
But still, completely different worlds. The closest you get to that is "Barebow" and that's not Olympic but "Lancaster Archery" does a competition that includes a Barebow category. But even that allows for too much "modern" stuff (small stabilizer) and it's all modern recurves.
I used to compete at college level in barebow archery.
The draw weight of the bows Lars tends to use is around 15-20 pounds tops, really low draw weight, low power, for extremely fast stunt/trick shooting.
The draw on the bows I'd use to compete with were 30-35 pounds usually - at 18 meters with no sights and whatever low profile stabiliser/weight you could get away with, anything heavier is a waste of time.
Olympic style recurve shooters usually go around the same in draw weight, there's a tradeoff between better flight characteristics of heavier draw/heavier arrows and the amount of time you can sustain holding back that amount if weight/force.
As an aside, there is a fun niche market for "within the rules" bow weights in barebow - the main function of the weight is to pull the bow "down" out of recoil/the path of the arrow as fast as possible after release so it doesn't kick back and impact the arrows trajectory. I made a few prototype ones back then out of brass, steel, etc. Good fun.
If you ever do precision sports you'll see what a trained human body is capable of. In precision pistol shooting disciplines (standing, single handed, without support) multiple consecutive hole-in-hole hits are very common. This one with arrows is likely more challenging but is entirely believable.
Maybe he faked all the videos and got the Guinness book of world records to put a fake record on their website, but they doesn’t seem like the simplest explanation.
The world records company has always been a separate entity founded as "Guinness Superlatives LLC", and now called "Guinness World Records".
It was owned as a subsidiary initially, however.
I presume so that any records held by themselves aren't called into question.
Lars Andersen does a lot of "crazy" stuff with archery that people would probably not believe can even be done. But it can. You may think what you will of the "stunt" aspect of it (I'm not a fan) but it doesn't change the fact that this is definitely possible.
It may also seem "impossible" because you don't see Lars using what people might expect of an archer: a compound bow. You really don't need it. You can get incredibly accurate with a traditional bow, especially on the short distance you see in the video.
This is exactly why I believe Lars: from everything that I can deduce about him, his driving force is to prove that he's correct about what can be done with traditional archery.
He’s like the Stonehenge guy with weights and balance - cheating would entirely be pointless because it would defeat the whole point - showing that it could be done.
This is a small video made quickly and many people have since asked different questions about how I do it.
I am going to make a longer video about this record and how it is possible to shoot arrows through a keyhole.
If one were moderately skillful and wanted to hoax, I wonder what kind of setup would let one make this video as "proof". What kind of "funnel" would you need? A straight cone?
I imagine the archer made several real-time videos from several vantage points to prove no shenanigans.
The near-perfectly-straight vertical division in the video would seem to make it particularly easy to fake, especially when combined with the fact that you don't see the other side of the door.
He can just shoot 7 consecutive arrows at the back of a door, then leave the camera running as he shoots 7 consecutive arrows through the keyhole (with the tip starting out in the keyhole so he can't miss), and then composite the footage of the arrows going through the keyhole on to the footage of the arrows coming out of the bow.
The time gaps in between the arrows will be different, but nothing much is happening to the back of the door during this time, so you can just slow down or speed up the "back of door" footage during the dead time to line it up.
(I'm not saying he's done that -- I think it's real -- but that is how I would do it).
I'm not sure about the audio, but it doesn't seem too much of a stretch to fake the audio as well.
I agree the video isn’t the best of evidence. There are views from the other side of the keyhole, but they’re in different shots. Who says they didn’t fit a steel funnel at the other side of the door to guide the arrow through the hole?
This is the attitude we need to teach average people to take every time they see a video as proof of something. Especially if the video otherwise reinforces some sort of ideological position they hold.
Not really. Can you show some evidence that Guinness has been party to falsifying their world record certifications in the past? Or give any reason to believe that Lars (who is well known in the trick archery world) faked the video?
What you're doing is spreading FUD, which is far worse and erodes basic trust - a tenant that society depends on.
I think you might have missed the point-- I don't think the poster you are responding to is actually endorsing the view that this video is fake, they're saying the skepticism applied to it would be useful more broadly.
The point that Guinness witnessed it and that Lars is well known are great ones-- but there are many things people believe unquestionably which don't have evidence anywhere near as strong as that.
Nobody is trusting the video alone. Guinness has certified this (NOT via the video), and Guinness has a reputation that - so far that I know - is beyond reproach. As does the archer himself.
I'll take that as a no, you can't provide any evidence to support your suspicion that this video is faked. Even just something like "He's lied in the past" would suffice, but you can't even do that.
This is an incredibly inefficient way of learning the world and while it may optimize for being wrong less, you will also be right less often as well. One should be critical in assessing whether one should be critical.
I think huristics of scepticism are useful when there is really something at stake, however they can become toxic to simply enjoying the wonder of life. They specifically require you to not assume positive intentions of others.
In this case, I'm fine to assume it could easily be faked, but wasn't.
I doubt we will be able to come to a mutual understanding, but the thought and morality held by many is as follows:
I will work with a bad person to do a good thing. I will not work with a good person to do a bad thing. My participation is based on the morality of the thing that I am doing, not the other person's past or context .
To put it technically, the focus is on the first order action and effect.
This is in contrast to an increasingly popular moral assessment based on speculative second and third order effects.
Going to guess you didnt read the link in a lot of detail.
There are accusations of forced participations in public spectacles in there, regardless of environmental conditions (ie: heat). If they'll do that for his birthday, would they do that for a world record attempt?
How much of a "good thing" is a world record attempt if the participants are compelled by the state and end up putting themselves at risk?
Further, the stated rationale from Guinness is "we are a family oriented brand".
I can understand them not having done much research about a dictator initially, and maybe being unaware.
Only they haven't actually done anything consistent with that when it has been highlighted this individual is using their records as part of a propaganda machine in a very oppressive state.
They in fact defended "their record holders".
You're making up a hypothetical situation where the record is objectively bad. Of course I agree that Guinness shouldn't participate in a force record. I'm saying that you can set aside something bad that someone has done, to do something that you believe in of itself is actually good.
Your point that record setting can be secondarily used as a propaganda tool feeds directly into my point above about considerations of primary action versus secondary and tertiary actions.
By that logic we shouldn't help a dictator build a school or a hospital, because it could be used for propaganda.
There's nothing hypothetical here. No could be used, is used for propaganda.
- Regime has a track record of human rights abuses
- Company takes payment, sends out judge, stamps out record
- Company takes a stance as "family values oriented"
- Company is then subjected to press coverage pointing out they are working with human rights abuser.
- The only public statement they have made is in support of their "record holders". Nothing revoked, revisited, reviewed.
If they had "family values", why wouldn't they do this upon learning about who they work with?
It's been a number of years, and they have done nothing.
This is not the consistent position worthy of respect you think it is.
You additionally keep going back to devil's advocate about choices you could make as an individual. You seem to decline to look further into what is happening between a regime lead by an individual and a for profit company, beyond holding them up as... admirable.
If you did, you would now know the individual in question does things like take political prisoners, expose the population to harm (mass participation record attempts during a pandemic), spend billions on world record attempt buildings, and more.
It's clear cut. The company involved is not achieving any tangible real world good. They are protecting someone who paid them.
Building the world's biggest X is not providing any social value.
To pretend that a giant statue record is the same as a school or hospital is disingenuous.
This discussion reminds me a lot about the debate around separating art from the artist, for example whether or not it's ok to like a Chris Brown song despite his history of extreme domestic abuse
It's fine if one wants to avoid working with a good person to do a bad thing. But if you make that choice, then it's often seen as highly hypocritical to work with a bad person in any capacity. Badness is an absorbing value if you will.
That's basically my point in a nutshell. There are interested in highlighting fun and novel records, and fundamentally not interested highlighting atrocities and making political statements
How do you apply this to things like international trade with countries committing atrocities? Obviously it’s complicated as the those who suffer with sanctions can easily be the most disadvantaged.
However opening up trade with North Korea, Iran, Russia etc doesn’t seem a good way of handling the situation.
I think we absolutely should work with North Korea Iran and Russia to do positive works.
I would have no problem if the US collaborated on building hospitals with Russia at the same time we are also in conflict with them elsewhere. Support the good that you want to see in the world and others. Don't support the bad
It is slightly suspicious that so few details are provided, such as target distance, diameter and height of target, type, size and tension of bow, type of arrows, what the previous world record was, and why he stopped at 7 attempts.
One youtube content creator explained that after he started "suggesting" that people like and subscribe, he got a significantly higher income. So that's why they do it.
The SponsorBlock extension (and the associated ReVanced patch for the Android app) do this. People can tag sponsor segments and 'annoying reminders' and you can set them up to be automatically skipped.
This is what happened on /. too, and why I eventually left for here. A larger and larger percentage of stories were clickbait, or designed to provoke heated discussion. Vim now better than emacs! Climate change may be responsible for hosting center failures. Go has features no other languages have! It promoted fun conversations sometimes even enlightening ones, but then they just started repeating them and I realized I wasn't learning things anymore.
I like Ruby, Javascript, and lifestyle posts. The next guy likes x language and y technology and lifestyle posts. I ignore his tech posts and he ignores my tech posts but we meet in the middle through lifestyle posts. The larger t he community grows the more engagement each post gets but the most engagement goes to lifestyle posts. Since posts rise due to how much engagement they get, you are destined to see more and more lifestyle content dominate the front page as the community grows larger.
There is a subset of every community that hates something and you seem to hate lifestyle posts but most of the community appears not too making this trend inevitable unless moderation decides to change the rules.
Now that you put it that way, lifestyle posts weren't an issue on /. because you could filter on topics labeled by moderators that were meta moderated. I actually like lifestyle posts, but I don't want this site to be nothing else. That would be like the grocery store only carrying GPUs. I like them just fine but I'll still need to find a new place to get food.
And the problem I was pointing out with /. wasn't lifestyle posts, it was intentional controversy for the sake of it.
Would that really even be breaking the record? Usain Bolt could easily be beaten in a race by, say, a car. A cannon would win the olympic shot put contest handily. The record is "who is the best human at X," not "what is the best X."
Reminds me of bowling robots, although in the case of bowling, being too consistent is a problem because it wears away the oil, impacting the path of the ball.
https://youtu.be/iTmiMwQnres
Or Olympic archery:
https://youtu.be/fOt4uz-bkfA
Even pool players are extremely still in their motion:
https://youtu.be/-FHz4kf_cus