"Peasant stock"? This guy sounds like someone who would actually believe in phrenology.
An email I just received:
"Dear Sir,
I have watched your videos and read your books, they are all well informed and very instructive. However, I do not understand your seeming obsession with “abs”. Why would a power lifter concern himself with something which is completely out of his purview. Successful power lifters are endomorphs who by definition do not have a slim waistline; they are the descendants of peasant stock bred for strength, not beauty or intelligence: think Hagrid or female Olympic shot putters. So let the ectomorphs and their fitness and fashion magazines worry about “abs”, and please stop wasting your time dwelling on a subject your audience cannot hope to attain.
Sincerely,"
Had this been a board post, I would have attributed it to an artless troll. But I believe this is an email, and trolls want everybody to see. So, there you go.
"Peasant stock"? This guy sounds like someone who would actually believe in phrenology.
It just doesn't make sense that this was a human. Not even the most dense of fools could understand anything of the kind from you.
It must be one Yuval Hariris' AI algorithms creating a database on you. One of the problems with AI is the lack of ability to pick up nuances of sarcasm and emotion etc. Matters more connected with the soul so to speak. Such concepts, humans don't even have a definitive understanding of, so how could we program an algorithm to be sensitive to these matters.
Why Can’t Robots Understand Sarcasm? - The Atlantic
Last edited by Gilead; 04-27-2022 at 11:29 AM.
Just out of interest, Where does this email rank in terms in WTF terms compared to what you normally get, and how many emails/messages of similar quality do you get each week?
You know phrenology was actually hundreds of years ahead of it's time, it basically founded neuroscience; the idea that areas of the brain relate to specific skills and that they get bigger due to use/disuse is almost 100% correct. The only thing they got wrong was that the brain gets denser, not physically bigger. They were just decades and decades ahead of MRI being invented, but even in the early 1800 they understood that the brain was a muscle and undergoes hypertrophy/arophy correspondingly.
Fun fact, the area that phrenologists identified as being responsible for speech was correct. (This was obviously a lucky guess) But why do you think speech is controlled by "Broca's area" while every other part of the brain is named differently? Broca named his area based on the teachings of Phrenology.
Mark, you should reply by sending a pic of your abs.
Or get that guy who hated the powerbelly article to write a dissertation on why the email is wrong, or right, actually I can't remember what his point was.
What is “power lifting?”
Phrenology! I wrote a paper on that "science" 40 years ago! It's actually pretty interesting stuff.
This is just confusing. Since when are you obsessed with abs? Also, why is he calling you a "powerlifter"? In addition, why does he assume powerlifters don't have abs or waists? Finally, overhead press builds thick abs.