Thank you for your thought-provoking piece. I'm going to double-click on the concept of "Do Your Own Research" (DYOR) that you referenced in your article by sharing a summary of the treatise "Do Your Own Research," by Nathan Ballantyne, Jared B. Celniker, and David Dunning.
Your article underscores the empowerment and individuality fostered by DYOR. As the research paper notes, DYOR can signal values like intellectual autonomy, open-mindedness, and evidence-based thinking. In an age marked by declining trust in institutions and experts, the slogan appeals to those seeking to reclaim control over their understanding of the world.
This aligns with the Enlightenment ideals of intellectual independence—encapsulated by Descartes' “Dare to think for yourself”—and underscores the role of individual curiosity in generating fresh insights and fostering critical discourse. As you rightly point out, innovation often emerges at the intersection of diverse perspectives and domains, making the encouragement of independent thought essential.
However, as the research paper highlights, the DYOR ethos is not without its complications. The authors argue that research competence hinges on two key factors: the tools required to acquire and evaluate evidence, and the "scaffolding" provided by education, social structures, and cultural context.
Without such scaffolding, individuals attempting to do their own research often lack the ability to navigate complex topics effectively. For example, the paper discusses the cognitive pitfalls of overconfidence (known as the Dunning-Kruger effect), confirmation bias, and an over-reliance on anecdotal evidence, all of which can skew one’s findings and interpretations. Algorithms on platforms like YouTube, which prioritize engagement over accuracy, further exacerbate the risks of encountering biased or misleading information.
You rightly criticize the tendency to dismiss independent thinkers with the refrain, “stick to sports." Yet, as the research paper suggests, there is a vital need for "humble inquiry" when approaching subjects outside one’s expertise. Humble inquiry involves recognizing the limits of one’s knowledge and seeking out reliable scaffolding—whether through credible sources, expert guidance, or structured learning—to ensure that research is both rigorous and constructive.
A particularly striking point in the research paper is that DYOR is often embraced most fervently in contexts where trust in traditional institutions is low. While skepticism can be healthy, it must be paired with a recognition of the value that expertise and consensus bring to complex issues. Encouraging lay researchers to critically evaluate their competence and to seek out diverse, credible sources can mitigate the risks of misinformation while preserving the spirit of intellectual independence.
As the research paper concludes, improving individual inquiry involves equipping people with both the skills and the humility to engage meaningfully with evidence.
As you suggest, discourse thrives when people are free to share their perspectives and question prevailing norms. However, ensuring that these contributions are informed and constructive requires a balance between intellectual autonomy and deference to expertise. By promoting a culture of both curiosity and humility, we can create a more informed and metacognitive society, where independent thought complements—rather than undermines—the collective pursuit of truth.
Thank you again for your thoughtful piece, which invites us to reflect on the interplay between individuality and expertise in shaping public discourse. It is an important conversation, and I appreciate your contribution to it.
The comment last week was to write about things you know. You can have an opinion on anything, but if it's a topic you don't understand then it will always be a less interesting opinion than those things where you do. You cannot write about a complex, nuanced topic in such a way and expect people to read and appreciate it in the same way as a post with deep understanding.
But, talking about sports, when you build an audience in a specific way about a specific topic that audience always reacts when you use it for other purposes. People follow athletes because of their sports and they have right to share their opinions, but they need to expect that the audience they built was not there because of those opinions. That means you'll get the full range of responses, including from those that only care about sports.
The audience is not a passive vessel for receiving opinions, it's a group of people with opinions themselves. Freedom of speech is not the same as freedom of reach. You have the right to say whatever you want, and the audience has the right to reject it.
Re, graph 1: I know about this topic very well, given, I watch it influence my industry, of what it is downstream of is clear. I just wrote on this above. And remember, sometimes important ideas come from people *not* part of an ideological tribe, or in the past the church. Academia is frequently the new church. The outsider perspectives are likely free of dogma. Of note, I really like the non-marketer opinions on marketing for this reason. I do not find this less interesting, it's from another perspective..
For graph 2, yeah ofc, and I think these people are kinda sad. It's so cool to hear people be human.
For graph 3, we are talking about *reasonable* takes here, in good faith, not anyone acting like jerks. I actually agree if you act like a jerk, you prob deserve to shed some audience. We've seen many ex of this.
I appreciate the discourse Sean! If nothing else writing about politics creates a lot of good metaconversation.
We're all friends here, none of this is personal! I appreciate we can have these discussions.
I guess there is a marketing lesson in here after all: if you build an audience on one topic, you can't know what to expect if you change topics. The results might not be agreement!
I don’t know man, the logic here veers into play the hits type thinking. Yes an audience has expectations but they are free to leave if they dislike how things evolve. I’m the type to cut bait and move on when someone goes haywire vs making a fuss - I commented on the thread in question to say it needed an editor because I felt the writing didn’t do the thought justice not that Adam was wrong for weighing in. And this is where I fall on people having opinions, we all have them but too often we don’t do the work to articulate the thought well. For instance, big names bring a confidence to everything they do and sometimes that confidence is misplaced.
Conversely, audiences bring a lot of expectations and they’ve never had more access for less money. So there’s a humility they should bring as well because at the end of the day, stick to sports is just lazy even when a criticism is warranted.
Off topic somewhat but to reply to one thing: an editor is helpful of course. One of the key differences between a personal blog and professional media would be lack of editor, which brings much more raw thoughts (in a way, is the essence of the medium). I'm in a constant state of learning to write (lifelong process) so feedback of this sort is very fair and I love that I get it. Noteworthy I get *none* of this with my music and wonder what my art would look like (better? worse?) if I got any of it there.
It’s funny because this is a change because professional talking heads do have editors for their blog. It creates an uneven terrain where we don’t know what’s truly personal and what is a team. This has been happening in art forever so I’m not saying it’s bad, rather that the thought might be at what point does the added polish make sense. Again, thanks for engaging with the comments and this post was a nice way to address the feedback.
That would be true in broadcast media, but we haven't had true broadcast media since the Internet started. Everything now is bidirectional media and the audience can have opinions too. One of those might be to leave, another might be to disagree.
You are right that it leads to "play the hits" but that the burden on the creator to give the audience new reasons to engage. It's not a burden on the audience to accept or agree with whatever is published.
I’m not disagreeing that people chime in due to ease of access now and that’s their right. Not much has changed because we used to have that as well - I do stick by my point that today more people are self entitled despite the relevance of it not changing. We often mistake the noisy commenters for reality.
Creators/artists/etc have always faced a challenge when they venture off their main track, this is nothing new. I spent 15 in corp comms, specializing in crisis situations, and my view is internet has made us less good at weighing salience when feedback is shared. On that, people leaving and cancelling is the only reliable metric that they are truly unhappy. Being a bit lazy myself with these thoughts.
"Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool."
Agree in principle that the "stick to sports," fallacy bad. If that were law, we wouldn't enjoy Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who, honestly, is one of the best thinkers I've come across on this here website (seriously, the man is prolific and worth a follow: https://kareem.substack.com/). It also overlooks the role of sports in our society, but that's a freshman-level essay for later.
One thing I take exception to here is the "NPC" dogwhistle (maybe too strong a term, but I'll leave it for now) around independent thought. Namely, while we all think on our own, there's no such thing as independent thought because all ideas are borne out of a shared language and knowledge. You cannot have a truly independent thought unless you're on the extreme edge of a very specific subfield — and even then you're still standing on the shoulders of those who have come before you.
This hits on another premise of your article: that calls to expertise/authority are seemingly bad or limiting to a person's ability to reason/be a fully flesh person (bottom of your sixth paragraph/first half).
Let's go back to the graphic design example you raised. I understand a bit of color and UX design theory. Does my amateurish knowledge make me qualified to manage and create design for a Fortune 500 company? Of course not. You'd hire a graphic designer for their expertise — their informed opinions. You can still comment on their work — no one is preventing you from that and sometimes necessary from an aesthetic point of view — but your graphic designer is going to have a far more informed understanding of what's necessary than you are. (E.g., accessibility design, color theory, brand consistency, etc.).
If I employ a graphic designer, it's because of two reasons: First, it grants access to skills/knowledge I don't have and don't have the time to build; Second, it helps me free up time to focus on areas where I can provide value.
Other notes:
"Speaking of, more than 10,000 academic papers were retracted in 2023 alone, so why is this source beyond reproach?"
Because it was redacted in the first place. The ability to peer review and identify information that's no longer valid or was wrong to begin with is a feature, not a bug. Peer review is what gives the academic community such authority. It's not perfect by any stretch, but it's far better than publishing and hoping for the best. On a second note, 10,000, is 0.2% of all academic papers published in an average year (5 million). That's not a bad ratio. (Also, it's important to understand *why* there was a spike in redacted papers, which the first graph of Nature hints at: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03974-8.)
"Appeal to authority retorts are from people who lack substance."
It can be. But I'd much rather draw on the expertise of someone who has years of knowledge and experience in a field than try and put it together myself from scratch. It's why I'm not my own pharmacist. It's why I'm not my own lawyer.
However, I do agree that regular people — the yous and mes out there — should engage with experts and their respective fields. We should always want to learn more. But this requires asking questions with a purpose (the goal of having a better understanding of a subject than you did before). Using "I'm doing my own research," to simply justify our own priors or get the answers we want (which nearly everyone is guilty of at some point in time) is what lacks substance. We should endeavor to recognize and accommodate our own limitations and biases as best as possible. It's not easy.
I do agree with your analysis of the marketing, though. The one caveat — I'd maybe argue — is that "the cult of safetyism," is just endemic to the field. It's cover-your-ass, which, imho, is just fine for most.
Great comment, and to be clear I have *personally* seen very politically biased research that was quoted on sites like Wikipedia and widely distributed that I've no idea if it was retracted later (maybe at some point?) after it's already widely distributed. So everyone asking common sense questions on things is important. Bullish humans willing to do this
Wait. Does that mean I can’t continue telling the armchair quarterbacks to shut up about sportsball and stick to their only area of competence in channel surfing? 😞
I don't disagree with any of the desired systems described in your post above, but I gotta say something like 90% of the the good faith "stick to sports" commentary (excluding political grifter types like Clay Travis) essentially boils down to consistency space vs. payoff space. It's not that people think LeBron James should be siloed and unable to have opinions on a host of other matters, rather that the average American does not need nor want advice from someone's life that differs so drastically from them. LeBron telling the working class how to think (and I do think often those with celebrity/power tell people HOW to think not WHAT they think) about basic political matters is ultimately insulting to a lot of people, and I think that is where the vast majority of the "stick to sports" rhetoric comes from, not some censorship grandeur where they don't believe athletes should be allowed to think on anything but ball in hoop.
Glad you commented I thought about this while writing too, everything you say is correct. Especially the odd celebs and athletes who say things the crowd rightly pans. In these cases, the real feedback they get outside of the 'stick to sports' commentary they receive is probably really good if they'll listen. Maybe it even helps them get to a space they can say something genuine and not just parrot a party talking point.
That's where I net out too, I think most rational people have 0 issue with the concept of an athlete endorsing a political candidate. I want every single citizen to vote and do so with the conviction of publicly sharing why. However, I think a lot of the time an endorsement is really just a ploy by said athlete to appease agents/sponsors/corporate interests, and doesn't reflect any true consideration by the athlete, which is where I think the "stick to sports" feedback is entirely fair. Maybe as you point out, critique is healthy in that we get to a place where we ask these incredibly well compensated and influential people to feel obligated to say something genuine and not just parrot a talking point.
I hope this comes across as me "Yes, and-ing" this post and these comments ... one of the complications these days, I think, is it's harder than ever to tell when a celebrity and/or athlete is actually thinking out loud versus 1. trolling, or 2. appeasing agents/sponsors/corporate interests. All of that suggests opposing the "stick to sports" mentality, since we aren't mind-readers.
Somebody who I think was pretty good about thoughtfully not sticking to sports, at least among teams I follow, was Sean Doolittle when he was on the Washington Nationals. Very liberal, and outspoken about his beliefs/causes, but also appears to have great ties with his teammates and the fanbase regardless of their political views. Seems to separate sports fandom from political fandom, in other words. For example, he skipped the White House invite after the 2019 World Series win but made clear it was a personal choice, not a judgment on teammates who went. https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2019/11/01/sean-doolittle-declining-white-house-invite-i-dont-want-hang-out-with-somebody-who-talks-like-that/
100%, and I think there is clearly a crowd of people who will stay STICK TO SPORTS because their mad he doesn't like their boy Trump, but most people would see that decision and say "cool, that's his right, and I have no issue with him saying so". And I think it's important to remember the rational ones are the majority, even if they aren't amplified and in your face. Good for Sean.
I often see the "stick to sports" sentiment around content creation. A channel or account will curate a following based around a specific topic and then occasionally post about something unrelated to the channel but deeply important to the creator. It's an insight into the human behind the content, but I can also understand that subscribers feel "cheated".
It's a weird social contract where viewers feel entitled to the content they want simply because they subscribed to a certain topic and have little regard for the person who makes the content. They paid (with their time and eyeballs) to see the show and by god they'll get what they paid for. The algorithm typically doesn't reward frankness and with unlimited online options attention is fleeting.
At the end of the day, you are incentivized to "do the thing" again and again, which is incredibly dehumanizing.
It would seem dehumanizing to the audience to treat them like a passive vessel for whatever content you want to create. They have agency and opinions, and if you've assembled them based on a specific topic why would you not expect a backlash when you change it?
Thank you for your thought-provoking piece. I'm going to double-click on the concept of "Do Your Own Research" (DYOR) that you referenced in your article by sharing a summary of the treatise "Do Your Own Research," by Nathan Ballantyne, Jared B. Celniker, and David Dunning.
Your article underscores the empowerment and individuality fostered by DYOR. As the research paper notes, DYOR can signal values like intellectual autonomy, open-mindedness, and evidence-based thinking. In an age marked by declining trust in institutions and experts, the slogan appeals to those seeking to reclaim control over their understanding of the world.
This aligns with the Enlightenment ideals of intellectual independence—encapsulated by Descartes' “Dare to think for yourself”—and underscores the role of individual curiosity in generating fresh insights and fostering critical discourse. As you rightly point out, innovation often emerges at the intersection of diverse perspectives and domains, making the encouragement of independent thought essential.
However, as the research paper highlights, the DYOR ethos is not without its complications. The authors argue that research competence hinges on two key factors: the tools required to acquire and evaluate evidence, and the "scaffolding" provided by education, social structures, and cultural context.
Without such scaffolding, individuals attempting to do their own research often lack the ability to navigate complex topics effectively. For example, the paper discusses the cognitive pitfalls of overconfidence (known as the Dunning-Kruger effect), confirmation bias, and an over-reliance on anecdotal evidence, all of which can skew one’s findings and interpretations. Algorithms on platforms like YouTube, which prioritize engagement over accuracy, further exacerbate the risks of encountering biased or misleading information.
You rightly criticize the tendency to dismiss independent thinkers with the refrain, “stick to sports." Yet, as the research paper suggests, there is a vital need for "humble inquiry" when approaching subjects outside one’s expertise. Humble inquiry involves recognizing the limits of one’s knowledge and seeking out reliable scaffolding—whether through credible sources, expert guidance, or structured learning—to ensure that research is both rigorous and constructive.
A particularly striking point in the research paper is that DYOR is often embraced most fervently in contexts where trust in traditional institutions is low. While skepticism can be healthy, it must be paired with a recognition of the value that expertise and consensus bring to complex issues. Encouraging lay researchers to critically evaluate their competence and to seek out diverse, credible sources can mitigate the risks of misinformation while preserving the spirit of intellectual independence.
As the research paper concludes, improving individual inquiry involves equipping people with both the skills and the humility to engage meaningfully with evidence.
As you suggest, discourse thrives when people are free to share their perspectives and question prevailing norms. However, ensuring that these contributions are informed and constructive requires a balance between intellectual autonomy and deference to expertise. By promoting a culture of both curiosity and humility, we can create a more informed and metacognitive society, where independent thought complements—rather than undermines—the collective pursuit of truth.
Thank you again for your thoughtful piece, which invites us to reflect on the interplay between individuality and expertise in shaping public discourse. It is an important conversation, and I appreciate your contribution to it.
The comment last week was to write about things you know. You can have an opinion on anything, but if it's a topic you don't understand then it will always be a less interesting opinion than those things where you do. You cannot write about a complex, nuanced topic in such a way and expect people to read and appreciate it in the same way as a post with deep understanding.
But, talking about sports, when you build an audience in a specific way about a specific topic that audience always reacts when you use it for other purposes. People follow athletes because of their sports and they have right to share their opinions, but they need to expect that the audience they built was not there because of those opinions. That means you'll get the full range of responses, including from those that only care about sports.
The audience is not a passive vessel for receiving opinions, it's a group of people with opinions themselves. Freedom of speech is not the same as freedom of reach. You have the right to say whatever you want, and the audience has the right to reject it.
Re, graph 1: I know about this topic very well, given, I watch it influence my industry, of what it is downstream of is clear. I just wrote on this above. And remember, sometimes important ideas come from people *not* part of an ideological tribe, or in the past the church. Academia is frequently the new church. The outsider perspectives are likely free of dogma. Of note, I really like the non-marketer opinions on marketing for this reason. I do not find this less interesting, it's from another perspective..
For graph 2, yeah ofc, and I think these people are kinda sad. It's so cool to hear people be human.
For graph 3, we are talking about *reasonable* takes here, in good faith, not anyone acting like jerks. I actually agree if you act like a jerk, you prob deserve to shed some audience. We've seen many ex of this.
I appreciate the discourse Sean! If nothing else writing about politics creates a lot of good metaconversation.
We're all friends here, none of this is personal! I appreciate we can have these discussions.
I guess there is a marketing lesson in here after all: if you build an audience on one topic, you can't know what to expect if you change topics. The results might not be agreement!
I don’t know man, the logic here veers into play the hits type thinking. Yes an audience has expectations but they are free to leave if they dislike how things evolve. I’m the type to cut bait and move on when someone goes haywire vs making a fuss - I commented on the thread in question to say it needed an editor because I felt the writing didn’t do the thought justice not that Adam was wrong for weighing in. And this is where I fall on people having opinions, we all have them but too often we don’t do the work to articulate the thought well. For instance, big names bring a confidence to everything they do and sometimes that confidence is misplaced.
Conversely, audiences bring a lot of expectations and they’ve never had more access for less money. So there’s a humility they should bring as well because at the end of the day, stick to sports is just lazy even when a criticism is warranted.
Off topic somewhat but to reply to one thing: an editor is helpful of course. One of the key differences between a personal blog and professional media would be lack of editor, which brings much more raw thoughts (in a way, is the essence of the medium). I'm in a constant state of learning to write (lifelong process) so feedback of this sort is very fair and I love that I get it. Noteworthy I get *none* of this with my music and wonder what my art would look like (better? worse?) if I got any of it there.
It’s funny because this is a change because professional talking heads do have editors for their blog. It creates an uneven terrain where we don’t know what’s truly personal and what is a team. This has been happening in art forever so I’m not saying it’s bad, rather that the thought might be at what point does the added polish make sense. Again, thanks for engaging with the comments and this post was a nice way to address the feedback.
That would be true in broadcast media, but we haven't had true broadcast media since the Internet started. Everything now is bidirectional media and the audience can have opinions too. One of those might be to leave, another might be to disagree.
You are right that it leads to "play the hits" but that the burden on the creator to give the audience new reasons to engage. It's not a burden on the audience to accept or agree with whatever is published.
I’m not disagreeing that people chime in due to ease of access now and that’s their right. Not much has changed because we used to have that as well - I do stick by my point that today more people are self entitled despite the relevance of it not changing. We often mistake the noisy commenters for reality.
Creators/artists/etc have always faced a challenge when they venture off their main track, this is nothing new. I spent 15 in corp comms, specializing in crisis situations, and my view is internet has made us less good at weighing salience when feedback is shared. On that, people leaving and cancelling is the only reliable metric that they are truly unhappy. Being a bit lazy myself with these thoughts.
This is a very good article and I think it is a well-formed argument with which I agree, except in the case of Steve Kerr, of course.
Even God welcomes discourse:
"Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool."
Isaiah 1:18 KJV
Agree in principle that the "stick to sports," fallacy bad. If that were law, we wouldn't enjoy Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who, honestly, is one of the best thinkers I've come across on this here website (seriously, the man is prolific and worth a follow: https://kareem.substack.com/). It also overlooks the role of sports in our society, but that's a freshman-level essay for later.
One thing I take exception to here is the "NPC" dogwhistle (maybe too strong a term, but I'll leave it for now) around independent thought. Namely, while we all think on our own, there's no such thing as independent thought because all ideas are borne out of a shared language and knowledge. You cannot have a truly independent thought unless you're on the extreme edge of a very specific subfield — and even then you're still standing on the shoulders of those who have come before you.
This hits on another premise of your article: that calls to expertise/authority are seemingly bad or limiting to a person's ability to reason/be a fully flesh person (bottom of your sixth paragraph/first half).
Let's go back to the graphic design example you raised. I understand a bit of color and UX design theory. Does my amateurish knowledge make me qualified to manage and create design for a Fortune 500 company? Of course not. You'd hire a graphic designer for their expertise — their informed opinions. You can still comment on their work — no one is preventing you from that and sometimes necessary from an aesthetic point of view — but your graphic designer is going to have a far more informed understanding of what's necessary than you are. (E.g., accessibility design, color theory, brand consistency, etc.).
If I employ a graphic designer, it's because of two reasons: First, it grants access to skills/knowledge I don't have and don't have the time to build; Second, it helps me free up time to focus on areas where I can provide value.
Other notes:
"Speaking of, more than 10,000 academic papers were retracted in 2023 alone, so why is this source beyond reproach?"
Because it was redacted in the first place. The ability to peer review and identify information that's no longer valid or was wrong to begin with is a feature, not a bug. Peer review is what gives the academic community such authority. It's not perfect by any stretch, but it's far better than publishing and hoping for the best. On a second note, 10,000, is 0.2% of all academic papers published in an average year (5 million). That's not a bad ratio. (Also, it's important to understand *why* there was a spike in redacted papers, which the first graph of Nature hints at: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03974-8.)
"Appeal to authority retorts are from people who lack substance."
It can be. But I'd much rather draw on the expertise of someone who has years of knowledge and experience in a field than try and put it together myself from scratch. It's why I'm not my own pharmacist. It's why I'm not my own lawyer.
However, I do agree that regular people — the yous and mes out there — should engage with experts and their respective fields. We should always want to learn more. But this requires asking questions with a purpose (the goal of having a better understanding of a subject than you did before). Using "I'm doing my own research," to simply justify our own priors or get the answers we want (which nearly everyone is guilty of at some point in time) is what lacks substance. We should endeavor to recognize and accommodate our own limitations and biases as best as possible. It's not easy.
I do agree with your analysis of the marketing, though. The one caveat — I'd maybe argue — is that "the cult of safetyism," is just endemic to the field. It's cover-your-ass, which, imho, is just fine for most.
Great comment, and to be clear I have *personally* seen very politically biased research that was quoted on sites like Wikipedia and widely distributed that I've no idea if it was retracted later (maybe at some point?) after it's already widely distributed. So everyone asking common sense questions on things is important. Bullish humans willing to do this
Wait. Does that mean I can’t continue telling the armchair quarterbacks to shut up about sportsball and stick to their only area of competence in channel surfing? 😞
I don't disagree with any of the desired systems described in your post above, but I gotta say something like 90% of the the good faith "stick to sports" commentary (excluding political grifter types like Clay Travis) essentially boils down to consistency space vs. payoff space. It's not that people think LeBron James should be siloed and unable to have opinions on a host of other matters, rather that the average American does not need nor want advice from someone's life that differs so drastically from them. LeBron telling the working class how to think (and I do think often those with celebrity/power tell people HOW to think not WHAT they think) about basic political matters is ultimately insulting to a lot of people, and I think that is where the vast majority of the "stick to sports" rhetoric comes from, not some censorship grandeur where they don't believe athletes should be allowed to think on anything but ball in hoop.
Glad you commented I thought about this while writing too, everything you say is correct. Especially the odd celebs and athletes who say things the crowd rightly pans. In these cases, the real feedback they get outside of the 'stick to sports' commentary they receive is probably really good if they'll listen. Maybe it even helps them get to a space they can say something genuine and not just parrot a party talking point.
That's where I net out too, I think most rational people have 0 issue with the concept of an athlete endorsing a political candidate. I want every single citizen to vote and do so with the conviction of publicly sharing why. However, I think a lot of the time an endorsement is really just a ploy by said athlete to appease agents/sponsors/corporate interests, and doesn't reflect any true consideration by the athlete, which is where I think the "stick to sports" feedback is entirely fair. Maybe as you point out, critique is healthy in that we get to a place where we ask these incredibly well compensated and influential people to feel obligated to say something genuine and not just parrot a talking point.
I hope this comes across as me "Yes, and-ing" this post and these comments ... one of the complications these days, I think, is it's harder than ever to tell when a celebrity and/or athlete is actually thinking out loud versus 1. trolling, or 2. appeasing agents/sponsors/corporate interests. All of that suggests opposing the "stick to sports" mentality, since we aren't mind-readers.
Somebody who I think was pretty good about thoughtfully not sticking to sports, at least among teams I follow, was Sean Doolittle when he was on the Washington Nationals. Very liberal, and outspoken about his beliefs/causes, but also appears to have great ties with his teammates and the fanbase regardless of their political views. Seems to separate sports fandom from political fandom, in other words. For example, he skipped the White House invite after the 2019 World Series win but made clear it was a personal choice, not a judgment on teammates who went. https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2019/11/01/sean-doolittle-declining-white-house-invite-i-dont-want-hang-out-with-somebody-who-talks-like-that/
100%, and I think there is clearly a crowd of people who will stay STICK TO SPORTS because their mad he doesn't like their boy Trump, but most people would see that decision and say "cool, that's his right, and I have no issue with him saying so". And I think it's important to remember the rational ones are the majority, even if they aren't amplified and in your face. Good for Sean.
I often see the "stick to sports" sentiment around content creation. A channel or account will curate a following based around a specific topic and then occasionally post about something unrelated to the channel but deeply important to the creator. It's an insight into the human behind the content, but I can also understand that subscribers feel "cheated".
It's a weird social contract where viewers feel entitled to the content they want simply because they subscribed to a certain topic and have little regard for the person who makes the content. They paid (with their time and eyeballs) to see the show and by god they'll get what they paid for. The algorithm typically doesn't reward frankness and with unlimited online options attention is fleeting.
At the end of the day, you are incentivized to "do the thing" again and again, which is incredibly dehumanizing.
It would seem dehumanizing to the audience to treat them like a passive vessel for whatever content you want to create. They have agency and opinions, and if you've assembled them based on a specific topic why would you not expect a backlash when you change it?