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If you Google "cheating scandal" right now, Google can't figure out which story you want. There's like six different things you could be looking for.
Pro Poker Rocked By Alleged Cheating Scandal Where Winner Repaid $269K To Loser
Chess Investigation Finds That U.S. Grandmaster ‘Likely Cheated’ More Than 100 Times
Fishermen nearly won a tournament. Then weights were found in the fish.
Nia Long’s Fiance Ime Udoka Suspended From the Boston Celtics Amid Cheating Scandal
The Try Guys Release YouTube Video Laying Out Exact Timeline of Ned Fulmer Cheating Scandal
Adam Levine Returns to the Stage After Cheating Scandal With Support From Wife Behati Prinsloo
First of all, obviously these are two different kinds of cheating. The first three are people gaining unfair advantage in competitions and the latter are men having sex with women other than their wives. But I think it's defensible to discuss these together. After all, there's a reason we use the same word for both behaviors. Both are a major ethical breach where one person gains an unfair advantage at something by breaching an agreement.
(If we broaden the scope to "ethics-related controversy" we can throw in the recent chaos on Twitch over gambling and an alleged sexual assault coverup to this list.)
Is it schizophrenic to suggest that maybe it isn't a coincidence that this is happening at the same time? It kind of sounds insane, obviously it's a coincidence. But I don't know, sometimes it just feels like there's something "in the water" culturally and there are suddenly similar things happening in many places at once. An example of this is how sexual harassment/assault/etc. accusations tend to come in waves against many people all around the same time. Another example is just about everything that happened in June 2020. But in those cases I think the explanation is that a political movement that had been gaining steam for a long time is behind the phenomenon and the fact that the media is paying attention to it fuels more activism in a positive feedback loop. In this case there's no political movement and it's not clear how e.g. Magnus Carlsen withdrawing from a tournament over suspected would make it more likely for a fishing tournament organizer to decide to cut open some suspiciously heavy fish in the same sense that Harvey Weinstein getting canceled for rape makes more women share stories of sexual assault in Hollywood or one statue getting torn down leads to activists to try to tear more down.
Maybe this is actually normal, and there are always this many cheating scandals going on? If so, what were the ones from before? I heard of all of these stories, and I didn't hear about any from 2022 before September. Maybe this is a media phenomenon where cheating scandals are getting more attention now because there are no other major stories to take up the oxygen? If there were any cheating scandals coming out in, say, the month after Russia invaded Ukraine, or the beginning of the Covid pandemic, or the weeks before a presidential election, they probably wouldn't get much attention because there's just more important things to talk about. But none of that is happening now, so the media is free to focus on the Try Guys and it bubbles up to my awareness in a way it wouldn't otherwise. Maybe there's somehow a cultural energy towards exposing cheating, and for some reason people in many domains are turning their attention to it.
Or maybe I'm being crazy and it's a coincidence. I don't know. I'd be curious to read what other people think of all this.
That's why you have to compare to earlier dates to see if there is a statistically significant uptick of cheating or just confirmation bias
I dunno why after a month people are still talking about the chess cheating thing. Magnus should provide proof or stop being a sore loser. Upsets happen all the time in sports, like that Mike Tyson vs Buster Douglas fight. A few relevant points: 1. Did Niemann cheat at over the board games? 2. Chess. com may not be impartial (it's buying Magnus' app) 3. Confirmation bias on the part of Chess. com Had Trump cheated at chess probably we'd still be talking about it, unlike all the other things he allegedly did, in which public and media interest died after a week.
It's the anal beads for sure.
No idea why you got downvoted because this is 100% correct. Unless you're into chess, "chess player accused of cheating" isn't particularly interesting. However, "chess player accused of cheating with anal vibrator" grabs your attention. It's kind of a funny idea, it makes you question "how does that even work?". But most importantly, it makes you want to talk to a friend and say "hey did you hear about the chess player accused of cheating with an anal vibrator?".
I am quite certain that if it weren't for the sex toy angle, this story would've never gained the traction it has.
I think it still would have without that angle, IMO. I think the anal vibrator thing didn't come out (not in that way, perverts) until later.
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Ok, here's a pitch: Chess, but cheating is legal, but if your opponent catches you, you lose the game.
Just imagine all the things people would come up with!
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That and the juxtaposition of chess, which has a rather staid and mathematical reputation, crossed with sexual paraphernalia. It's the unexpectedness that keeps people buzzing.
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I think they're talking about it because things keep happening, the most recent being the chess.com report saying he had likely cheated at least 100 times (in online games), and apparently admitted to it when confronted with it (I haven't dug in though), including fairly recent games (within the last two years) and in games for prize money.
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For what it's worth, while Magnus didn't provide anything besides "just a hunch", Chess.com ruled that Hans most likely cheated more than 100 times in a 72-page report (52 of which is just the appendix).
Chesscom published the report based on cheating from over 2 years ago, but the most recent game that prompted all these cheating accusations was from last month. So far there's no evidence that cheating occurred in that game other than character evidence of him cheating online 2 years ago.
This is almost certainly chesscom trying, and succeeding, to cover for their questionable decision of re-banning Hans, most likely motivated by their financial stake in the reputation of Magnus. Here's the timeline, and you can double check this by reading the report you linked:
Up to 2020-08-11: Hans was cheating on chesscom. He cheated in 100 games, including prized tournaments.
2020-08-12: Hans was banned by chesscom and given an ultimatum to confess to cheating so he can recreate his account. He confessed, and chesscom let him create a new account
2020-08-12 to 2022-09: No evidence of cheating on Hans' new account was detected by chesscom, in the 4000 games played in the interval.
2022-09: Hans won over Magnus, who then implicitly accused him of cheating.
2022-09: Chesscom banned Hans for cheating.
NO EVIDENCE!
There is absolutely evidence. Chess.com even cites some it, while saying that they say, in their own opinion, it is not enough to ban him from OTB chess (which they do not moderate anyway).
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When it's difficult to detect cheating in a sport, I think it's fair to cast suspicion on someone who became 'best in the world' but has been caught and literally admitted to cheating quite a few times.
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the more pertinent question is did he cheat more than the average online player . If someone plays thousands of games, then probably inevitably some of of the games are going to look suspicious . IF chess. com ran such a detailed audit on dozens of other players, would there also be suspicious activity? And if chess. com knew he cheated 100 times, why wouldn't they ban him on the 5th time or something. So it's like they compiled this huge dossier to make him look bad , even though they suspected he had cheated in the past and didn't do anything, which makes chess .com also look bad? Also, does not answer the question of over the table cheating, which is what my OP mentioned.
the report is a joke . it does not even address how he cheated in those 100 games. only that his strength score was high.
When you are regularly winning prize money you should expect higher scrutiny than that.
Yes, and they do. You say you read the report so I do not know how you missed this.
Because it was found on looking back. Also, when your job is "catching cheaters" you absolutely do not tell someone the instant they trip an alarm.
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The controversy over Hans has been building for a long time.
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Once you notice a coincidence, you become sensitized for further coincidences in the same class.
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Counterpoint: Garbage in Garbage out. Content creator motives, People love drama (more than usual nowadays?)
You should not try to pull much conclusions from what is being reported by in the media because what gets reported on is an extremely non random sample.
I don't know if I am the only one to notice this, but peoples hunger for drama is really high nowadays. For example in the Ned Fulmer case. Hes a popular youtuber that got into a scandal, hardly the first time that happened. But I noticed the difference this time was that the scandal blew up outside of their main audience. I saw 100's of tiktoks commenting on the situation, analyzing the event, explaining the drama to the uninitiated. The gossip networks are just that much bigger due to shortform content becoming the dominant form of media. Short form videos are like tweets which are already GREAT at spreading drama but even more appealing to the masses. So many creators are talking about this and getting in on the drama while the getting is good.
Noticed a similar trend with the Neimann-Carlsen scandal. So many comments in /r/chess going along the lines of "don't play chess or follow the pro scene, just here for the drama". Unsurprisingly chess streamers (a relatively new phenomenon) were fanning the flames of drama non-stop digging up dirt on Neimann, their fanbases and drama lovers from outside ate that shit up.
I would say if you think Twitter is a stain on the social fabric, you would think TikTok is antichrist. Heard of "West Elm Caleb"? In short; a random guy from NYC ghosted a fair number of women on online dating apps. Some random woman made a tiktok "warning" others of his shenanigans. Said tiktok went viral and many many more women who supposedly got ghosted by the same Caleb also made tiktoks about his shenanigans. Resulting in a witch hunt and doxxing of said Caleb. So girl gossip/drama -> witchunt/doxxing/probable unemployment is the new meta?
It's always been this way. Social media only makes it worse due to social signals and virality. Everything seems distilled or class or politics, whose side are you on.
Sorta like how the 24-hour-news-cycle didn't exist before 9/11 and ever since then keeps looking for the next 9/11, the social media machine is getting hungry for dramabombs after all the recent wackiness has died down.
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Yeah but I would say tiktok and other short form video content is amplifying that to a degree even those aware are not used to.
These days people are dredging drama from normies who have absolutely no power over anything.
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To the extent these are reflective of any larger phenomenon it looks a lot what some commentators call the transition from a "high trust" society to a "low trust" one.
High trust meaning one where all members know and willingly follow "the rules" mainly out of some sense of social obligation rather than fear of punishment, where they honor their promises and cooperate at every opportunity.
vs. Low trust where members are constantly looking for a chance to defect for personal gain, and everyone KNOWS everyone else is looking to defect, and thus is on guard against that risk.
In high-trust societies you can sell vegetables with an honesty box for payment and expect most people will actually pay the right amount, despite there being effectively no chance of being caught if they don't.
Vs. A low trust society where stores put common household items behind glass due to how common shoplifting is. Just the other day I was buying a new phone and noticed all the displayed models were locked down so you couldn't interact with or examine them much. The salesman claims this was because too many people would snip the wire and steal the display phone. Frustrating.
High trust societies are theoretically better on the grounds that less effort and cost is expended on mechanisms for enforcing rules and thwarting defectors, and generally there is much less friction since you don't have to spend mental epicycles second-guessing your counterpart's motives.
In practice, no society runs fully on trust beyond a certain point, when the dollar amounts involved get high enough you can't expect a "handshake deal" to protect you, even with a friend.
Likewise, modern technology offers many options for enforcing rules that are cheap enough that you don't "need" trust in order to transact. Cryptocurrencies as a class attempt to solve this for currency and create the ability to engage in transactions with zero trust by either party. At least zero trust in each other.
But all-in-all, in a high trust society with iterated games, you would expect participants NOT to defect, cheat, or screw each other over in any scenario where they expected to have to deal each other on a repeated basis.
So we have some evidence here that formerly high-trust organizations that didn't implement fully robust anti-cheat mechanisms, relying on the good faith of their participants, are now having to grapple with the loss of trust and the now-apparent need to implement stricter enforcement mechanisms, to the detriment of all participants.
Is this actually a symptoms of a broader social trend where people are more prone to cheat than ever, or was this always occurring at similar rates its just now it is possible to detect and publicize these events more often?
I tend to suspect the latter but I've also observed many examples in my local community that make me concerned its the former, and we're in a slow, downward spiral where trusting societies are violated by repeated defections, which leads them to be less trusting, and inspires more people to act in ways that inspire less trust, since there is little/no gain for being honest when everyone else cheats.
I try very hard to locate and protect high-trust environments (for instance, my local gym sells water and protein shakes on the honor system) because I greatly prefer living in places where you can take other people at their word and don't have to constantly look over your shoulder. And the most distressing problem is that is usually only takes a bare handful of defectors to destroy said system for everyone.
So I would not be surprised if, on the margins, there are more people willing to cheat than even 20 years ago, and that leads us to a situation where trust has declined DESPITE most people still being fundamentally trustworthy.
I think you've nailed it -- and part of it has been an erosion in the social judgement against cheaters & defectors. I somewhat hate to yield to the 'blame the woke for everything' bias I apparently have, but I think they have definitely amped up the excusing & rationalizing. There was a big thing about various people should be allowed to cheat at school, it was just bogus and unfair to them anyway.
I think once you let people justify that cheating is okay, many indeed will.
And I find it really sad, because I think it makes the world a worse place for pretty much everyone.
That's partly why I get extra grumpy at scams that take advantage of people's better nature (money for gas, help for grandkid in a foreign country) -- it ruins things for everyone.
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What's absolutely wild is the extent to which these phenomena can co-exist in the same societies, even in the same neighborhoods at times. It turns out that no matter how many scumbags will steal razors from a convenient store, the same degenerates aren't really that into fresh vegetable heists.
Don’t speak too soon!
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this is a tangent but your use of the word degenerate there gained my attention because it is usually used as a descriptor for people who engage in "hedonistic" behaviors, not those who violate property rights. so its a point of evidence for the claim that degenerate is often used as a slur against innocent people (say, strip club visitors).
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Maybe part of that is that veggies are harder to stuff under a shirt.
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It's patently clear, IMO, that China is one of the lowest-trust societies on the planet and probably the lowest-one by far among states with above 95 average IQ.
I like this measure: civic honesty. Dishonest people are untrustworthy, after all.
I think we have a word for that: «safety».
But in China it's achieved precisely by embracing low trust, by covering every angle with CCTVs and emphasising the inevitability of punishment.
Once again, I have to link to that old comment of mine, referencing even older ones.
And when it's impossible in a given domain to approximate the consequence of native Western levels of trust with such ham-fisted measures, you get Chinese science – and Steve Hsu in the US.
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That seems very interesting. Shame it's paywalled; i'd like to know about which societies are found to be most honest, and where some with particular reputations stand. Though the sample size might be too small to really say much, I suppose.
Ah, apologies, forgot where I am. A small lesson in how low-trust peoples act in such a situation:
Alternatively: https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.1126/science.aau8712
(for some reason those mirrors yield different versions of the article).
Thanks!
Edit: Somewhat surprised by the findings. Poland especially. They're better than their reputation, it seems!
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I'm surprised to see Japan as lower trust, given that they send little kids on errands and trust slightly older kids to navigate around.
Maybe it depends on how the question of "Most people can be trusted" is translated into the language? In Japan maybe they hear the question "Most people (globally) can be trusted" and think of their geopolitical neighbors China, North Korea, and Russia and say, nah. And in China they hear the question "Most people (locally) can be trusted" and agree? "Share of people who trust others in their neighborhood" is at 74% in Japan at your link.
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Oddly, pre-electronic Wall Street worked this way; you could trade millions on just a phone call.
In most high trust systems there isn't zero enforcement. Someone takes the vegetables without paying, and another person (maybe an employee, but often another customer) will loudly tell them "hey, you need to pay for that". If they keep doing it they get thrown out. The reason a handful of defectors can destroy the system is when they're allowed to operate openly, some of the remainder feel like chumps, which causes them to start defecting as well.
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Even if they are share some base similarities societies do not treat them the same. In the case of the latter Western liberal society has declared that sexual matters that take place between consenting adults are generally not a matter for the whole of society to litigate or can claim a stake, whereas cheating at public games is considered fair game for everyone.
This view would be seen as dangerously naive or even degenerate by some other parts of the world, but it is nominally the view of liberals - especially the progressive side.
So it is interesting - and odd - that so much time is being consumed by "mere" adultery. At least the Try Guys case involves some sort of work element (even then I question whether anything about this is healthy), I'm really baffled why a) we're supposed to care about a rock star cheating and b) these women coming out of the woodwork expect sympathy for at best being willfully ignorant about a rock star cheating (and apparently got some!).
The current state of these norms is an absolute mess. You cannot judge private business unless you can, you're responsible for what you do until you're not, you're a consenting adult until you're suddenly a child...of twenty-something years,
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I'm not superstitious, but I'm a little stitious. I've become more and more of a believer in some kind of fate/serendipitous force that ought to be respected, if I can't place it rationally that doesn't mean it isn't functionally useful to respect it in concept.
But, leaving aside the infidelity scandals, consider another much larger cheating scandal in the COVID era: academic cheating. West Point scandal, NPR, Academic study.
Why did students become more dishonest during Covid? Because a lot more opportunities appeared in a social world denuded of human contact and ordinary regulation. It's tough to feel guilty for "cheating" others when those others are just images on your screen. And while schools have done their best, it is near impossible to prevent cheating in a take home test. To be honest, I blame professors using old closed-book test methods for classes learned and tested entirely at distance for cheating scandals: you just can't ask people to be closed book in their own homes, it's stupid. Trust, but verify; and if you can't verify, don't trust at all. All of the mechanisms that lead people to choose not to cheat, the mechanisms that prevent them from cheating, the mechanisms that would catch them after they cheat, and the will to punish cheaters after they cheat have been weakened or eliminated. I won't feel bad for getting a "fake A" if nobody "real" knows I got an A anyway, it's just a resume line. They can't stop me, they can't catch me. And when they do catch me, odds are the Deans (see earlier argument about colleges getting soft) who would normally come down on me like a ton of bricks will make excuses for me because they don't want the scandal of failing a bunch of freshmen during these "traumatic times."
So if I were trying to draw a broad societal "Why" for why we're seeing so many minor sports/games face cheating scandals right now, it would be looking for common elements there. Maybe the sense of honor in these games degraded as a result of less time spent in person, together, with other players. Maybe procedures put in place to align with dumbass lockdown rules during Covid made it easier to cheat. Maybe competition stakes changed in such a way to attract cheating in greater volume, with cash opportunities as influencers making cheating in say Chess more lucrative than it once was. Especially at lower, qualifying levels, where Covid restrictions were probably stricter making oversight laxer; and where once being a low ranked (but ranked!) chess player meant nothing, now you can get a social media following and monetize it.
Our institution did this -- when everyone closed up shop in March 2020 we flat-out refused to administer any final exams for the spring since we knew we'd be doing them online and we knew we wouldn't be able to trust the data. Granted, I work for a military academy and we have some flexibility there that most institutions probably don't.
I don't think schools did their best, though. My view on the ground with lots of friends across lots of institutions is that teachers / professors were struggling to carry out their class in a difficult environment with little to no support from administration. If you have to pivot online, there are ways to take some advantage of that media, and lots of ways to do it catastrophically poorly. I haven't see any evidence that administration made any effort to help their professors transition smoothly and teach a good class as opposed to just throwing them to the wolves.
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I am the kind of guy who would not cheat in a class or on a test, but I can definitely imagine all my ethics getting cooked away to nothingness being in an environment of "this is an exceptional situation, just this once, actually they expect you to do it" that were present during covid.
The situation combined with paying identical tuition for 1/10 the experience would lead to pretty lax morals on my part, for sure.
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I think the biggest thing to me would be not wanting to be a chump. I have a pretty strong aversion to cheating, but if my class were grading on a curve, and I knew most of the others were cheating, and the administration knew and weren't doing anything, I would feel the honest people shouldn't be punished.
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Well, it's very literally co-incidence; things corresponding in both nature and time of occurrence. On one hand, cheating has been happening forever; we have cuneiform tablets from 1750 B.C. complaining that someone delivered the wrong grade of copper ingots. It has even been theorized that sapience is the evolutionary result of a runaway cheating arms race. So, like, you're definitely not noticing a new development in human behavior.
On the other hand, we could say the same thing about, like, transsexuals (an example I pick in part because of the advantage, arguably unfair, enjoyed by males participating in women's athletic competitions). Men living as women, and vice versa, are attested anciently, though it is hard to separate ancient record from ancient rumor. The fact that something has been happening forever isn't proof that it's not happening more now. And it is manifestly true that there are a lot more people claiming to be something they aren't today, than there used to be--to the point where some people get conspicuously upset when it gets phrased that way (notably, Simler and Hanson observe that the best way to persuade someone of a falsehood is to first persuade yourself!). Nevertheless, the act of sending social signals that deceive regarding one's sex appears to operate in the same mental realm as sending signals that deceive regarding one's fidelity to one's spouse, or the poker hand one is holding, or the like.
The trouble with your hypothesis is that even if you are noticing a genuine trend toward something like "increased social or personal acceptance of cheating," it's going to be difficult to measure empirically. You could try to capture it within some particular domain, but the very nature of cheating is such that your ability to measure it depends on your ability to detect it, and the whole point of this kind of behavior is to pass undetected. This is the standard difficulty with claiming that e.g. certain kinds of crimes are underreported, or that certain kinds of crimes are even occurring. You will also, per the example above, run into people who want to say cheating is not really cheating--to give another example, is extramarital sex "cheating" if it's consensual (i.e., open marriage)? Or is that just an extremely elaborate form of cheating (e.g. deceiving regarding the nature of one's love and affection, to the point of effectively gaslighting your spouse into believing it's okay)?
So I am open to the possibility that we live in an society that has become so "individualistic" in its priorities that individuals are more expected to pursue their own conscious aims than ever before, even at the expense of unlegislated cultural norms, and expected to allow others to pursue those conscious aims even when they appear, to our anciently-evolved cheat-detection software, to be cheating. In formal competitions we may still get upset about clear rule-breaking, if we catch people doing it, but I don't think I'd have to look very hard to find a Marxist willing to claim that "get yours, screw others" is very much a late-stage capitalism thing, or words to that effect.
But I think it's going to be very difficult to demonstrate, and extremely prone to being one of those arguments that strengthens your priors whatever those priors happen to be, e.g. "the real cheaters have been my outgroup all along!" That doesn't mean you're actually wrong--and the difficulty of the argument may make it one of those that turns out to be exceptionally fruitful when made well. But off the top of my head I can't think of a good way to explore broadly-defined "cheating" in a clear empirical way.
I think the reaction to these events demonstrates it's clearly not socially acceptable. Even under the highly individualistic, "WEIRD" morality (in Jonathan Haidt's terms) both cheating at a competition and cheating on your spouse are wrong.
If anything, I would suggest that these things are actually more likely to generate condemnation than in the past. Sports and other competitions have a long history of cheating scandals, from the Black Sox to Congressional baseball steroid use hearings to the early days of Magic: The Gathering when effectively the only rule was "if you got away with it, it wasn't cheating" to the 1904 Olympic marathon, one of the most bizarre competitions in sports history, in which the original winner was disqualified for cheating and the eventual winner should have been, given that he didn't complete the race under his own power.
The other kind of cheating was also quite common, at least among nobility and rulers. TBH, it's unclear if many civilizations even had the idea that monogamy applied to rulers, but even if it in theory was supposed to, for example after the Christianization of Europe, it doesn't seem to have impacted their ability to rule (well, social condemnation didn't matter; the practicalities of having many competing possible heirs is another story). For example, William IV of Great Britain had 10 illegitimate children in the early 1800s, and as far as I can tell, history is full of kings and emperors with mistresses, concubines, and lovers from the Andes to China to the Mediterranean. Probably the average person was subject to stricter monogamy norms.
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You aren't crazy, so much as human. It cannot be helped.
The modern information environment is not normal. Nor was, for that matter, that of a century ago, or even that of someone urban two, three, four hundred years ago. We live in times where people are both more and less scrutinised than ever: more because technology has given us thoroughly better ways to record and track just-about anything; less, because personal ties are weaker than ever, and being anonymous in large parts of your life is something you can do nowadays. Insofar dying pieces of media ravenous for scraps of clicks and views find a bunch of cheating incidents, it is in LARGE part because these are things we can actually find today, as well as signal boost through aforementioned money-starved media machines. Think of it yourself: pro poker, pro chess, fishing contests - do you really care about them? Would you have heard of them if not for journalists meticulously going through everything?
All of this isn't a bad thing, not necessarily, but people are poorly suited to handling such an environment very well. Our monkey brain hasn't updated all that much since times much different from today's, and so having a mere half-dozen tidbits of news seems like it's REALLY REALLY MUCH. If you look into this all, do it with the thought that modern times are modern in mind; do not let what is a new environment drive you crazy. It isn't good for you, and you deserve better.
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Availability bias, probably. There's a very large amount of other possible things that might have happened at the same time but didn't, we just don't take them into account. If there's a million different coincidental things that can happen every news cycle, you can expect to experience one-in-a-million chances constantly.
"Cheating" is a pretty common event, too. If we assume there's two such stories each cycle and they occur randomly in a Poisson distribution, you'd need ~42 cycles to have a ≥50% chance of seeing six or more at the same time. Not too much of a coincidence.
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