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Anyone find it difficult to "work hard" for reasons that essentially boil down to disbelief? For example, I play some multiplayer games, mostly RTS and MOBA games. I can see some interesting ways to improve at those games. For the RTS games, some of the ideas I had involved a spreadsheet, of course, and an autohotkey script that would make an additional save game every time I pressed the build worker key so that I could easily compare different decision branches while hill climbing toward an optimal build order. I can see some experiments I could perform in Dota 2, such as running a custom game on 2 computers to explore how I could take advantage of blind spots in enemy vision, or doing some mathematical modeling and running a solo game to figure out the exact patterns of how waves of enemy creeps cascade and yoyo from losing to overwhelming the enemy creeps.
But then I think, hardly anyone even bothers to consistently watch replays. At least, that's my perception. These ideas I'm having, they're weird. I've never heard anyone talk about doing this sort of thing. Would someone really try this hard to win at a video game? Well, eventually, I had the chance to join some high skill discords, and, yes, they made spreadsheets, the were timing things down to the second, they were re-running test ideas dozens of times until perfect, they'd spend hours testing and looking for bugs. Turned out that really was how some people got good. I had the right ideas, but I couldn't believe in them because I couldn't believe others were trying that much because up to that point, I hadn't been trying that much so that must be how others acted too, because otherwise they'd have talked about the extra things they did.
It's all these soft spaces where you can take the time to figure out best ways of getting upvotes on reddit, best ways to get lots of clicks on youtube and it's hard to believe that someone would resort to something like giving their comments an initial boost through alt-accounts so they can ride their initial higher visibility to thousands of upvotes, but that was exactly what incredibly reddit popular and actual scientist Unidan did.
Which all kind of circuitously leads me to the following point here. If it's so easy to have such a bias like "nah, everyone's just playing it straight for the most part" even in the face of seeing that sort of belief overturned multiple times, how much are we discounting the possibility of various conspiracies by a similar kind of bias in favor of ordinariness? If these sorts of weird and trying too hard kinds of tactics are effective at getting you to, say, the top .1% in some endeavor, then even if people willing to bend the rules or go to insane lengths are rare, they could easily make up a substantial proportion of such a small sample of people. For example, could Epstein have actually been running a business model of offering up underage girls to the rich and powerful, surreptitiously recording it, and then blackmailing them? It seems insane, it seems something at least 95% of people wouldn't even dare try, it seems high risk, but if you could pull it off, would you not be a rich man?
This reminds me of the doping scandals in the pro cycling world. This all broke in the American mainstream a number of years ago during the rise and fall of Lance Armstrong.
It seems to be the case that basically everyone in the pro cycling world is doped to their eyebrows on prohibited performance-enhancing drugs, to the level that you can't compete at all without your own batch of medical experts to figure out how best to drug you up without getting caught. It's become the culture there, which means that everyone is using somewhat different methods to dope and evade, which means that it's really tough to come up with a way to stop all of it at once - if your new test doesn't catch everything, than whichever doper is skilled or lucky enough to have a method that it doesn't catch has a huge advantage and will probably win everything. Part of the detail of this is that performance levels at the top are so high that you need all 3 of supreme genetic makeup, plus massive dedicated training, plus lots of drugs, to be competitive. There's no crutch to slack off on anything.
All of this feels like it changes the morality of it. If nobody is doping in a sport and you do it, then you're a cheating asshole. But if everyone is doing it and it's impossible to compete without it, then you're just playing the game, same as everyone else.
Presumably amateurs getting closer to these high levels of competition conclude one of 1. Everyone here is really just that much better than me and I can't compete, oh well, 2. Everyone here is on a shitload of drugs, I'm not ready to risk wrecking my body like that so I'm out, or 3. Everyone here is on a shitload of drugs, so pass the needle, I'm in.
Ah yes, that's a great example. It makes too much sense for them to dope up, there are enough biochemists saying they can hide PEDs from tests. Standing from the perspective of an ordinary person uninformed about such matters, it would seem really implausible that there's doping, then there are tests to detect doping, and then there is the game of getting around those tests so you can dope anyway, and every single competitive athlete chooses to play the test evasion game.
Another issue is maybe the recent chess cheating scandal. #1 grandmaster in the game accuses another, younger grandmaster who cheated as a teen, of cheating to win against him at an offline tournament. We're told they were checked for devices, so people online are making jokes about anal beads, part of the joke being that, perhaps, this is too ridiculous an extent to go to for cheating. But, in fact, why not? The prison wallet is a time-tested loyal friend of the smuggler. Doesn't just have to be in his ass either, since there are audience members at the match, all he'd have to do is have a confederate in the crowd with some pre-arranged way(s) to signal a few pertinent messages.
I hear also that most of those male instagram fitness influencers actually got that look on juice and then put their followers through that silly game of "how to get as big and shredded as a steroid user without using any steroid.
Anywhere where cheating can get you ahead after adjusting for risk I expect to find a lot of cheaters.
Fitness influencers in particular seem like it’s a pretty low risk game, because afaik normies are very rarely prosecuted for personal use of ‘roids/HGH/anything else.
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Since the NFL started testing for steroids in the 80s, it didn't take long to realize that basically everyone performing a physical sport on TV is probably doping as hard as they can without getting caught.
It wasn't until I saw Dr. Dre after a few decades and realized everyone on TV was probably doing it, too.
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I'm reminded of Bill Burr on Lance Armstrong: "Our 'roided up asshole beat your 'roided up asshole!"
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When the media says taking steroids is cheating, is it really cheating if everyone is doing them? There is no way around this: banning the substances means people find ways around it, allowing drugs creates an arms race of drug use. It's like this for all competitive endeavors it seems. People will do anything for an edge.
Another way to look at it. Call it "cheating" or not, it is a rule (and an enforced rule) that anyone caught with drug use is declared to have lost. It might be part of the game to be on drugs, but in this case it is also part of the game not to be caught.
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Yes, it's still cheating even if everyone is doing it. Cheating is not defined by how common or uncommon it is.
I think that it is, actually, and feel like the idea that it isn't represents a confusion of means with ends.
The objective of sport isn't to follow the rulebook like holy writ, and the "winner of sport" is not he who most religiously adheres to the commandments of the International Olympic Committee Good Practice Handbook Subsection 17 Paragraph C. The written rules are a means, not an end. The end is... some combination of showcasing human physical excellence, putting on a good show for the spectators, and getting from the start line to the finish line faster than others.
When the start line is (figuratively) "doped up to the eyeballs" and the finish line is "100km of French cycling routes away" then you are still competing 'fairly' against your opponent if he's as doped up as you. That both if you exceed the 14ppm blood oxygenation level stipulated by the IOC... who cares? Other than sports lawyers who want to carve out a permanent need for their own employment, I don't think it benefits anyone to be a rules-autist about this stuff.
Sport has a third tenet though, which Coubertin and his buds might actually have been convinced is the most important: it's supposed to foster good health and morality by rallying all around a universal human endeavour.
How wicked is it that the institutions setup to give good rolemodels to youth have become spectacles of hypocrisy?
Cheating isn't just about fairness, it is also about honesty and truth. So yeah if everyone does it, it's still cheating because I care that the people earning the millions and being on the posters are a bunch of fucking liars. Sodom was a wicked city, "everyone does it" is not an excuse.
At least wrestling had the guts to admit that it's all fake. But it's no longer sport then, just dynamic entertainment.
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The rules are indeed a means, not an end. But not following the rules is cheating, full stop. The rules may need to be amended if they aren't serving a good purpose, but if you break the rules then you are a cheater even if everyone else does it.
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Yup. Primary reason the anti drug rules are important is because with them pros will ride the razor's edge of discoverability; without them they will ride the razor's edge of ODing or death.
A lot the drugs athletes take under PED bans right now are just testosterone but re-synthesized to avoid detection. There's a lot of ways to get T levels up, and the safest ways to do it are also the most studied and easiest to detect. In this way, PED bans actually incentivize athletes to take riskier drugs.
People like the narrative idea of a Faustian bargain so much they assume it's always true that there's one on offer. But it's possible if under a scheme where PED's are allowed that the rational choice for athletes is sticking to basic steroid cycles and blood doping that gets them 95% of the way there and avoid the riskier experimental stuff that might not even help.
that is an excellent point right up there with the thing where due to illegal drugs being illegal people will get them from street dealers, whose drugs are going to be massively more dangerous than a theoretical legal equivalent.
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I'm not seeing an important part here?
If pros want to put dangerous substances into their body in pursuit of the limits of human achievement, that's their perogative. It is after all their body. And for a more noble and quixotic cause than most people put dangerous substances into their body.
It's important because I find it unaesthetic to have athletes dying from ODs on PE drugs, and, more crucially, so do the people running the olympics.
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Only if they don't misrepresent to the fans that their achievements were achieved without drugs.
And even then, people act in stupid and self-destructive ways and having a drugs-allowed athletic competition is a magnet for people to kill themselves using drugs.
I hate is wen people do this. Probably because openly admitting drug use would open up possible consequences. Discussing steroid use on YouTube may mean demonization for that particular video.
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