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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30037 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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Maybe there does exist a carefully-developed and safe PED stack which could significantly enhance performance without significant side effects, but as soon as you allow any PEDs, there would be a strong incentive to disregard health and take the highest possible dose. In the end, the ranking still ends up being a combination of genetics and hard work, except all the athletes have now destroyed their hearts and livers. It's a prisoner's dilemma.

Edit: If you allow cybernetic enhancements, implants, etc., you would still need some restrictions, otherwise a shot putter could just mount a trebuchet on their back. The line has to be drawn somewhere, and "no cybernetics at all" is a very natural place to do it.

If the Olympics committee doesn't ban cochlear implants or pacemakers, then we're already past the "no cybernetics" line.

At any rate, I'm personally not concerned about the prisoners dilemma here because the athletes in question are competent adults who can simply choose not to compete or stick to the kiddy leagues/baseline only competitions instead.

It's a prisoner's dilemma.

This is a valid concern. Ideally, sports would gatekeep based on the actual end result concerning health and sustainability. Currently, it is acceptable to destroy your body through non-PED methods but unacceptable to improve your health with PED methods. If health is part of bettering oneself, and that's the point of sports, the current system is using very poor heuristics for it.

Regarding restrictions on cybernetic implants, I believe you might be mistaken about where we are drawing the line right now. We do permit glasses, for instance. So, our boundary is more like "Only cybernetics that enhance people to a perceived human norm," which is also a somewhat natural distinction.

I do think the appeal of sports needs to relate in some way to the human body, and technological advancements should be integrated into that body. Otherwise, it becomes more like a vehicle expo than a competition to enhance human morphology. In the long term, we might decide to move on to less human morphologies, but at that point, I think there will be plenty of room to subdivide by factors such as morphology type and weight class.

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