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Why winners become cheaters
- danvoell 11y agoMight explain why winners of free market capitalism want to institute measures (laws, regulations) to keep others from achieving the same level of winning.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoPart of the same psychology. Like Lance Armstrong, they begin by rationalizing "I just want to level the playing field". Then they take acts to elevate themselves well above the field.
- ickwabe 11y agoJoe Rogan interviewed Lance Armstrong in depth and Armstrong talks in detail about how he got to the point of justifying "juicing" to himself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEfSdPz1WtA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEfSdPz1WtA
- maxxxxx 11y agoRogan was way too nice with Armstrong IMO.
- minikites 11y agoThis is why we need strong labor protections like unions.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- tomp 11y ago> Might explain why winners of free market capitalism want to institute measures (laws, regulations) to keep others from achieving the same level of winning. I don't think that's an accurate description of reality. My take is that everybody wants to institute measures that benefit them and hinder others... but the "winners" (i.e. the rich) have comparatively more political power and thus also more success forcing these measures through.
- dec0dedab0de 11y agoMy take is that everybody wants to institute measures that benefit them and hinder others Maybe I'm not living in the real world, but I sincerely doubt that most people would like to hinder others.
- michaelt 11y agoMost people probably don't think of the things they support as "hindering others" - they think of it as "making the market take externalities into account" or "preserving the character of the neighbourhood" or "ensuring safety for customers of our industry" or "bringing our short-term incentives in line with our long-term incentives"
- evanpw 11y ago"protecting American jobs"
- anigbrowl 11y agoTaking externalities into account isn't hindering others, since the externality is by definition an unwanted imposition pf costs on a third party that didn't exist prior to the economic activity that generated it. I fail to see how this is different from an unpaid bill, and Nobel laureate Ronald Coase has rather convincingly argued* that the costs of mitigation in advance or in arrears ends up being the same, but that the transaction costs of enforcing property rights against externalities are a sufficient barrier to many pollutees that polluters are often willing to gamble on others' inability to adequately enforce their rights and pocket the resulting savings. * in The Problem of Social Cost, an unusually readable essay for the field of economics.
- bduerst 11y agoIt's rational when the hindrance means fulfilling self interests. I've been in competitive workplaces where people would try to get your project shot down because it could compete for resources with their own.
- tomp 11y ago
- neonhomer 11y agoMost of the winners have won through illegal actions or government collusion. That's not free market capitalism.
- stygiansonic 11y agoRelated HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11065661 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11065661 Related Ars link: http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/winners-act-as-thick-as-thieves/ http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/winners-act-as-thick-...
- lazyant 11y ago"Faster, Higher, Stronger" book showed a study where athletes were asked what they would give up for an Olympic gold medal and from what I remember a good portion would give up their lives in 5 years for that (or some other crazy time), the pressure and willing to win for professional and aspiring professional athletes is incredible.
- timwaagh 11y agoso...best strategy is to cheat.
- Pietertje 11y agoDoes someone know if this research has been published and is freely accessible? The difference of the losers of -0.5 compared to the expected value gives me the feeling N is not pretty high...
- gpvos 11y agoYes, the article links to the study, from where you can download the PDF.
- Pietertje 11y agoThanks, reading it more carefully I see I missed more info... Anyway, 86 participants, divided in two equal groups. Let's say the 43 participants in the loser group all threw the dice once you'll end up with a ~9% chance of the groups average to be below 6.5. So that might well be possible. The winners group throwing on average above 9 is highly unlikely purely by chance. Quite interesting.
- dang 11y agoThe paper was also discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11065661 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11065661.
- benlower 11y agoVery interesting article. Makes me think this is a tendency that we should all look for in ourselves since it could be we start pushing harder to maintain our new 'status' of winning. It also seems a bit sad that we tend to get so wrapped up in our successes that we will start cheating to maintain our new self identity.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- unabst 11y agoArmstrong was a true champion. It's the public that wasn't made aware of what the real game was. All the cyclists knew it as did the organization and everyone professionally close to pro cycling. It was a doping game. And out of all that doped, Armstrong won 7 years in a row. He was a true champion. The more accurate statement here is "cheaters become winners" and not the other way around. Cheating implies rules, and most rules are stupid, especially in sports. Doping of course changes the "sport" in many ways, and is illegal for good reason, but in a true competition of life and death, of success and failure, of rags to riches, of maintaining a family legacy, or of simply "winning" in today's "winner's society", the upside of cheating easily surpasses the downside. And for those who figure out how to cheat, it becomes easy, and part of the game. Then as they see everyone else cheat, the moral and ethical burden is easily nullified. Rules in society are also pretty stupid. Drug dealers know this. Wall Street for sure knows this. And the smartest people who win, most often than not, do so by cheating, because it's all just a game. And it's okay to cheat in a game as long as you don't get caught. "Play dirty" is the western mantra that embodies this sentiment nicely, and it's a positive sentiment. It's antiestablishmentarianism, it's rock n' roll, it's Bruce Willis in Die Hard. Regardless of what anyone thinks of Lance Armstrong, you have to hand it to the guy. He certainly made the most out of his cheating win streak through one of the greatest charities of all time. Cheating in sports is one thing. His true legacy was doing whatever he could to help others cheat death as he did. Devils don't save lives (people do).
- agentgt 11y agoI think what your trying to say can be more abstractly put as "the ends justify the means". > Rules in society are also pretty stupid. If you mean laws than no.. they are not stupid. Killing people and getting away with it is bad. And some of the "rules" in wall street if broken can have an equally horrific impact. And that comes back to the question do the ends justify the means? Sometimes it does for sure. For Armstrong it could be argued it did.
- coliveira 11y agoThe other side of the question is this: should society respect people who believe that the end justify the means? I believe the answer to that should be clearly no. So, yes, sometimes you can get what you want by cheating. Should I understand or even respect this? Of course not. Society should be willing to go against anyone who believes and acts on this kind of ideas.
- sschueller 11y agoThere is a very interesting interview with Lance where he talks about the whole cheating thing and living with a lie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEfSdPz1WtA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEfSdPz1WtA
- ikeboy 11y agoI wonder how much of the first experiment described is not due to causation, but is instead from certain kinds of people being both more likely to win and to cheat. Some of the other ones do point to causation, but it would be interesting to see an experiment where people thought it was skill, but the actual winners were chosen randomly (e.g. you get points, and they tell you who wins at the end, but you don't see the actual calculation, so you won't be suspicious.)
- ScottBurson 11y agoThe first game was designed so that cheating was impossible.
- ikeboy 11y agoThat doesn't have anything to do with my point above, which is that the alternative hypothesis "people with some property X are better at game Y, and separately, people with property X are more likely to cheat" is not ruled out by experiment 1 as described. Edit: you could also differentiate between "winning->cheating" and the confounder possibility by having the cheatable game first.
- heapcity 11y agoDriving Uber; its pretty predictable that wealthier people are less likely to rate you well.
- itp 11y ago> When Lance Armstrong was found guilty of doping a few years ago, the sports world was aghast. For almost a decade, he had dominated cycling so thoroughly that the thought of anyone else winning bordered on ridiculous. Few had guessed that he had done it by cheating, and many found it hard to believe, even after Armstrong himself owned up to his dishonesty. Huh. I was just barely a young adult when Armstrong began his period of dominance, and this doesn't match my recollection. Most people I spoke with who had any familiarity with cycling were utterly convinced he was cheating. Maybe this wasn't true outside the bubble of my peers?
- anigbrowl 11y agoStories like this greatly depress me. I've been aware of the phenomenon since a young age, when my identically-aged first cousin and I were assigned to count yellow cars in the street in exchange for a small cash reward for each one we identified so as to temporarily relieve the adults of our company at the time. My cousin (whose parents are pretty jolly and easygoing) professed to detect three times as many yellow cars as I did. I'm pathologically honest (probably because I grew up in an abusive environment where even a small transgression was liable to result in a severe beating) and I was simply astonished at my cousin's willingness to maximize his reward at what seemed to me to be an insanely high level of risk. I learned much later in life that my father had bullied my uncle growing up and that the uncle's response was to develop peer-teaming strategies while my father went on to a successful but rather lonely and extremely competitive executive career. To this day I have a very hard time dealing with any sort of economic activity that has more than a whiff of subjective advantage and am deeply uncomfortable accepting any sort of unexpected windfall, to the point of refusing well-earned and freely-offered promotions and having great difficulty enjoying gifts. I have literally gone hungry and been late on my rent because of an unwillingness to deposit a check (in payment for work) for an amount greater than I had expected to receive. Needless to say, this has had a pretty dire and cumulative effect on my career, material wellbeing etc. :-/ I forgot to add that the one context where this does pay off for me, although I rarely indulge in it, is playing Poker - since elaborate bluffing and systematic dishonesty is actually a legitimate play strategy in that game I'm able to manufacture tells and run a 'slow loser' strategy with ease and frequently walk off with the entire pot. I've never had the resources or risk tolerance to try it against professionals, though.