8 ms·

Man and Superman

66 points by npalli 13y ago

PeterisP 13y ago
Sports competitions are about finding the best athlete, not purely the best training regimen - and genes are part of the definition of who that athlete is. On the other hand, an interesting question would be about improved homo sapiens - we will start to improve ourselves as a species at some point (simply because there are so many imperfect things to improve), and at that point 'unupgraded' athletes probably won't be competitive at all.
- bayesianhorse 13y ago
  People overestimate the role of genetic advantages in individuals. Usually these advantages can't be quantified, they can hardly be predicted. It takes a lot of math to do that for a population of athletes... and then the top performer gets injured.
  - timje1 13y ago
    The article mentions some clear examples of people who have genetic advantages. Eero Mäntyrantas' advantage isn't difficult to quantify ( sixty-five per cent more red blood cells than the normal adult male ), so I'm not sure it can be dismissed so easily..
    - bayesianhorse 13y ago
      There are exceptions to every rule. His particular mutation is extremely rare, and probably not even beneficial outside endurance sport. Of course there are "big wins" in genetics. But they are the exception, not the rule. If you see someone smarter or faster than someone else, chances are genetics has next to nothing to do with it. Still we hear genetics mentioned in this context all the time.
      - PeterisP 13y ago
        If we have the top marathon runner from Kenya, and the top marathon runner from, say, Russia - then chances are that genetics have everything to do with it. At top of sports, every single one of them has all the "nurture" stuff close to maximum - not identical, not maximum, but with no huge differences in the training and preparation. If you see "someone faster than someone else", then if those 'someones' are a gold medalist vs an amateur - sure, genetics have little to do with it; but if those 'someones' are a gold medalist and 4th place... then genetics (or possibly doping) are everything; the 4th place runner did everything else pretty much the same as the top one.
  - chongli 13y ago
    People overestimate the role of genetic advantages in individuals. No, they don't. In fact, we're so aware of it that we have an entirely separate category for athletes that lack a Y chromosome.
    - RBerenguel 13y ago
      I'd go to the length of defining this as the role of chromosomic advantages (or disadvantages.) I guess genetic is too "small" to refer to chromosomic.
    - lkozma 13y ago
      I'm trying to understand the argument you are making, but it seems logically correct only if the previous comment were "underestimate" instead of "overestimate".
6d0debc071 13y ago
No more so than any other advantage. Some kids get good diets, encouragement, the best teachers. Others get an abusive gym teacher, crap microwaved meals, and parents who don't give a toss about them. Honestly, looking at the sacrifices some sportspeople have to make in other areas of their lives, I'm not sure I'd even want the advantages if they were offered me. I mean I love martial arts, dancing, swimming, archery... but I'm not sure I'd want to live the sort of life necessary to become the best in the world in any of them. When did sports become about winning, rather than having fun and making friends?
- dagw 13y ago
  When did sports become about winning Two thousand years ago or so (maybe more), when prize money and sponsorship deals became a thing.
  - arethuza 13y ago
    There was a mention on Radio 4 this morning of how the earnings of the top Roman chariot racer, when converted to modern currency, are much larger than any contemporary athlete - about $15 billion! http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7942699/Wealth-of-todays-sports-stars-is-no-match-for-the-fortunes-of-Romes-chariot-racers.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7942...
  - informatimago 13y ago
    Not 2000, in antiquity, they only earned some laurel (and it was as common as today). Gold and silver medails started to be given 150 years ago. But now it's finished, they only get worthless gold plated medails, plus e sponsorship deals.
    - dagw 13y ago
      Valuable prizes in sport goes back to at least 500 BC. And even for events that didn't have prize money, leveraging the fame that came with being the winner of a great event into money and fortune was as common then as it is now.
bayesianhorse 13y ago
I guess you can start talking about unfair genetic advantages when you have zero doping... Also I don't believe it matters at the top level. Even with high heritabilities, the top performers will probably share the same "genetic" advantages.
- RodericDay 13y ago
  Hamilton was eventually caught and was suspended from professional cycling. He became one of the first in his circle to implicate Lance Armstrong, testifying before federal investigators and appearing on “60 Minutes.” He says that he regrets his years of using performance-enhancing drugs. The lies and duplicity became an unbearable burden. His marriage fell apart. He sank into a depression. His book is supposed to serve as his apology. At that task, it fails. Try as he might—and sometimes he doesn’t seem to be trying very hard—Hamilton cannot explain why a sport that has no problem with the voluntary induction of anorexia as a performance-enhancing measure is so upset about athletes infusing themselves with their own blood. Did you even read the article? Sometimes it feels like when the headline is simple like that people feel like they can skip the thing completely and just post the most concise, one-up retort they can muster.
  - engrenage 13y ago
    Some people are just wired to post quick retorts. For the rest of us it takes years of painstaking practice.
laichzeit0 13y ago
In the sport of bodybuilding, genetic advantages do make it "unfair" because you are most definitely constrained by it (zipper abs, unaesthetic chest insertions). But I wouldn't subscribe to this definition of fairness. Fairness seems more about everyone playing by the same set of rules in the sport. If you start including genetics into the rules then it would become unfair, purely by defining it that way.
- erkose 13y ago
  In bodybuilding, you are confusing genetics with steroids.
  - berntb 13y ago
    I thought the point of body building was people's genetically based reactions to horrendous amounts of steroids? But seriously... I am all for sport enhancements from now on. We really need to do lots of tests with RNA based genetic modification. (I predict that Chinese companies will earn fortunes by curing lots of diseases in ten-fifteen years.)
  - konstantintin 13y ago
    you can't get good bone and muscle structure from a needle!
- moron4hire 13y ago
  Bodybuilding is more of a pageant than a sport.
informatimago 13y ago
Of course. Let's equalize it all. Same genes, same education, same training, same food. 120% pure clones. And then let's who's able to stick his head ahead of the others. We can dig out our beloved Guillotine to see it that no one ends first.</irony mode="dang">
- rsheridan6 13y ago
  If we did equalize everything, then the result would be random luck, which is also unfairm - sort of like how genetics are random luck. Why don't we just change the rules so everyone wins?
  - streptomycin 13y ago
    The article is about fairness in terms of equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. It's not luck if one identical twin trains more than the other and thus can run faster.
frank_boyd 13y ago
> Do Genetic Advantages make sport unfair? Our LIVES are determined by 2 factors: 1. Genetics 2. The environment in which our genetics are applied (social, economic, ecologic, etc.) Everything in our lives is caused by these two. So no, there is no real free will and nobody is ever treated fairly. And yes, our entire culture is still medieval with regards to accepting this fact and taking it into account.
collyw 13y ago
There wouldn't be the Paralypmics if genetics were fair.
petegrif 13y ago
Let's not allow competitive sports other than between people with identical genomes and identical doping regimes. Then we can be confident that in most instances the winner tried hardest. We already have lab standard rats with identical DNA, so it shouldn't be too hard to clone a race of identical competitive athletes.
tokenadult 13y ago
People overestimate the effect of genetic advantages in sport. I have two examples. 1) The first example is identical twins Otto and Ewald, who pursued different sports and developed rather different physiques through their sports training. http://thesameffect.com/check-out-identical-twins-otto-and-ewald/ http://thesameffect.com/check-out-identical-twins-otto-and-e... (I learned about this case from a local professor who teaches courses in human behavior genetics. He uses this case as an example to correct misunderstandings about genetics.) 2) The second example is that Usain Bolt was once thought to be too tall to be a successful sprinter. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00v9bs4/profiles/usain-bolt http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00v9bs4/profiles/usain-bolt http://bleacherreport.com/articles/49040-usain-bolt-why-the-fastest-man-alive-is-in-the-wrong-business http://bleacherreport.com/articles/49040-usain-bolt-why-the-... http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/recycled/2009/08/taking_sprinting_to_new_heights.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/recycled/200... The simple fact is that athletic training reshapes bodies and makes what seems impossible possible after all.
- nedR 13y ago
  Yes and No depending on the sport. 1. Chess is a game traditionally considered to be strongly co-related to IQ (which is strongly heridetary), but a survey of Grandmasters find that they have generally average IQ. What they did have a lot of, was years of experience and dedication, and also probably very good memories. 2. Basketball is a game where height (which is also strongly heridetary) is very important (the average height of a NBA player is 6' 7"). What are the odds of a man who is 5' 7" becoming a great world-class player? Sure, you could name some guy who fought all odds to rise to the top. But the key word here is odds, and genetics plays a huge role in stacking up the odds.
  - alan_cx 13y ago
    This line falls apart because people will rightly argue over what is a sport. If we then include chess, then why not programming? Or education in general? Education is not competitive, but we can compare and rank. In the end it all becomes a horrible mess. In then end I tend to think the genetics must have an impact all over society and culture, and, well, that's that.
unono 13y ago
The bigger question is - why does sport exist anymore? It comes from a time before movies,books,tv,video games,facebook,pinterest. Want to stay fit? Do some bodybuilding and some swimming. Want to focus your mind tactically? Plan your app empire. Hackers need to find creative ways to destroy the sport industry, just as PG urges us to find creative ways to destroy Hollywood.
- recursive 13y ago
  A lot of hackers play sports. Why would we try to destroy them? Sports exist because some people find them fun. If you don't, don't worry. They're purely optional.
  - unono 13y ago
    Sports are one of the few things keeping people cutting the cable tv cord, we as hackers are losing big money from that situation. Also, sports are one of the few times that people log off from their computers. That's another huge loss in revenue for us hackers.
    - jmduke 13y ago
      Things being offline aren't inherently at odds with "us hackers". This is a bizarre train of thought.
      - unono 13y ago
        I don't understand. If people are offline, they're less likely to be consuming the products hackers create, and therefore not paying hackers.
  - kazagistar 13y ago
    Huge budgets at state universities are sunk into the traditional american sport of handegg. Usually it is at a loss, but considered neccessary to draw more students. I don't mind casual sports... its the bullshit of proffesional sports that has a more direct negative inpact via decreased funding for education.
recursive 13y ago
Nothing in life is fair. Why would sports be any different?
brudgers 13y ago
Every example is of an individual sport. If one looks at team sports, the advantage of any one phenotype over others begins to disappear: most tellingly in the world's most popular sport. Top footballers range from Messi to Ronaldo to Cech. "Third lung" is from the Korean penninsula, not 2000 meters.
- daleharvey 13y ago
  I dont disagree with what you are saying, but I think its woth mentioning a lot of people speculate that Messi might get an advantage from his growth deficiency, he has a low center of gravity which can help shifting momentum (not to take anything away from the best player in the world)
  - brudgers 13y ago
    Peter Cech is nearly a foot taller. England international striker Peter Couch is more than a foot. Christiano Ronaldo's stature is in between. The Brazilian great "Garrincha" - aka Anjo de Pernas Tortas - lived with physical deformity. What they have in common is having enjoyed the opportunity to express their unique abilities and the will to develop them to an elite level. A high red blood cell count won't make a Trinidadian into a world class cross country skier.
- chongli 13y ago
  You're just cherry-picking. Pick another sport: basketball. Here you'll find a collection of players way above average height. In fact, players who are average height are the extreme outliers in basketball.
  - brudgers 13y ago
    Other than basketball, there are few team sports where stature is a specific advantage (and stature is not a unique genetic characteristic like long Achilles tendons or elevated red blood cells. Thus cricket, rugby, and American football allow for a wide range of physiques at the elite level.
teddyknox 13y ago
Relevant XKCD. http://xkcd.com/1173/ http://xkcd.com/1173/
kumarski 13y ago
Yes. Read about myostatin. It's a protein that inhibits muscle growth.
jl6 13y ago
Exercise and training make sport unfair! Top athletes spend hours and hours at it, every day, often forsaking a normal life and education, sometimes even ruining their bodies in the process. And in doing so they gain a decisive advantage over those who don't spend so long training.
moron4hire 13y ago
"We want sports to be fair and we take elaborate measures to make sure that no one competitor has an advantage over any other." That is incorrect. If sports were fair, then everyone would win. Sports are specifically not meant to be fair, the entire point of the competition is to reveal which competitor is superior to the others. The rules that we have against performance enhancing drugs are not about having an advantage over other competitors. We don't have similar rules governing how much weight training a particular athlete may do, or how clean their diet may be. They are about establishing rules by which universal play can be governed. The rules of the game define the game. If you play by a different set of rules, you are playing a different game. If the Tour de France did not have a rule against excessive[1] steroid use, then using steroids would not be cheating. But, the Tour de France with steroids is not the Tour de France, it's a different race entirely. As a culture, we associate healthful living with physical fitness, and we associate sports accomplishment with physical fitness, therefore we make the huge leap of associating sports accomplishment with healthful living. Even sans-drugs, sports accomplishment doesn't necessarily equal healthful living, especially in the cases of ultra-marathons increasing risk of heart attack and the head trauma of American football increasing the chance of dementia. But we still make that association, so as a culture we tend to value sports that at least pay lip service to maintaining the image of athletes as healthy. Though, it's important to point at that we are inconsistent in that regard: certain performance enhancing drugs are allowed in horse racing, and why shouldn't pain killers be considered performance enhancing, if they allow the athlete to perform better than they would without them? Our culture shapes the rules we choose for our games, the rules define the game. Cheating is not about "gaining an unfair advantage". It is an unfair advantage for the New York Yankees to have the very best sports doctors in the league, but it is within the rules of the game, therefor it is not cheating. Much of sports strategy is about finding ways to find unconventional play within the rules to give oneself an unfair advantage. Cheating is violating the social contract of the game: "we've come here today to engage in a competition and these are the rules by which we will evaluate the competition". [1] steroid use rules are often defined in terms of testosterone levels, and the limits are frequently well, well above the levels expected for a healthy male. The rule is thus, "no high testosterone", not actually "no steroids", and it has become standard practice in many sports to try to cycle a steroid usage to peak testosterone levels just below the limit. This takes significant personal experimentation and blood testing to see exactly how the individual body reacts to the drugs and over what time frame. But don't expect the difficulty to mean that people aren't doing it: they are. When you see an athlete testing positive for steroids, it is not a question whether or not they were using steroids or that others were also using it, it's a matter of them not following their regimen properly.
professorplumb 13y ago
Gladwell seems to be making the point that doping in sports is a sort of reverse Harrison Bergeron, with the have-nots needing to "cheat" to get to the same level as the genetically gifted haves. What happens, though, when the most innately talented (Armstrong, Rodriguez, Barry Bonds) also go in for enhancement?
Xcelerate 13y ago
This is a very interesting article. I ran D1 track & field and cross-country a couple of years ago, so I've put a lot of thought into this. Personally, I think there are huge genetic variations between individuals. I could never possibly train hard/effectively enough to compete with someone like Bekele or Gebrselassie. I also think it is kind of hard for most people (non-athletes) to understand this fact unless they have personally spent years training hard themselves. That said, these huge genetic variations only set the ceiling of what you are capable of. This is why I think that for the majority of people who participate in sports, it is in fact a very fair endeavor. Even up through the D1 level, I think hard work can more than compensate for most genetic disadvantages. It becomes more difficult as you start to approach world-class, but for 99% of people who are athletes of some form, anyone you would locally compete against can be defeated simply by working harder. It may not be fair in the sense that I might have to run 80 miles a week vs my competitor running 30 miles a week to achieve the same result, but in the end, all that matters is who has a faster time or a better score. Maybe that bothers some people, but it doesn't bother me.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  these huge genetic variations only set the ceiling of what you are capable of. It also sets how fast you can get there.
jacinda 13y ago
This article brings to mind the story of Harrison Bergeron, a short story set in a dystopian future US that attempts to remove all possible sources of inequality. http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html

66 points by npalli 13y ago

Sports competitions are about finding the best athlete, not purely the best training regimen - and genes are part of the definition of who that athlete is. On the other hand, an interesting question would be about improved homo sapiens - we will start to improve ourselves as a species at some point (simply because there are so many imperfect things to improve), and at that point 'unupgraded' athletes probably won't be competitive at all.

bayesianhorse 13y ago
People overestimate the role of genetic advantages in individuals. Usually these advantages can't be quantified, they can hardly be predicted. It takes a lot of math to do that for a population of athletes... and then the top performer gets injured.
- timje1 13y ago
  The article mentions some clear examples of people who have genetic advantages. Eero Mäntyrantas' advantage isn't difficult to quantify ( sixty-five per cent more red blood cells than the normal adult male ), so I'm not sure it can be dismissed so easily..
  - bayesianhorse 13y ago
    There are exceptions to every rule. His particular mutation is extremely rare, and probably not even beneficial outside endurance sport. Of course there are "big wins" in genetics. But they are the exception, not the rule. If you see someone smarter or faster than someone else, chances are genetics has next to nothing to do with it. Still we hear genetics mentioned in this context all the time.
    - PeterisP 13y ago
      If we have the top marathon runner from Kenya, and the top marathon runner from, say, Russia - then chances are that genetics have everything to do with it. At top of sports, every single one of them has all the "nurture" stuff close to maximum - not identical, not maximum, but with no huge differences in the training and preparation. If you see "someone faster than someone else", then if those 'someones' are a gold medalist vs an amateur - sure, genetics have little to do with it; but if those 'someones' are a gold medalist and 4th place... then genetics (or possibly doping) are everything; the 4th place runner did everything else pretty much the same as the top one.
- chongli 13y ago
  People overestimate the role of genetic advantages in individuals. No, they don't. In fact, we're so aware of it that we have an entirely separate category for athletes that lack a Y chromosome.
  - RBerenguel 13y ago
    I'd go to the length of defining this as the role of chromosomic advantages (or disadvantages.) I guess genetic is too "small" to refer to chromosomic.
  - lkozma 13y ago
    I'm trying to understand the argument you are making, but it seems logically correct only if the previous comment were "underestimate" instead of "overestimate".

6d0debc071 13y ago

No more so than any other advantage. Some kids get good diets, encouragement, the best teachers. Others get an abusive gym teacher, crap microwaved meals, and parents who don't give a toss about them. Honestly, looking at the sacrifices some sportspeople have to make in other areas of their lives, I'm not sure I'd even want the advantages if they were offered me. I mean I love martial arts, dancing, swimming, archery... but I'm not sure I'd want to live the sort of life necessary to become the best in the world in any of them. When did sports become about winning, rather than having fun and making friends?

dagw 13y ago
When did sports become about winning Two thousand years ago or so (maybe more), when prize money and sponsorship deals became a thing.
- arethuza 13y ago
  There was a mention on Radio 4 this morning of how the earnings of the top Roman chariot racer, when converted to modern currency, are much larger than any contemporary athlete - about $15 billion! http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7942699/Wealth-of-todays-sports-stars-is-no-match-for-the-fortunes-of-Romes-chariot-racers.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7942...
- informatimago 13y ago
  Not 2000, in antiquity, they only earned some laurel (and it was as common as today). Gold and silver medails started to be given 150 years ago. But now it's finished, they only get worthless gold plated medails, plus e sponsorship deals.
  - dagw 13y ago
    Valuable prizes in sport goes back to at least 500 BC. And even for events that didn't have prize money, leveraging the fame that came with being the winner of a great event into money and fortune was as common then as it is now.

bayesianhorse 13y ago

I guess you can start talking about unfair genetic advantages when you have zero doping... Also I don't believe it matters at the top level. Even with high heritabilities, the top performers will probably share the same "genetic" advantages.

RodericDay 13y ago
Hamilton was eventually caught and was suspended from professional cycling. He became one of the first in his circle to implicate Lance Armstrong, testifying before federal investigators and appearing on “60 Minutes.” He says that he regrets his years of using performance-enhancing drugs. The lies and duplicity became an unbearable burden. His marriage fell apart. He sank into a depression. His book is supposed to serve as his apology. At that task, it fails. Try as he might—and sometimes he doesn’t seem to be trying very hard—Hamilton cannot explain why a sport that has no problem with the voluntary induction of anorexia as a performance-enhancing measure is so upset about athletes infusing themselves with their own blood. Did you even read the article? Sometimes it feels like when the headline is simple like that people feel like they can skip the thing completely and just post the most concise, one-up retort they can muster.
- engrenage 13y ago
  Some people are just wired to post quick retorts. For the rest of us it takes years of painstaking practice.

laichzeit0 13y ago

In the sport of bodybuilding, genetic advantages do make it "unfair" because you are most definitely constrained by it (zipper abs, unaesthetic chest insertions). But I wouldn't subscribe to this definition of fairness. Fairness seems more about everyone playing by the same set of rules in the sport. If you start including genetics into the rules then it would become unfair, purely by defining it that way.

erkose 13y ago
In bodybuilding, you are confusing genetics with steroids.
- berntb 13y ago
  I thought the point of body building was people's genetically based reactions to horrendous amounts of steroids? But seriously... I am all for sport enhancements from now on. We really need to do lots of tests with RNA based genetic modification. (I predict that Chinese companies will earn fortunes by curing lots of diseases in ten-fifteen years.)
- konstantintin 13y ago
  you can't get good bone and muscle structure from a needle!
moron4hire 13y ago
Bodybuilding is more of a pageant than a sport.

informatimago 13y ago

Of course. Let's equalize it all. Same genes, same education, same training, same food. 120% pure clones. And then let's who's able to stick his head ahead of the others. We can dig out our beloved Guillotine to see it that no one ends first.</irony mode="dang">

rsheridan6 13y ago
If we did equalize everything, then the result would be random luck, which is also unfairm - sort of like how genetics are random luck. Why don't we just change the rules so everyone wins?
- streptomycin 13y ago
  The article is about fairness in terms of equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. It's not luck if one identical twin trains more than the other and thus can run faster.

frank_boyd 13y ago

> Do Genetic Advantages make sport unfair? Our LIVES are determined by 2 factors: 1. Genetics 2. The environment in which our genetics are applied (social, economic, ecologic, etc.) Everything in our lives is caused by these two. So no, there is no real free will and nobody is ever treated fairly. And yes, our entire culture is still medieval with regards to accepting this fact and taking it into account.

collyw 13y ago

There wouldn't be the Paralypmics if genetics were fair.

petegrif 13y ago

Let's not allow competitive sports other than between people with identical genomes and identical doping regimes. Then we can be confident that in most instances the winner tried hardest. We already have lab standard rats with identical DNA, so it shouldn't be too hard to clone a race of identical competitive athletes.

tokenadult 13y ago

People overestimate the effect of genetic advantages in sport. I have two examples. 1) The first example is identical twins Otto and Ewald, who pursued different sports and developed rather different physiques through their sports training. http://thesameffect.com/check-out-identical-twins-otto-and-ewald/ http://thesameffect.com/check-out-identical-twins-otto-and-e... (I learned about this case from a local professor who teaches courses in human behavior genetics. He uses this case as an example to correct misunderstandings about genetics.) 2) The second example is that Usain Bolt was once thought to be too tall to be a successful sprinter. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00v9bs4/profiles/usain-bolt http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00v9bs4/profiles/usain-bolt http://bleacherreport.com/articles/49040-usain-bolt-why-the-fastest-man-alive-is-in-the-wrong-business http://bleacherreport.com/articles/49040-usain-bolt-why-the-... http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/recycled/2009/08/taking_sprinting_to_new_heights.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/recycled/200... The simple fact is that athletic training reshapes bodies and makes what seems impossible possible after all.

nedR 13y ago
Yes and No depending on the sport. 1. Chess is a game traditionally considered to be strongly co-related to IQ (which is strongly heridetary), but a survey of Grandmasters find that they have generally average IQ. What they did have a lot of, was years of experience and dedication, and also probably very good memories. 2. Basketball is a game where height (which is also strongly heridetary) is very important (the average height of a NBA player is 6' 7"). What are the odds of a man who is 5' 7" becoming a great world-class player? Sure, you could name some guy who fought all odds to rise to the top. But the key word here is odds, and genetics plays a huge role in stacking up the odds.
- alan_cx 13y ago
  This line falls apart because people will rightly argue over what is a sport. If we then include chess, then why not programming? Or education in general? Education is not competitive, but we can compare and rank. In the end it all becomes a horrible mess. In then end I tend to think the genetics must have an impact all over society and culture, and, well, that's that.

unono 13y ago

The bigger question is - why does sport exist anymore? It comes from a time before movies,books,tv,video games,facebook,pinterest. Want to stay fit? Do some bodybuilding and some swimming. Want to focus your mind tactically? Plan your app empire. Hackers need to find creative ways to destroy the sport industry, just as PG urges us to find creative ways to destroy Hollywood.

recursive 13y ago
A lot of hackers play sports. Why would we try to destroy them? Sports exist because some people find them fun. If you don't, don't worry. They're purely optional.
- unono 13y ago
  Sports are one of the few things keeping people cutting the cable tv cord, we as hackers are losing big money from that situation. Also, sports are one of the few times that people log off from their computers. That's another huge loss in revenue for us hackers.
  - jmduke 13y ago
    Things being offline aren't inherently at odds with "us hackers". This is a bizarre train of thought.
    - unono 13y ago
      I don't understand. If people are offline, they're less likely to be consuming the products hackers create, and therefore not paying hackers.
- kazagistar 13y ago
  Huge budgets at state universities are sunk into the traditional american sport of handegg. Usually it is at a loss, but considered neccessary to draw more students. I don't mind casual sports... its the bullshit of proffesional sports that has a more direct negative inpact via decreased funding for education.

recursive 13y ago

Nothing in life is fair. Why would sports be any different?

brudgers 13y ago

Every example is of an individual sport. If one looks at team sports, the advantage of any one phenotype over others begins to disappear: most tellingly in the world's most popular sport. Top footballers range from Messi to Ronaldo to Cech. "Third lung" is from the Korean penninsula, not 2000 meters.

daleharvey 13y ago
I dont disagree with what you are saying, but I think its woth mentioning a lot of people speculate that Messi might get an advantage from his growth deficiency, he has a low center of gravity which can help shifting momentum (not to take anything away from the best player in the world)
- brudgers 13y ago
  Peter Cech is nearly a foot taller. England international striker Peter Couch is more than a foot. Christiano Ronaldo's stature is in between. The Brazilian great "Garrincha" - aka Anjo de Pernas Tortas - lived with physical deformity. What they have in common is having enjoyed the opportunity to express their unique abilities and the will to develop them to an elite level. A high red blood cell count won't make a Trinidadian into a world class cross country skier.
chongli 13y ago
You're just cherry-picking. Pick another sport: basketball. Here you'll find a collection of players way above average height. In fact, players who are average height are the extreme outliers in basketball.
- brudgers 13y ago
  Other than basketball, there are few team sports where stature is a specific advantage (and stature is not a unique genetic characteristic like long Achilles tendons or elevated red blood cells. Thus cricket, rugby, and American football allow for a wide range of physiques at the elite level.

teddyknox 13y ago

Relevant XKCD. http://xkcd.com/1173/ http://xkcd.com/1173/

kumarski 13y ago

Yes. Read about myostatin. It's a protein that inhibits muscle growth.

jl6 13y ago

Exercise and training make sport unfair! Top athletes spend hours and hours at it, every day, often forsaking a normal life and education, sometimes even ruining their bodies in the process. And in doing so they gain a decisive advantage over those who don't spend so long training.

moron4hire 13y ago

"We want sports to be fair and we take elaborate measures to make sure that no one competitor has an advantage over any other." That is incorrect. If sports were fair, then everyone would win. Sports are specifically not meant to be fair, the entire point of the competition is to reveal which competitor is superior to the others. The rules that we have against performance enhancing drugs are not about having an advantage over other competitors. We don't have similar rules governing how much weight training a particular athlete may do, or how clean their diet may be. They are about establishing rules by which universal play can be governed. The rules of the game define the game. If you play by a different set of rules, you are playing a different game. If the Tour de France did not have a rule against excessive[1] steroid use, then using steroids would not be cheating. But, the Tour de France with steroids is not the Tour de France, it's a different race entirely. As a culture, we associate healthful living with physical fitness, and we associate sports accomplishment with physical fitness, therefore we make the huge leap of associating sports accomplishment with healthful living. Even sans-drugs, sports accomplishment doesn't necessarily equal healthful living, especially in the cases of ultra-marathons increasing risk of heart attack and the head trauma of American football increasing the chance of dementia. But we still make that association, so as a culture we tend to value sports that at least pay lip service to maintaining the image of athletes as healthy. Though, it's important to point at that we are inconsistent in that regard: certain performance enhancing drugs are allowed in horse racing, and why shouldn't pain killers be considered performance enhancing, if they allow the athlete to perform better than they would without them? Our culture shapes the rules we choose for our games, the rules define the game. Cheating is not about "gaining an unfair advantage". It is an unfair advantage for the New York Yankees to have the very best sports doctors in the league, but it is within the rules of the game, therefor it is not cheating. Much of sports strategy is about finding ways to find unconventional play within the rules to give oneself an unfair advantage. Cheating is violating the social contract of the game: "we've come here today to engage in a competition and these are the rules by which we will evaluate the competition". [1] steroid use rules are often defined in terms of testosterone levels, and the limits are frequently well, well above the levels expected for a healthy male. The rule is thus, "no high testosterone", not actually "no steroids", and it has become standard practice in many sports to try to cycle a steroid usage to peak testosterone levels just below the limit. This takes significant personal experimentation and blood testing to see exactly how the individual body reacts to the drugs and over what time frame. But don't expect the difficulty to mean that people aren't doing it: they are. When you see an athlete testing positive for steroids, it is not a question whether or not they were using steroids or that others were also using it, it's a matter of them not following their regimen properly.

professorplumb 13y ago

Gladwell seems to be making the point that doping in sports is a sort of reverse Harrison Bergeron, with the have-nots needing to "cheat" to get to the same level as the genetically gifted haves. What happens, though, when the most innately talented (Armstrong, Rodriguez, Barry Bonds) also go in for enhancement?

Xcelerate 13y ago

This is a very interesting article. I ran D1 track & field and cross-country a couple of years ago, so I've put a lot of thought into this. Personally, I think there are huge genetic variations between individuals. I could never possibly train hard/effectively enough to compete with someone like Bekele or Gebrselassie. I also think it is kind of hard for most people (non-athletes) to understand this fact unless they have personally spent years training hard themselves. That said, these huge genetic variations only set the ceiling of what you are capable of. This is why I think that for the majority of people who participate in sports, it is in fact a very fair endeavor. Even up through the D1 level, I think hard work can more than compensate for most genetic disadvantages. It becomes more difficult as you start to approach world-class, but for 99% of people who are athletes of some form, anyone you would locally compete against can be defeated simply by working harder. It may not be fair in the sense that I might have to run 80 miles a week vs my competitor running 30 miles a week to achieve the same result, but in the end, all that matters is who has a faster time or a better score. Maybe that bothers some people, but it doesn't bother me.

sliverstorm 13y ago
these huge genetic variations only set the ceiling of what you are capable of. It also sets how fast you can get there.

jacinda 13y ago

This article brings to mind the story of Harrison Bergeron, a short story set in a dystopian future US that attempts to remove all possible sources of inequality. http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html