
Why winners become cheaters - rkda
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/08/why-winners-become-cheaters/
======
stygiansonic
Related 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-...](http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/winners-act-as-thick-as-
thieves/)

------
unabst
Armstrong 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).

~~~
dtertman
Relevant: [https://xkcd.com/1173/](https://xkcd.com/1173/)

You can get better a lot of ways in sport. Why is performance-enhancing drugs
the way that is singled out as not acceptable?

~~~
coliveira
There are thousands of rules in any sport, anti-doping is just on of them.
Anyone trying to get around the rules is just cheating, so why should doping
be excused?

~~~
arcanus
> Anyone trying to get around the rules is just cheating, so why should doping
> be excused?

Perhaps a better question is: why are there rules against doping in the first
place? As the xkcd notes, 'some performance enhancements are ok, some are
bad', and the line is rather arbitrary at this point.

~~~
arjie
Sports/games rules are inherently arbitrary. This is like asking why you can
move while dribbling but not while just holding the ball in basketball. There
is no why. There only is.

Can you move while tossing the ball in the air repeatedly (dribbling against
the sky)?

No.

Wait why? It's just like dribbling except upside down.

It's just the rule.

It's just the rule, man. The rules are what define the game. Why can't I start
the bishop where the queen is? It's just the rule. Why can't I have an under
inflated ball? Just the rule. Why can't I use a cricket bat in soccer? Just
the rule.

~~~
arcanus
In American Football, can you throw a forward pass? Or in Basketball, can you
shoot three point shots? Both were not originally in those respective games,
and were added. The rules of all sports are evolving, and will continue to do
so.

I'm not aware of any sport that restricts your diet, or the amount of exercise
or training you can perform. Yet some chemical substances are arbitrarily
banned. It is anti-science!

------
lazyant
"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.

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danvoell
Might explain why winners of free market capitalism want to institute measures
(laws, regulations) to keep others from achieving the same level of winning.

~~~
tomp
> 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
_My 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
Most 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"

~~~
anigbrowl
Taking 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.

------
Pietertje
Does 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
Yes, the article links to the study, from where you can download the PDF.

~~~
Pietertje
Thanks, 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.

------
benlower
Very 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.

------
sschueller
There 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)

------
anigbrowl
Stories 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.

------
itp
> 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?

------
heapcity
Driving Uber; its pretty predictable that wealthier people are less likely to
rate you well.

------
timwaagh
so...best strategy is to cheat.

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ikeboy
I 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
The first game was designed so that cheating was impossible.

~~~
ikeboy
That 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.

