The thing that really made the Enganced Games à debacle isn’t that the participants failed to beat top clean athletes. It’s that they failed to beat their own performance from when they were still clean.
Meaning that they didn’t just fail to demonstrate that these supplements could lead to superhuman performance. They didn’t even just fail to demonstrate that they enhance performance. They failed to demonstrate that their overall effect isn’t deleterious.
And yet everyone involved believed quite firmly, based in part on personal experience, that it was self-evident that these supplements would make them better athletes.
A lot of the arguments for AI in education aren’t far off from the reasoning behind the kinds of popular supplements they used in the Enhanced Games. The limits of that style of thinking are demonstrated quite nicely in the 2010 Canadian Medical Association Journal article “Cigarette smoking: an underused tool in high-performance endurance training”: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3001541/
Meaning that they didn’t just fail to demonstrate that these supplements could lead to superhuman performance. They didn’t even just fail to demonstrate that they enhance performance. They failed to demonstrate that their overall effect isn’t deleterious.
And yet everyone involved believed quite firmly, based in part on personal experience, that it was self-evident that these supplements would make them better athletes.
A lot of the arguments for AI in education aren’t far off from the reasoning behind the kinds of popular supplements they used in the Enhanced Games. The limits of that style of thinking are demonstrated quite nicely in the 2010 Canadian Medical Association Journal article “Cigarette smoking: an underused tool in high-performance endurance training”: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3001541/