this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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Lord knows I'm not a sports guy, but even I believe a big fascination with the entire field is that someone can get the combination of physical talent and mental fortitude to make it to the top. And even at the top, like top-level soccer where basically every player, even the substitutes, are way better than the average 5-a-side player, there are transcendent talents that people talk about for decades to come.
Performance-enhancing drugs take away a lot of that fascination. It's literally cheating which is why everyone, not just government killjoys but the fans themselves hate it with a passion.
I believe there's a short SF story about a future like this, where young poor kids are suckered into pumping themselves full of PEs and competing for the benefit of "research", with their inevitable deaths and invalidity just confirming the experiments failures.
To make this work, the organizers will have to have people competing who are already near the top, to deliver those jaw-dropping results for the TV networks, but these people would understand that it's a one-way street. If the even flames out or is banned in multiple countries, they're barred from ever competing in normal events again. It's a libertarian pipe-dream, but then ofcourse Thiel backs it.
@gerikson @skillissuer They also completely misunderstand a whole aspect of this (surprise) -- nobody who's won an Olympic gold is going to come out and say "Woohoo, it's the doping games for me!" because top athletes actually care about their reputation and their legacy in a way the likes of Thiel would never be able to parse.
Doping is something to be _ashamed_ of doing, which is why people who get caught doing it fight so hard to get let off. Appear at these games and your career as a legit athlete is over. No Olympics, your sponsors will abandon you, no sporting dreams any more. Your record will be tarnished and anything you won in the past will have a "possibly doping" asterisk next to ot in the records. Nobody will sponsor this, there'll be no lucrative TV rights. It'll just be like a grim track meet at your county stadium.
They might manage some grotesque spectacle where over-the-hill mediocrities will dope themselves up in order to compete because they didn't win anything significant during their actual careers, but it will not be any kind of sporting spectacle.