I completely agree with seriousness and aliveness, but think competitiveness is only applicable in extremely narrow, well-defined circumstances like some games, and that these circumstances aren’t present in the real world. Sports is an edge case, since the boundaries are artificial, but not as abstract as the rules of, say, chess, and so have real-world gray area which is exploitable.
So I would argue that, most of the time, competitiveness leads to a much, much lower level of play in individuals, not higher. I see several routes to this:
Goodhart’s Law can attack, and people can start trying to game the metric and play the system to “win” at the expense of making real hard-to-measure progress, and the field suffers greatly.
People under pressure perform much worse on the candle problem. Offering cash prizes or deadline threats can only motivate well-defined, mechanical thinking, except by drawing attention to the desired problems.
#2 seems to be the bigger contributor, from my perspective.
(As a point of clarrification: I fully agree that if you make sports a multi-billion dollar industry, you will attract the interest of enough people capable of ignoring their incentives and just exploring the problem philosophically. However, my point is that for an individual already focused on a particular problem, a deadline or cash prize is the last thing they need. It had the distracting effect of focusing the mind. (Also, more generally, these sorts of phenomenon are known as the overjustification effect, which is why any system built on incentives alone is doomed to failure.) )
This (#2) is likely to sound highly surprising, so let me expand the model a bit: The actual frame of mind you want to be in to make real, novel breakthroughs is one of detached, unhurried curiosity. The world is usually way to eager for tangible, measurable results, and so is way way way to far toward the “exploit” side of the “explore/exploit” trade-off (formally, the multi-armed bandit problem). Goodhart’s Law strikes again.
Examples (of #2) to try and triangulate meaning:
If you actually wanted to win at a competitive sport, the way to do it is NOT to practice or compete. Everyone’s already doing that, so it’s an efficient market. The way to win is to look for loopholes which haven’t been exploited yet.
Example 1: Moneyball fundamentally changed the way people thought about sports, by playing a fundamentally different game with a different goal (optimizing for return on investment, not winning/prestige/warm fuzzies).
So, of the top of my head, you might take a close look at which sorts of transhumanist enhancements might not be illegal yet. Can you stretch leg bones, create new drugs that aren’t banned yet, (example 2) or recruit from untapped demographics which have some unique trait? Lets explore that avenue of the transhumanist approach.
I happen to randomly recall that ADHD meds stunt growth, so that might help make smaller gymnasts who are still old enough to participate in the Olympics. (Example 3) (I also happen to vaguely recall that China lied about the age of their gymnasts to get yunger into the Olympics, because smaller is apparently better for gymnastics.) So, since no one is going to ban a drug which a kid legitimately needs for non-sports reasons, ADHD meds sound promising. There are presumably health and moral reasons why kids are often taken off of ADHD drugs for the summer, to allow them to grow, but if you’re a true creative Machiavellian focused solely on winning, you could probably put them in a school system without a summer break or something.
Meta discussion of these examples:
Note that all we’ve done here is randomly mash up transhumanism + sports, and see what relevant knowledge our brains already have which might be useful. Having 2 things I randomly recall suggested one approach, but we’ve hardly scratched the surface of the search space. In order to generate a few thousand new, better approaches, we might read more about extreme features (height/weight/body proportions/endurance/hormones/etc.) or different athletes. (I happen to also randomly recall that some tour de france champoin had testicular cancer and ridiculously high testosterone levels or something. Similarly, the swimmer Michael Phelps is bizarrely proportioned, with short legs and long arms.) Combining that with looking up whether it might be possible to induce such features should be fertile ground for ideas.
But, even that approach is extremely narrow. We could broaden it to looking for the key limiting factors in various sports, physical or not, and then researching how to overcome them. Or better yet, spend a lot of time thinking about which search spaces are excluded even by that broader methodology, and then search in them. The entire point is not to get sucked into one concrete path until you are reasonably sure you’ve exhausted all the search space reachable by human-like minds, and are at least starting you implementation in the right ballpark. You should still expect to pivot to different sports or approaches though, even halfway through implementation. Discard sunk costs quickly.
Back to gesturing at #2:
Some of this sort of creative problem solving may occur in sports from time to time. I don’t follow sportsball close enough to guess exactly how inadequate/low-level-of-play sports is generally. But, the mere fact that people are bothering to waste time playing the object-level game, rather than concentrating all their efforts on the meta-game, isn’t a sign of competence. That’s probably for the best though, since any competent arms-race in just about anything is just a paperclip maximizer built out of human institutions instead of AI.
If there’s something important that you actually want to make substantive contributions too though, then the trick is to figure out how to revolutionize the entire field, rather than wasting time making incremental improvements. That means thinking outside the box, and outside the “outside the box” box. Douglas Hofstadter calls this JOOTSing, for “Jumping Out Of The System”. This is entirely distinct from merely repeating the innovation of a previous jump.
Saying “…so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of [me/you]...” over and over again isn’t actually going any additional meta-levals deep, which is why Yudkowsky’s Law of Ultrafinite Recursion applies to such situations. To win such a battle of wits, you have to completely upend the previous level of play, such as by building up an immunity to iocaine powder.
And such creative solutions require precisely the opposite mindset from the hyper-focused blinders which narrow attention to nothing but the object-level task at hand, to the exclusion of everything else. The odds of the ideal solution actually lying in such a tiny search space are infinitesimal.
Excellent comment! I don’t agree completely but I appreciate your taking the time to engage in such detail.
I think that concentrating efforts on the meta-game can be useful, and as you say can be one of the best ways to deal with situations that are currently extremely competitive. That being said, to me this seems almost evidence for competitiveness as a relevant aspect; these sorts of approaches become necessary only when applying standard methods won’t work because the level of competition is already high.
In many fields, you can win by just showing up and “doing it right”—only in fields with serious competition, where you can reasonably expect that people have reached the limits of the current approaches, is the meta approach really necessary. That said, as you point out you often need to take a new approach in order to do something really revolutionary, even if it’s easy to beat the current competitors in the field...
I completely agree with seriousness and aliveness, but think competitiveness is only applicable in extremely narrow, well-defined circumstances like some games, and that these circumstances aren’t present in the real world. Sports is an edge case, since the boundaries are artificial, but not as abstract as the rules of, say, chess, and so have real-world gray area which is exploitable.
So I would argue that, most of the time, competitiveness leads to a much, much lower level of play in individuals, not higher. I see several routes to this:
Goodhart’s Law can attack, and people can start trying to game the metric and play the system to “win” at the expense of making real hard-to-measure progress, and the field suffers greatly.
People under pressure perform much worse on the candle problem. Offering cash prizes or deadline threats can only motivate well-defined, mechanical thinking, except by drawing attention to the desired problems.
#2 seems to be the bigger contributor, from my perspective.
(As a point of clarrification: I fully agree that if you make sports a multi-billion dollar industry, you will attract the interest of enough people capable of ignoring their incentives and just exploring the problem philosophically. However, my point is that for an individual already focused on a particular problem, a deadline or cash prize is the last thing they need. It had the distracting effect of focusing the mind. (Also, more generally, these sorts of phenomenon are known as the overjustification effect, which is why any system built on incentives alone is doomed to failure.) )
This (#2) is likely to sound highly surprising, so let me expand the model a bit: The actual frame of mind you want to be in to make real, novel breakthroughs is one of detached, unhurried curiosity. The world is usually way to eager for tangible, measurable results, and so is way way way to far toward the “exploit” side of the “explore/exploit” trade-off (formally, the multi-armed bandit problem). Goodhart’s Law strikes again.
Examples (of #2) to try and triangulate meaning:
If you actually wanted to win at a competitive sport, the way to do it is NOT to practice or compete. Everyone’s already doing that, so it’s an efficient market. The way to win is to look for loopholes which haven’t been exploited yet.
Example 1: Moneyball fundamentally changed the way people thought about sports, by playing a fundamentally different game with a different goal (optimizing for return on investment, not winning/prestige/warm fuzzies).
So, of the top of my head, you might take a close look at which sorts of transhumanist enhancements might not be illegal yet. Can you stretch leg bones, create new drugs that aren’t banned yet, (example 2) or recruit from untapped demographics which have some unique trait? Lets explore that avenue of the transhumanist approach.
I happen to randomly recall that ADHD meds stunt growth, so that might help make smaller gymnasts who are still old enough to participate in the Olympics. (Example 3) (I also happen to vaguely recall that China lied about the age of their gymnasts to get yunger into the Olympics, because smaller is apparently better for gymnastics.) So, since no one is going to ban a drug which a kid legitimately needs for non-sports reasons, ADHD meds sound promising. There are presumably health and moral reasons why kids are often taken off of ADHD drugs for the summer, to allow them to grow, but if you’re a true creative Machiavellian focused solely on winning, you could probably put them in a school system without a summer break or something.
Meta discussion of these examples:
Note that all we’ve done here is randomly mash up transhumanism + sports, and see what relevant knowledge our brains already have which might be useful. Having 2 things I randomly recall suggested one approach, but we’ve hardly scratched the surface of the search space. In order to generate a few thousand new, better approaches, we might read more about extreme features (height/weight/body proportions/endurance/hormones/etc.) or different athletes. (I happen to also randomly recall that some tour de france champoin had testicular cancer and ridiculously high testosterone levels or something. Similarly, the swimmer Michael Phelps is bizarrely proportioned, with short legs and long arms.) Combining that with looking up whether it might be possible to induce such features should be fertile ground for ideas.
But, even that approach is extremely narrow. We could broaden it to looking for the key limiting factors in various sports, physical or not, and then researching how to overcome them. Or better yet, spend a lot of time thinking about which search spaces are excluded even by that broader methodology, and then search in them. The entire point is not to get sucked into one concrete path until you are reasonably sure you’ve exhausted all the search space reachable by human-like minds, and are at least starting you implementation in the right ballpark. You should still expect to pivot to different sports or approaches though, even halfway through implementation. Discard sunk costs quickly.
Back to gesturing at #2:
Some of this sort of creative problem solving may occur in sports from time to time. I don’t follow sportsball close enough to guess exactly how inadequate/low-level-of-play sports is generally. But, the mere fact that people are bothering to waste time playing the object-level game, rather than concentrating all their efforts on the meta-game, isn’t a sign of competence. That’s probably for the best though, since any competent arms-race in just about anything is just a paperclip maximizer built out of human institutions instead of AI.
If there’s something important that you actually want to make substantive contributions too though, then the trick is to figure out how to revolutionize the entire field, rather than wasting time making incremental improvements. That means thinking outside the box, and outside the “outside the box” box. Douglas Hofstadter calls this JOOTSing, for “Jumping Out Of The System”. This is entirely distinct from merely repeating the innovation of a previous jump.
Saying “…so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of [me/you]...” over and over again isn’t actually going any additional meta-levals deep, which is why Yudkowsky’s Law of Ultrafinite Recursion applies to such situations. To win such a battle of wits, you have to completely upend the previous level of play, such as by building up an immunity to iocaine powder.
And such creative solutions require precisely the opposite mindset from the hyper-focused blinders which narrow attention to nothing but the object-level task at hand, to the exclusion of everything else. The odds of the ideal solution actually lying in such a tiny search space are infinitesimal.
Excellent comment! I don’t agree completely but I appreciate your taking the time to engage in such detail.
I think that concentrating efforts on the meta-game can be useful, and as you say can be one of the best ways to deal with situations that are currently extremely competitive. That being said, to me this seems almost evidence for competitiveness as a relevant aspect; these sorts of approaches become necessary only when applying standard methods won’t work because the level of competition is already high.
In many fields, you can win by just showing up and “doing it right”—only in fields with serious competition, where you can reasonably expect that people have reached the limits of the current approaches, is the meta approach really necessary. That said, as you point out you often need to take a new approach in order to do something really revolutionary, even if it’s easy to beat the current competitors in the field...