XKCD: It's more than a comic

BTW, not all human performance enhancing drugs are steroids, btw. In fact, an increasing number of them have no relationships to steroids at all.

You are missing the point of the joke.

The whole issue sounds increasingly arbitrary to me. Sure, no steroids or dedicated performance-enhancing drugs. But it's perfectly legitimate to eat an ordinary diet tailored by a dietician to maximize your performance. No doping, but it's legitimate to train at high altitudes. No muscle-bulking drugs, but it's legitimate to train in a centrifuge under 1.5g to get the benefit of increased constant workout from just moving. (And if you ban any of the above, you just have to draw the line elsewhere. For instance: Anyone's performance will be improved by spending a large amount of time practicing. People who are well-off are more able to take time off from earning a living to practice. Thus, clearly we must mandate that all athletes can spend only up to a certain low cap of practice time, so as not to unfairly disadvantage lower-income competitors!)

My own contention is that athletic competitions should be won by teams of two: the athlete, and the bioscientist type in charge of his enhancement program.

edited 13th Feb '13 10:19:59 AM by alethiophile

Or, we could cease placing such societal emphasis on arbitrary physical feats.

So, stop doing stuff that we as a species have been doing since at least the Assyrians? Good luck with that. Even the Catholics didn't immediately stop Arena games when they took over.

I didn't say stop doing it. I said stop making such a big deal out of it.

But what will we watch every 4 years?!?

edited 13th Feb '13 10:12:04 AM by QuestionMarc

@ alethiophile: That would be just like Forma-1.

Regarding steroids being unhealthy: sports are unhealthy. Exercise is generally regarded as a good thing, but like pretty much anything you do to your body too much is bad for you. Participating regularly in strenuous physical activity can be bad for your heart, among other things.

I'm not saying people shouldn't exercise, since the vast majority of people are probably below the cut-off point, but if we're talking about the top tiers of people who we actually care about when they use performance-enhancing drugs they're probably already living unhealthy lifestyles tailored to increase their performance.

As mentioned earlier, what's the difference between having a carefully controlled diet and practice regime and supplementing that with other drugs? I mean, didn't your parents tell you to eat your vegetables to grow up healthy? Would we have a different perspective on the matter if the steroids were naturally occurring in something eaten ordinarily like potatoes or something? I posit that we'd just think of potatoes as "sports food".

edited 13th Feb '13 11:20:10 AM by Clarste

I don't think it's so difficult to explain to an outsider why we condemn steroid use in sports competitions.

"Humans engage in competitions of physical fitness, which are very high status, so they do practically anything they're allowed to do in order to win. Consuming certain chemicals helps humans win, but some chemicals are dangerous to everyone who consumes them. So we make rules against using these chemicals, because it's equally fair and less dangerous if nobody uses them than if everyone does."

If you're already training at an extremely high level, eating healthy foods will help your performance without posing further danger to your health. We don't place restrictions on "sports food," because things in that class aren't creating additional risk for participants in exchange for performance enhancement.

edited 13th Feb '13 11:37:15 AM by Desertopa

But you'd have to explain to someone why taking a drug is bad if it lets you win. Isn't the point of a competition to win? Doesn't it increase your performance and show that you're the best?

They might also reasonably note that in many sports, particularly American football and similarly energetic activities, the useful life of an athlete is already incredibly short due to the extreme likelihood of injury, not to mention the cumulative damage you do to your body from the physical stress.

yea. plus two lines of guys smashing into each other isn't my idea of entertainment. I like the super bowl for the commercials.

Desertopa: That's easy to say, but it's not just those methods of performance enhancement that bear medical risks which are banned. Blood doping in the traditional sense bears no more risks than any medical procedure involving injecting things intravenously, all of which risks are actually exacerbated by the rules against it (which force athletes who do it to prioritize stealth over proper safety measures). There are doubtless other drugs which, if taken in the correct context and dosage, could effectively boost performance without causing undue health risk—certainly no more than the athletes already bear by the strain of training and competing at all. This is why I say that the whole thing is basically arbitrary. It always seems to me that all the people getting morally outraged over doping scandals are in fact going nuts about basic efficiency in pursuit of a goal, which bugs me.

I thought one of the clearest analogies to make non-sports fans understand is that it's like using a modded controller or hacks in a multiplayer videogame.

Not the same. Video games are (mostly) an entirely skill- or luck-based proposition; sports have quite a significant component of conditioning, and various practices meant to aid conditioning are already considered legitimate.

Or to make another video game analogy: It's just fine to spend hundreds of dollars on really high-quality precise input devices that maximize responsiveness, but it's not okay to get the same effect by opening up a cheap keyboard and fixing the electronics?

Not if it's against the rules. My actual position on this issue is that if the rules disallow it, and you do it anyway, you are not playing that game, you're playing something else. That's why it's like hacking. Playing pokemon with Wonder Guard Spritomb and Huge Power Deoxys is not regular pokemon, and so playing baseball using disallowed performance enhancing substances is not playing regular baseball.

Nothing wrong with that position, but weren't we arguing about why it was against the rules in the first place? I mean, we can agree that breaking the mutually agreed-upon rules is bad, while still arguing about whether a certain rule makes sense or not.

Getting SMBC vibes. :p

Sports are full of arbitrary seeming rules. If you are running to get to a line before everyone else, wouldn't it in real life make sense to try take a head start, or to try trip them? If you're in a word fight, why not bring a longer sword than your opponent? In boxing, why not kick as well, why not hit below the belt? Why take breaks, in stead of beating the opponent down until they're a bloody pulp?

In the end, I can personally not offer any other justification for opposing doping in sports than what you lot would condemnd as Appeal to Nature, because on the internet, making logically sound arguments is more important than being right.

At risk of derailing everything, I like the explanation/metaphor from HPMOR on this one—if you're having a competition, a fight or whatever else, an you both obey rules that stop you from going all out, then you might win or you might lose but you won't lose everything even if you lose. If you turn a fist fight into a knife fight, or a boxing match into one in which you can kick below the belt, or whatever, that raises the cost of failure but not the gain from winning. If you break the rules first you're slightly more likely to win but your opponent will immediately start breaking the rules as well and if you DO lose you'll be in the hospital or dead.

So rules actually have a very logical and very important place in physical competitions. Especially when the people writing the rules are only concerned with the long term and not the current fight.

Not quite true.

And EPO was developed because it was safer than older methods of blood doping.

I don't expect that all banned performance enhancers have been found to be dangerous by reliable research, but since in practical terms athletes are being invited to use everything that's not actually forbidden, then as a matter of policy it's most likely safer to err on the side of not allowing things. It's awfully difficult to test all the possible combinations and find out if, for instance, using two doping agents together leads to a catastrophic risk from increased blood viscosity plus elevated blood pressure.

edited 14th Feb '13 8:00:38 AM by Desertopa

@Desertopa: There's plenty of things athletes could do that would pose risks to them. We don't ban all of them.

@Jethro: The way you become right is by making a logically sound argument. If you don't have one, then even if you manage to be correct in your conclusion it's broken-clock effect.

Not really, it's quite possible to have justified and correct views that you are incapable of communicating clearly to others. Logic isn't how you become right, it's how you demonstrate your rightness in a way other people can reproduce to confirm your results.

edited 14th Feb '13 11:36:59 AM by EdwardsGrizzly

Fair enough. The point remains that disparaging logical soundness in favor of "being right" is missing the point.