It’s really unfortunate that some of the most influential people are also some of the least thoughtful. Unfortunately we live in a world of lottery winners who not only think they are experts in the lottery, but any other subject as well.
For a person with that level of money, he has every opportunity to talk with the most informed people on any topic, and who on this topic would inform him that steroids aren’t just bad for the athletes that take them, they have negative effects on those around them. Hair trigger temper is no joke when combined with superhuman strength.
Nobody is saying let's ditch the Olympics and everybody should take roids. Behind the scenes, so many athletes are already enhancing themselves during the off season in so many sports, this is an attempt to "legalize it."
I'd like to know where the line on enhanced will be drawn - will they allow for robots to compete?
Also, this sounds good:
> The Enhanced Games have been designed so they can be hosted at a Division One university campus, its website said, avoiding the need to build new stadiums and push cities into debt. It will also mean athletes can be paid fairly...
It's like a more sustainable, equitable Olympics that's happens to have a vice. But will people care enough to watch? The market will decide.
> Behind the scenes, so many athletes are already enhancing themselves during the off season in so many sports, this is an attempt to "legalize it."
The thing that troubles me is that enforcing a certain degree of plausible deniability also limits the harm that these athletes cause themselves with the drugs.
When you throw the plausible deniability away like this, you open the gates to reckless drug abuse for the sake of competition, which could be an order of magnitude more lethal than everybody doping in secret moderation.
I'd be a lot more comfortable with it in principle if they were allowing drug use, but enforcing sane limits and disqualifying athletes who were clearly being reckless and causing themselves serious harm.
I don't think we should legalize 15 year old girls being pressured to ruin their bodies with drugs so that they can win a gold medal for their country.
If it became popular it would remove many bad apples from the Olympic pool.
Or it would just add a new level of obvious doping while the hidden doping methods would keep evolving, maybe even faster due to the public branch
> Thiel is joined by the likes of Balaji Srinivasan, a cryptocurrency investor and former CTO of Coinbase, and Christian Angermayer, a biotech investor who said the games “will undoubtedly inspire the public’s imagination.”
I wonder if this will be a true "free for all" of any kind of enhancements or will ultimately end up with some limits as well.
Keep in mind the Olympics allow things which can easily be classed as enhancements. They just have some defined level which everyone is capped at.
You can frame that as safety with everything below that level as "safe" and everything above it as "unsafe" but that is ultimately just an arbitrary line.
This seems like this has the ability to rapidly grow, much like it seems that MMA/UFC has eclipsed traditional boxing (I am not a fan of nor a follower of either) but it seems like the zeitgeist among those people has shifted.
It doesn't help that the olympics seems to have become an absurdly large spectacle event demanding exorbitant amounts of money for the host cities with ultimately little benefit.
Personally, also, the olympics has become extraordinarily difficult to watch (legally). I don't have a cable subscription. I don't want a cable subscription. I would have gladly paid a reasonable one-time fee (figure $100) to sign up for something where I could watch the olympics, but, that wasn't possible last time I tried, it was only available by subscribing to a cable tv package, which was only possible with a 1-year commit. Even if I was willing to do that, Comcast said my address was "ineligible" for self-install and so I would need to wait 2-3 weeks for a self install. The user experience here was absurdly poor.
Ultimately, I think an Enhanced Games could succeed where it feels like the olympics is failing. Make it far easier on host cities, make it far easier to pay to watch, remove the ultimately arbitrary line of what is a disqualifying substance. Simple formula.
It’s going to very quickly devolve into people doing incredible amounts of performance enhancing drugs to the point where you will have several high profile deaths leading up to and during the “games”. It’s going to be a hard PR and legal thing to maneuver around.
I can imagine someone taking some street legal analog of PCP and absolutely ripping someone else apart during BJJ/boxing matches.
Anabolic steroids is not an arbitrary category. Protein powder doesn’t give you roid rage. The world is not going to be a better place if steroids become more popular.
Entirely natural substances, such as "blood doping," injecting your own stored red blood cells, is also prohibited. I'm not sure I could come up with something more natural.
Meanwhile Codeine, a synthetic drug, is permitted.
Needless death for the sake of entertainment is the line.
The reason why blood doping is not allowed in competitive sports is that it confers a sizable edge but carries significant risk of stroke and heart attack. If you allow it, then everyone needs to do it to be competitive, and if everyone is taking that risk, fatalities are bound to happen.
Yes, many sports already carry a risk of serious injury or death. However, rules are used to mitigate and minimize the risks. While you can argue about the ethics of permitting risky sports, removing drug rules from sports is much more difficult to justify. Drug enhanced performance will not offer a spectacle to viewers that is appreciably different, but it will cause needless deaths.
Thiel basically wants to build himself a gladiatorial ring. Not cool.
It's not my judgment, but that of the IOC, practically all existing sporting bodies, and medical doctors. The claim that the things they ban are perfectly safe is extraordinary, and cries out for extraordinary evidence.
This is just untrue. It's not arbitrary at all, there's been a huge amount of research and work that has gone into the rules around doping in sport. There are very clear harms caused by the drugs that they ban. You're right that you have to draw the line somewhere, but the line they've drawn is far from arbitrary.
It's very unclear whether it's the doping that's predominantly responsible for the increase in mortality, or whether it's the constant bulk/diet cycles, or the intentional and sometimes extreme dehydration, the volume of food and protein, or some other lifestyle-related factors.
There have been a number of longitudinal studies focused on steroids in particular, and they failed to produce really meaningful evidence of steroid mortality. One study in particular looked at East German Olympic athletes, many of whom were the witting or unwitting subjects of a state-sponsored steroid program, and found that as a population, they actually lived longer than their West German Olympic counterparts, in relation to their national population. (Table 2)
It might be a good idea to be like Sumo and still have testing, but for health markers not illicit substances. Require that competitors's blood pressure, hematocrit, heart function, diabetes etc. are within safe limits. It will do a lot to stop people dropping dead on TV at least.
Right now the ecosystem of research drugs is large, easy to access and completely unregulated. And there is a huge incentive mechanism because you could be the one to find the next EPO and thus have a major advantage over your competitors.
Of course the problem is that the risk of issues is significantly higher because they simply aren't tested especially longitudinally.
As far as I'm concerned, the regular Olympics are also pretty damn "Enhanced", whatever that means.
Our bodies produce a whole plethora of chemicals, many of which are responsible for competitive performance. Olympic medalists tend to be outliers as far as genetics and chemicals their bodies produce. Sure, you can make the argument that their bodies produce this "naturally", but to an average person like you or me, who isn't particularly athletically inclined or physically gifted genetically, either one of these categories might as well be freaks of nature.
Trying to squeeze an extra 1% of performance out of our bodies, while pushing them to the absolute brink of failure seems pretty grotesque on some kind of deeper level.
Team sports are slightly better in this regard, but they have their own set of problems (over-commercialization and idolization), but at least they add a whole another skill vector that's relevant.
Athletes are probably considered more as billboards for brand ads than humans. So if something could attract more audience, then it will happen.
Also, most probably it will not attract attention for more than 2-3 years and the whole Enhanced Games will disappear after that.
The big problem for humanity is a huge step towards doping normalization as a result of this commercial event. We will lose more many young people because of it. It's sad.
Cool, they can go first. What, did they expect to be the emperors giving the thumb up rather than the guy in pit with the lions? Oh well, that's unfortunate.
Any sort of problem has almost never been "what will good honest folk do with this" and we have no exception here. It's possible to dope responsibly. Unfortunately we already know from Cold War docs how abusive countries were. The reasons the drugs were banned all still exist. In Peter Thiels' fever dream we'd see a Lance Armstrong unleashed. In reality we'd see East German Communists unleashed.
This sounds a lot like Billionaires taking a potentially very risky idea and deciding to fund it safe in the knowledge that they won't be the ones suffering the consequences if things go wrong.
I think you underestimate how much progress there has been in human enhancement the last few years. We are very close to the point where we can bypass the genetics. I suspect that's why Peter Thiel is taking an interest like this.
> We are very close to the point where we can bypass the genetics.
Yeah, no. Lots of citations needed for this extraordinary claim. Most olympic medalist winners are winners because of genetics, specifically being genetic outliers.
Yeah like injecting botox into your genitals? All for an extra 1 cm? Bryan Johnson and these so-called "biohackers" have become an elaborate joke. Whether they are aware of it or not adds to the humor.
Is he not the face of the “bio hacking”? Even pg mocked him and rightly so. Performing bizarre experiments on yourself discredits serious biohacking attempts.
You're overgeneralizing, it's fallacious to suggest we should judge the state biohacking by someone you determined (and brought up) to be the face of it.
Defending "serious biohacking attempts" after saying "and these so-called "biohackers" have become an elaborate joke" makes you appear confused about your stance.
Almost every professional athlete in almost every sport uses tons of "performance-enhancing substances": Vitamins, mineral supplements, refined proteins, painkillers, not to mention engineered diet plans that have nothing to do with natural human nutrition. Then there are own-blood transfusions etc.
All of these substances enhance athletic performance, which is why athletes are taking them; and their widespread application is one of the reasons athletes today perform at levels that were unimaginable 100 years ago.
And yet none of these are considered "doping". Which is laughable hypocrisy.
I think you vastly underestimate the lengths that people will go to for fame, money, and success.
Optimized nutrition and vitamins for peak performance aren't that detrimental to your health. Shooting up amphetamines before a game for a slight edge is most definitely detrimental to your health.
It doesn't seem silly that sports leagues would want to put limits on the substances their athletes take.
I'm not talking about gym culture, which can be great. (It can also be incredibly toxic, but that's a different discussion).
I'm talking about athletes at the professional level, where the margins are razor thin and the benefits of winning arlcna be immense. I'm talking about the levels where the difference between everyone knowing your name and not being able to make a living can be a few percent, or fractions of a second.
Yeah, I can understand why steroids are a thing when possibly millions of dollars are on the line. That's pretty much a guarantee that someone will dope.
The top level of anything seems to be determined at least partly by who's willing to make sacrifices.
Curious how you think it is laughable hypocrisy. Everything you mentioned might give you an “edge” but anabolic steroids give you more than an edge, they give you hormones your body doesn’t produce on its own.
For a person with that level of money, he has every opportunity to talk with the most informed people on any topic, and who on this topic would inform him that steroids aren’t just bad for the athletes that take them, they have negative effects on those around them. Hair trigger temper is no joke when combined with superhuman strength.