From doping to trading, the tragedy is that people take it so seriously and thus turn it into a life-and-death game of all-or-nothing.
Taking things seriously robs any chance to just be good enough and be happy about that.
Anyone who can complete Tour de France at all or moderately but steadily grow an investment portfolio over the years should be extremely satisfied with just that already. If you're not, you'll seek greater but less likely and more momentary satisfaction from winning to win, and you'll likely end up more miserable in the average.
I don't know... in my mind, cheating at sports is fundamentally different from (and less serious than) defrauding people in the stock market;
The sock market is how we allocate most capital. Even making it slightly less efficient has huge negative consequences that touch almost everyone, not just people that choose to play in the stock market.
The Stock Market is bigger and more impactful than sports, but I wouldn't say cheating in sports is less serious. There is a LOT of money moving around in sports (Superbowl, BCS, etc.) and having the best (doping or non doping players) turns into dollars. The total impact is less, but I don't think you can wave it away.
Total impact is dramatically less. I mean, stealing a candy bar is wrong, and it has a real, measurable impact; stealing a car is also wrong, and has a real, measurable impact. but most people (and the law, at least in my jurisdiction) would make a distinction between the two crimes; one results in a 'slap on the wrist' while the other usually involves jail time and a felony record that makes it quite difficult for the perpetrator to get a legitimate job.
For that matter, there's another difference. In both sports and finance, most of the money is in the surrounding ecosystem, not in the traders or athletes themselves. The difference here is that if one athlete wins instead of another because of doping, this doesn't really effect the ecosystem all that much. Okay, so reebok gets the extra shoe sales rather than nike, but you are going to probably move about the same number of units at about the same price with about the same labour input. One athlete winning over another has nothing to do with the actual efficacy of the reebok or nike design or manufacturing operations. The wronged party is mostly the athlete that doesn't dope.
But the stock market is different. The stock market is how nearly all the corporations we work for and buy stuff from are owned. Stock prices directly effect things like how much labour is put towards food production vs. car production. There are real consequences to miss-allocated capital that are much larger than what brand of overpriced shoes is popular this week. Potentially, for instance, miss-pricing food commodities could cause starvation.
There are other factors than money. For example, I was a mad cricket fan as a child - spent endless hours watching, analyzing, playing etc. until a couple of my heroes were caught throwing away matches, for money. What I couldn't understand then, and now, is this - they were good in their game, and were already maKing boatload of money. What difference could some more money possibly make in their lives? I stopped watching the sport altogether, it was disgusting. When a sporting hero cheats and gets caught, it makes a huge impression on their fans, especially the younger ones.
I agree cheating in stock market has more impact than cheating in sports, but cheating in sports is not something to be swept under the rug.
Note that you don't have to cheat or scam the stock market in order to cause negative externalities. The same driving force of everyone trying to be the best instead of just good enough emphasizes short-term quick wins over long-term steady gains. It causes unconstructive volatility and noise in the stock prices, ultimately delivered by HFT in the recent years, which can't be ignored even by those who still wish to go by the more moderate strategy.
It's my perception that if everyone tried to merely be good enough to some respectable standards instead of trying to exclusively win, it would benefit the overall picture of the economy/society/activity/whatever more.
I think most people trading in the stock market would be pretty happy with 'second best'
I mean, I completely agree that the short term focus of the stock market destroys a great deal of the value it could be providing in it's intended role (efficiently allocate capital) - but then, I don't have good ideas how to fix that. I think that problem is way deeper and more prevalent than people being dissatisfied with being 'second best'
(though, I think, in the short term, the stock market looks awfully zero-sum, while in the long term, that doesn't seem to be the case nearly as much. Second place looks a lot better in a game that is not zero sum than in a game that is.)
> Anyone who can complete Tour de France at all or moderately but steadily grow an investment portfolio over the years should be extremely satisfied with just that already.
(I'm not certain what "should" means in that sentence - a moral judgement? - but I'll interpret it as advice.) I think that this is excellent advice for some people, but poor advice for others. I don't think there is anything wrong, per se, with wanting to be the very best at something. There's just a trade-off: you can be happily excellent, or you can take a chance and be perhaps the best but most likely just unhappy. But this decision is, in my opinion, a personal one: happiness does not have to be the ultimate goal of life.
> I don't think there is anything wrong, per se, with wanting to be the very best at something.
Its probably obvious, but everyone wants to be the very best at something (or even everything?), even though of course its unrealistic, so most people disregard that desire almost immediately after thinking of it.
However, there are a minority that feel they can be, and when they realize they mightn't be, they cheat to do so, at the cost of others. And that's what i think is the real crux of the problem.
Imagine you're now the best programmer in the world who knows as much as any other programmer knows, and more. How depressing would that be. You'll always find room to improve any library you download from the internet. When you have no idea to do something, you have no one to ask. You'll have nothing to learn from reading programmer's blogs. Nothing to learn reading programming related entries in HN. No role models to learn from. No new information to read from programming books. No enlightenment reading Knuth's (Or Rob Pike or Paul Graham or Jeff Atwood or any other programmers') writing.
No, I have no desire to be the very best at all. It'd be great if I can always have someone in front of me to learn from, all the time.
I'm happy for you, really. But those who strive for greatness and who invent or discover new concepts also get amazing feelings, and learn amazing things too.
Not to mention that nobody can know everything. If you know everything about programming, you are deluding yourself. And even if you could know everything, there is much to be said of applying concepts from other disciplines to your own. That's how we got Design Patterns.
What you described is not the best programmer. It's some kind of superhuman programmer that you get when you combine the best attributes of every single programmer on the planet and spends five thousand hours a day doing computer science research so that they always think of every idea first.
I'll go point by point in a situation where you're just 'the best' and not some kind of demigod that steals ideas before they are conceived.
1. Every library has room for improvement. Even the libraries you make can be improved by average programmers that focus on specific aspects of it.
2. Do you honestly only ask people that are better than you for help? Everyone that can understand a problem can potentially provide insight.
3. Blogs will still have new information, new insights that you haven't gotten to.
4. Same as 3.
5. If the only standard for role model is who is the best programmer ever, then this can be a valid point.
6. Same as 3.
So sure, being a demigod might be boring, but I would be perfectly content being the best at something.
Your interpretation is correct: I wrote it as an advice, not a judgement. Whenever in doubt, prefix the original sentence with "In my opinion, " and internet comments start making a whole lot of sense.
Taking things seriously robs any chance to just be good enough and be happy about that.
Anyone who can complete Tour de France at all or moderately but steadily grow an investment portfolio over the years should be extremely satisfied with just that already. If you're not, you'll seek greater but less likely and more momentary satisfaction from winning to win, and you'll likely end up more miserable in the average.