Welcome to the Blunderdome

Why do you think they call it dope?

You already know what you think about Enhanced, Peter Thiel’s new steroid-friendly sports league. If you are a blue-pilled, longhouse-dwelling, future-hating weakling, you hate it. If you are a red-pilled, strengthmaxxing, future-loving Übermensch then… well actually you still probably hate it, because it’s so obviously stupid. Donkeyspace can’t help you escape this devious culture war deadlock, but we can help you try to understand it.

The premise of Enhanced is kind of beautiful in its ideological transparency. It goes like this: sport is a celebration of human performance. We have the ability to adjust and improve human performance in a variety of ways - with better nutrition, equipment, and training methods. Performance-enhancing drugs are just one more technique we can apply to enable better performance. Sure, there are safety considerations, but none that are intrinsically different from those that apply to a new kind of sneaker. By prohibiting steroids, we are intentionally forcing athletes to underperform. We are artificially holding them back, just like wokified schools hold back the best and brightest children so that the less-talented kids won’t feel bad, just like the bloated nanny-state holds back superstar entrepreneurs in fealty to some perverse vision of egalitarian collectivism. Oh! The ressentiment! The slave morality! O tempora! O mores! Don’t you want to run faster, swim harder, throw farther? Don’t you want to reach the stars?

Well, yes. But it’s not that simple!

Sports aren’t a pure expression of human physical capacity. Sports are a competitive ritual. The rules that define what is and isn’t allowed within a sport are not mere restrictions that prevent an athlete from achieving optimal performance, they are the boundaries that define the edges of the sport, creating the space within which optimal performance can exist. They are what Dave Hickey calls, in his brilliant essay The Heresy of Zone Defense, “liberating rules”. These boundaries are always, in a sense, arbitrary. They are not natural, given, pre-existing things. We create them to produce specific kinds of rituals, with specific properties, in pursuit of specific kinds of beauty and meaning.

To make the point especially obvious, consider swimming. The point of swimming is not to go as fast as fast as possible. It’s not even to go as fast as possible through the water. If you wanted to use the power of science and innovation to enhance a human’s ability to go as fast as possible through the water, you wouldn’t give them steroids, you would give them a boat. The point of swimming, as a sport, is to go as fast as possible through the water without using a boat, or flippers, or an oxygen tank, or steroids.

What Enhanced is trying to do is make a new sport that is identical to competitive swimming in every way except that it allows steroids. It’s very hard to make a new sport. If it were easy to make a new sport we would all be watching SlamBall, which is Basketball with trampolines, and is objectively awesome, unlike steroid swimming, which is just regular swimming with more liver failure.

As evidence for how hard it is to make a new sport, note that Pickleball, the world’s newest sport, was invented in 1965 and only became a big deal over the past few years. It’s also worth noting that Pickleball isn’t a harder, faster, turbo-charged, pumped-up version of tennis. It’s a different game, with a slower ball speed that gives players more reaction time, amplifying the sweet spot of cause and effect in which physics, perception, decision, and execution come together into an intoxicating stew called fun.

It’s also worth noting that you can play Pickleball and also play Tennis. Unlike steroid swimming which, if you do it, means you can’t also do regular swimming - you know, the one people watch on TV, with the medals and the records and the cheering crowds and the history books. It’s a bad idea to design a sport that is intrinsically incompatible with other activities that people might want to do, like playing other sports and having normal-sized testicles. Maybe the Enhanced folks think this will create a moat that locks players in? But you need people to care about a thing before you lock them in. You’re not supposed to build a moat around your dumb product that no one cares about yet.

There is a clear implication in this project that sports are a transaction. Enhanced will pay athletes to compete in steroidal versions of regular sports. They hope for an audience that will watch because these athletes will have slightly better physical performance as judged by some objective measure. And Enhanced will sell supplements and take a percentage of the betting action. It’s all very Rollerball dystopian. Except, again, Rollerball is awesome and this is incredibly lame.

But sports are not products, or apps, or meritocracy thought experiments. Sports are activities that people do because they’re fun. They start as competitive games that are intrinsically fun, and then evolve to become spectator events, to have institutional structures and official rulebooks and all the other trappings. Sometimes they grow big enough to have real social and cultural impact, to bend the economy, and the media landscape, and the actual, physical landscape around themselves. Big enough to have careers in, to live inside of, to give up everything for. At this scale, sports can generate deep meanings unlike any other game. But these meanings are always, ultimately, grounded in the pleasure of the core activity, which players do, voluntarily, for its own sake.

Athletes don’t want to take steroids. They take steroids because they want to win.

The wide-spread use of steroids in sports is, in part, due to a certain kind of game theoretical dilemma. Because steroid use gives you an advantage and is hard to detect, there is a temptation to do it. Every athlete knows this. Importantly, every athlete knows that every other athlete knows this. When deciding whether to dope or not, you might start out with a very slight temptation that is way below the threshold that would cause you to decide to do it. But then you think about it, and you realize that some of your competitors are going to have thresholds that are lower than yours. That makes it more likely that some are already doping. And that make your temptation to dope increase just a little bit, bringing it slightly closer to the threshold. But wait, if just thinking about it made you slightly more likely to do it, what about your competitors? They’re thinking about it too. They’re probably more likely to do it than you originally thought. Better adjust your calculations again. But hold on, that means they’re adjusting their calculations too! And so on, leading to a situation in which doping goes from being a slight temptation to almost obligatory.

If there was an easily enforceable, 100% effective, global way to prohibit steroids, athletes would gladly opt into it. This is what makes steroids different from the other sacrifices that athletes make in pursuit of excellence. They wouldn’t choose to eliminate waking up early, exercising hard, eating well, practice, study, even if they could. These things are part of the whole package, which, taken together - the pleasure and the suffering - defines the sport they love.

Sports thrive when their edges are clear, when the space of competition is well-defined, like a well-tuned scientific instrument whose results can be trusted to accurately reflect the property being measured. You can never totally eliminate the ambiguity around the edges of a sport, or any game, but we make our best efforts. Doping blurs the edges of a sport, making them hidden, ambiguous, and uncertain. Enhanced will not be able to avoid this problem. They’ll allow steroid use, but how much? On their website they claim that “every competitor will undergo rigorous, state-of-the-art medical profiling before participating in the competition.” This implies that there will be some clearly-articulated rules for what is and isn’t allowed, some level of risk or danger below which athletes must remain. But if I can gain a slight edge by pushing slightly past this level, why shouldn’t I? And why wouldn’t I expect my competitors to do the same? As soon as you draw the line, we are right back where we started, only much worse off.

The collective action trap that performance-enhancing drugs create is an example of a larger set of problems that can occur in society - Red Queen situations where players burn energy and resources but make no progress, where competition goes sideways, improving nothing and leaving everyone worse off. If Peter Thiel actually cared about the world, he could work on that.

We used to have a better class of billionaire in this country.