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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

"unfair advantage" is particularly hard to define. We are not born equals, so there are already folks among us who have unfair advantage due to their genes, their upbringing, their social background, etc... I would say the definition is still blur. What if you have a medical condition that impairs you in some ways but make you stronger for doing one type of tasks? Is that unfair?

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Genetic advantage is what we're testing for in these running experiments though. It isn't an unfair advantage, it's the whole point.

I like your comment and agree with it. The purpose of such sports, especially the Olympics, is to test for genetic (and, I'll add environmental & epigentic) advantages.

Your thoughts on Caster Semenya's "advantages"?

Events like the Olympics - and athletics as we know it - will lose the public’s attention if the most publicsed events (e.g. men’s 100m) become giant genetics microoptimization pissing contests - but it’s the direction the sports-science industrial complex is heading in anyway; but I hope it will lead to less contested sports becoming more popular.

Genetics will be interesting, but I wonder if we eventually reach a point where it's even beyond that. To use Gattaca as an example, a person with vastly inferior genetics was able to outperform genetically perfect individuals through sheer "human spirit" (the film's term) which manifested as work ethic, drive, will, etc.

I could see a future where we've settled on the perfect genetic template for specific disciplines so we progress on to brain chemistry and/or psychology in order to reproduce the spirit aspect which separates the merely genetically blessed from the world class athletes.

[Gattaca spoiler warnings]

> outperform genetically perfect individuals through sheer "human spirit" (the film's term) which manifested as work ethic, drive, will, etc.

I didn't like Gattaca's message for that reason: it's fallacious to suggest those mental attributes aren't also subject to genetic advantages.

Another issue with the story is that the protagonist has a heart condition, and in the end he got on the spaceship's crew, which meant other people's lives were put at risk if he collapsed due to that heart condition in-transit. Salute the human spirit, but he put others at risk for his own benefit, and that's irresponsible and immoral.

> I could see a future where we've settled on the perfect genetic template for specific disciplines so we progress on to brain chemistry and/or psychology in order to reproduce the spirit aspect which separates the merely genetically blessed from the world class athletes.

Adderall, lol.

It is a question of time until we have Gene doping. It might be happening already.

It's reasonable that amputees with prosthetic legs would be banned from normal competitions because they weren't born with those legs; they were manufactured. But what if it was discovered that people born without an appendix somehow performed better? Would they be banned? It would seem unfair to ban them. But it could lead to competitors surgically removing their organs, which would go against the spirit of the sport. But allowing them to compete might also create a class of appendix-less "mutants" who dominate a sport.

I heard a podcast recently about a wrestler who was born without legs. He was almost unbeatable at the high school level, due in part to (a) his very low center of gravity, (b) the ineffectiveness of many common moves on him, and (c) the fact that he could carry much more upper body muscle into the same weight class.

The other parents in the state were teaming up to try to get him banned for unfair advantage (!)

At that price and 100 mile effective usability, it's hard not to bring up the pay to win argument for these shoes.

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