The fact that an athlete in a competitive sport was allowed to partake in an event even after admitting to cheating not only once, but twice, is outrageous in itself.
Allowing people back into the sport swings the EV math heavily in favor of cheating if the penalty isn't massive given that the chance of getting caught is so low (as long as you know what you're doing). The only way to make the EV of cheating negative is to make the sanction very, very bad. Losing all of your future earnings from the sport is a good way to do that.
I used to run Magic: the Gathering tournaments, and there was a tremendous amount of "minor" cheating - forgetting the rules when it benefits them, shuffling in suspicious ways, peeking at opponents decks, etc. Many competitive players even openly admitted to doing this. Even if a tournament official could call them on the cheating and disqualify them (which was frowned upon without hard evidence), they would likely not be suspended from sanctioned play at all unless the evidence was overwhelming. Several famous cheaters did it many times and got caught several times. Minor cheating was very common as a result.
The benefits were in the thousands and thousands of scholarship dollars.
I cheat now in my employment. I work three full time jobs remotely and do the bare minimum in each. The risk is getting fired (and if I only get fired from two of the jobs, I am still ahead of honest work). The payoff is decades taken off my working life.
In general I feel that if enough people are doing the "wrong" thing, then punishing most of the population is probably an even worse move. Failing individuals, marking their transcript, or kicking them out of college may seem acceptable when you have the perspective that only individuals cheat. But when you hypothetically punish over half the student body by taking their money and kicking them out...
In a collage setting having a high number of cheaters reduces the value of a degree as people get used to graduates being incompetent. That also hurts non cheaters.
Why?
The opposite also applies though, if you have a large amount of cheaters in each graduating cohort you devalue the degrees and trash the reputation of the institution. Which hurts all of the students, including the cheaters.
Is this actually the case or it is apocryphal? A quick google tells me that thefts make up 47% of all total reported crimes in Saudia Arabia in 2002 [1]. That seems like the opposite of "aren't very many", especially when compared to Canada, whose number appear to be 28% in 2020 [2]. (Just the numbers I could find - I'm sure there's reporting issues at play here.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Saudi_Arabia#Theft
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Canada#Crime_statisti...
I always wonder what the expected value on this strategy is. I'm a naive sucker, so I have worked my ass off at my job, and I have had 250% salary growth in 5 years at it. Maybe that's standard if you're job hopping. Do you ever get raises? Do these jobs actually pay over 33% of the best job you could get? Would it be more stressful to juggle this kind of thing than the level of stress at a normal job you're invested in?
I applaud you but can never tell if I should join you...
I earn 300K CAD between the jobs plus a pension. Let's call it 230K USD. I have three years of experience. I live in a low cost city in Canada as all my jobs are remote. I suppose it depends on whether you view this as a pro or a con, but my earnings are virtually all cash (some 20K in stock in total), so I am not taking a beating with the current markets. I work about 5-6 hours a day, mostly by being willing to volunteer for stuff that others hate or consider useless careerwise internally (I will happily be the support dev for example, despite that meaning I show far fewer achievements come review time).
Being support dev (monitor Sentry and resolve all the bugs) works because I never join teams with core production responsibilities, so support is never urgent. Say that you are with Netflix. You want to be on the analytics team, not the streaming team. But other devs still hate it, so nobody will question taking a day to answer a question as everyone else doesn't even want to think about it. I went to the extreme and stretched out a config issue for three weeks. My manager and the other members of my team wrote me letters of praise and the skip manager had a meeting to praise me over handling it. Niche knowledge can be quite powerful. Debugging is also a skill in itself. I have also survived several layoffs, so plenty of opportunities to get rid of me.
Pick your teams very strategically. The equivalent of the streaming team at my Job 1 has a horrendous work schedule and 3AM on-call. I have never worked a job with on-call.
Also, choose to work on tools for work, a.k.a things that nobody will complain about over the weekend.
> Do you ever get raises?
I don't generally stick around at any org long enough to get raises, as the job hops have led to huge increases. I was earning 65K two years ago and that was two jobs ago. But I am told that I will be getting at least 8% this year at Job 1. Job 2 has a union ratchet, so performance hardly matters. Job 3, probably not, as they are stingy in every other way (but you can disappear for days and have it not be a big deal).
I personally view raises as kind of a scam. Another dev on one of my teams is brilliant and highly productive, far more so than I am. She didn't get a raise with her promo. I am getting a raise for existing at Job 1. Be friendly, be funny, and you can get away with a lot.
> Do these jobs actually pay over 33% of the best job you could get?
Given the sacrifices I am willing/unwilling to make, yes. If I were willing to make other sacrifices like relocating or working harder, no. I also cannot leetcode that well. If you work for Google, you are beating this strategy.
> Would it be more stressful to juggle this kind of thing than the level of stress at a normal job you're invested in?
I find it less stressful as you just stop caring about all the little games. You stop caring about whether your standup report is meaningful or shows sufficient work. You stop caring about showing initiative. You stop caring about going the extra mile, or about leaving a bug unfixed over the weekend. You find yourself awash in so much cash that losing your job for years wouldn't matter. You don't worry about delivering, as deadlines are meaningless.
Obviously don't blow high profile things, but as long as you deliver the bigger noticeable stuff to a decent standard (and bugs are one area to do that), all is well.
At least in my case, I can coast to retirement within a year and will have a fully paid off upper middle class house before I am 30. That is also a huge stress reliever, as (contingent on responsible spending and prudent investing) I only need to keep up the high salary for 4-5 years.
I work one job, make a bit more but not a lot, have house and boat payments, and bank most of the rest. Just started collecting SS. I could retire, but with the uncertain US economy, I'm looking to go part-time, or work remote instead. Remote would give me back the ~10hrs/wk of commute time to do other things. But virtually no chance of going remote without a job change.
I had an AWS interview which looked great, sounded great, nice increase, and was mostly remote. I aced the pre-interview(he told me so), thought I aced the interview (8rs over 2 days), but was "not selected", and "no specific feedback". Since, they've invited me to interview for several other positions. I've ignored them as 1) large expenditure of time and energy to prep and perform in the interview, and 2) I think there may have been some age "consideration" on their part. Not sure I'd want to stay long enough to be fully vested in the stock compensation. I can play that from the outside.
Is there any point in suing when there’s no damages?
Do you earn more from the three jobs than one job "honestly"? Perhaps ... but then it becomes complicated because I suspect you have to maintain three lots of "reality" to deal with each employer. Now it may be that you have managed full on parasite and are able to live with that and prosper. I'd keep an eye out over my shoulder if I was you.
Sociopathic behaviour can work for a while, quite a long while but eventually society might lose more than it can afford to easily lose and looks for scapegoats and then deals with it. Then you had better have some remarkable camouflage or discover the joys of summary justice.
You describe one unpleasant aspect of society that we all are aware of: the parasite. I'm warning you that society has fangs beyond the police and the law. We might call it natural justice or whatever but please do not fall afoul of it.
There is of course way more to your story and my response but please do be careful.
1. He admitted to cheating twice, so it's not a question of an innocent man being punished by mistake.
2. As noted already, it's not a game, it's a professional sport that people at his level make their living doing, and every cheater in this scenario is stealing money from someone who has earned it.
I'm personally a bit frustrated with the ever changing standards for adolescents. They are as responsible or naive as people want them to be for whatever their bias calls for. (not saying you btw, just in general).
He may have to take a long break.
What's your opinion of the National Sex Offender Registry?
People are on it for simply peeing in public. And teenage minors in a relationship sending nudes to each other due to a lack of "Romeo and Juliet" laws.
Not much is black & white.
Knew another guy who did a few years in prison for "just a bag of weed", again that was true in a technical sense, he was on parole for a strong arm robbery and had the bag in plain view when he got pulled over.
I'm not saying nobody is ever innocent, but everyone I talk to claims to be and it never holds up.
Not to take away from the point you are making, but this is simply not a good example of an uncontroversial case of scarlet lettering.
also probably because people who commit murders and do the time are not always in a permanent urge to do more of that, unlike.
What we are talking about here is a minor who admitted to using a chess engine in a meaningless online match 2 times. Like all the grandmasters don't play with chess engines just to see how they work.
12 is horrible if you have a track record of blatant cheating and only getting worse for years till they permanently banned you.
If you do something bad when you are 17.9 should we wipe the slate clean once the odometer rolls over to exactly 18.0 where for some reason that age creates a solid barrier where the person emerges like a chrysalis and all their sins are washed clean?
And as a 50 year old, the difference between a 16 year old and a 19 year old are not very big. An unfortunate fact is that if you fuck up pretty big when you're 16 that people aren't going to trust you very much when you're 19. You need to do the time to build up more collateral. I've seen people who were assholes when they were teenagers change, but they didn't wake up on some magic birthday a new person. They were still assholes in their early 20s but their trajectory was such that by the time their early 30s came around they had changed themselves.
50 year olds may be set in their ways because they don't see any need to change and what they've got going works for them, but you can change at any age.
Everybody ages in a monotonic way. :-)
As for the difference between a 16-year-old and 19 not being big, that probably just depends. At 19, I was absolutely mortified at things I did in high school.
Maybe when he's 24 or 30 we can try again.
> “I cheated on random games on Chess.com. I was confronted. I confessed. And this is the single biggest mistake of my life. And I am completely ashamed. I am telling the world because I don’t want misrepresentations and I don’t want rumours. I have never cheated in an over-the-board game. And other than when I was 12 years old I have never cheated in a tournament with prize money.”
This report identifies 3 separate tournaments with prize money in 2020 alone (2 SCC Grand Prix, and the Pro Chess League) that he appears to have cheated in, blatantly contradicting what he previously said.
My guess is that the more decentralized a sport is, the more likely it is for cheating to occur and go unpunished. Chess is unofficially becoming a decentralized sport since the pandemic due to the shift to online playing. Even if some organizations claim to be in power, there is only so much they can do. Banning cheaters permanently may not even be possible.
*Of course this varies a lot by sport, gymnastics careers are obviously very short, a golfer's career may be much longer.
Unless their chess.com scores feed into their FIDE ELO scores or something?
Chess.com isn’t the yahoo chess web app or whatever, there’s more at stake there than “gamerscore”. Some of these 100 games were in online tournaments for cash prizes.
Just because it wasn’t a FIDE run tournament doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter or that no one cares. The chess.com Pro Chess League they suggest he cheated in 12 games of had a $100,000 prize fund.
I'd argue that an online tournament is bogus if anybody can cheat by using a computer.
They may be able to detect consistent cheating over many games, but still, one can assume that cheating is pervasive in online platforms.
Still it sounds a bit harsh to me that a child that cheated online can never in his adult life participate in chess tournaments.
If he had cheated as an adult I would have a different opinion.
For him, that was 2 years ago.
I don’t care one way or the other, but I’d assume the worst.
The penalty for cheating in most major sports is way more lenient than you think. Most leagues will suspend you for a handful of games in the first instance. In the NBA for example you can be caught three times before being suspended for one season.
This is a super on-point and sharp critique based on the assertion that Michael Jordan's first retirement from the NBA to go play Minor League baseball was an under-the-table suspension for gambling on NBA games (dude has a legit problem) while playing in the NBA Championships. This happened right after a three-peat (3 Championships in a row).
And in one fell marketing miracle, the status quo and marketability of both the NBA and Michael Jordan was protected. One and a half years later, MJ "un-retired" to light up the league for another 3 straight championships.
Especially since there are many others who don’t cheat that can take your place in a competition.
What is this alternate reality you're in, and what is your list of "everything else"? Citations, please.
You're right that that's not "basically done," but once they're retired, HoF is all they have to look forward to. Being officially in disgrace is pretty done.
You might want to remove Schilling from your list, btw. He hasn't been accused of any cheating; instead, he did other embarrassing things.
If you're not someone who'd be considered HoF material anyway, then the consequences are probably manageable.
I was addressing the other part of your statement, however.
Also, he allegedly cheated for money at 12yo. Yeah, right, that's definitely a grave unforgivable sin that should ruin his whole career. /s
If you are going to be snarky, at least be correct.
The first result when you google "Are chess players athletes" says no [1], but I realize that this is more of an opinion piece. I would be curious to hear what more members of the competitive chess community think of the designation as athletes.
Edit: Upon further googling, I have learned that the IOC recognizes chess as a sport. Reading up further on how the matches last for 7+ hours, and how important physical conditioning is, I think it's totally valid to refer to chess players as athletes. In different sports there is wide spectrum of physical and mental demands - and I think chess just falls on the incredibly-demanding-mentally-but-less-demanding-physically end of the spectrum.
[1] https://herculeschess.com/are-chess-players-athletes/
[2] https://olympics.com/ioc/recognised-international-federation...
It's recognised by the International Olympic Committee - https://olympics.com/ioc/recognised-international-federation...
A common definition is: "Sport pertains to any form of competitive physical activity or game that aims to use, maintain, or improve physical ability and skills while providing enjoyment to participants and, in some cases, entertainment to spectators." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sport
I wouldn't consider poker players or tetris players athletes.
I don't think it worked for him.