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Comment by fsckboy | Hacker News Reader

If your attitude about chess competition was applied toward you in all of your routine irl activities, you would be extremely unhappy.

The cop does better in his job by meeting his quota of speeding tickets, so it objectively makes sense that he would issue you a speeding ticket every day with no evidence and over your strenuous objections... except you wouldn't object because the cop is working the system rationally. Yeah, right. Anyway, the lawyer you hired to work through this issue in court would of course inflate the number of hours he worked on your case, because why wouldn't he, he'd be an idiot not to!

Can't wait for you to apply for you YC investment, you make a great business partner, so rational and all.

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He didn't say it's a good thing, nor that he approves, just that it is unsurprising that people (attempt to, and sometimes) cheat because cheating is a rational response.

It's just a different way of saying that when the measure of something becomes the target, then that measurement is gamed.

Would you also assume that Goodhart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law) prefers cops who issue illegitimate tickets, or lawyers who pad their hours?

The sad fact of reality is honest people finish dead last in the race known as life. Anyone who succeeds in life has cheated in some form or another, unless their life was a miraculous chain of stars aligning one after another.

Human society and life isn't one of cooperation and harmony, it's a competition and we're all striving to one up each other to varying degrees. If that involves literally kicking another guy off the ladder, so be it. If a cop is feeling particularly irate and/or is hard pressed to satisfy a quota with frivolous speeding tickets, so be it. Contractors inflating their hours is par for the course.

Life ain't all sunshine and flowers, it's also dirty and ruthless. Nobody's a saint in this plane of existence.

> Anyone who succeeds in life has cheated in some form or another

Totally unfair. Some of us succeed by being dealt unreasonably good hands at birth.

This is sociopathic rationalization for poor behavior. It isn’t true. If you are a compulsive liar and cheater, perhaps you will justify your immoral behavior by deluding yourself into believing that everyone else is doing it too- but it is not so. We are not all behaving this way.

It's also the sophist Thrasymachus' central point in Plato's republic: "Justice is serving the interest of the stronger".

You can claim "Well, we are/I am honest!" all you want, but the reality is nobody is a saint. Nobody. Full stop. If someone says they're a saint, they are lying out their ass. We have all cheated at something at some point in our lives, whether we got caught or not.

You also fail to understand I'm not passing judgment on such behaviour. Rather, I'm saying we need to take into account the ruthless nature of reality if we don't want to get screwed over ourselves.

Calling evidence of Neiman cheating a surprise is an honest and naive understanding of reality, one which leaves you wide open to cheating thrown your way that you will never realize because you never expect it.

Nobody is a saint, much less when achieving victory is so heavily incentivized as in professional games.

> You can claim "Well, we are/I am honest!" all you want, but the reality is nobody is a saint. Nobody. Full stop. If someone says they're a saint, they are lying out their ass. We have all cheated at something at some point in our lives, whether we got caught or not.

That's a total non-sequitur. Perhaps no-one is perfect (though frankly I doubt it), but that doesn't mean that cheating more means more success than cheating less.

Cheats definitely exist. But many of them end up doing worse than people who live more honestly, as we see here.

Cheating might work if you have nothing to lose. Example: you are supposed to be present in an online lecture as a formality, there is no interaction and nothing to gain by being in it. Sure, people are likely to join, mute and do other things.

However, for serious real life situations where stakes are high, risk of ruin is too high. This is not rational. In fact, those stars have to align for the cheater, not the honest ones.

(I still don't think Hans cheated OTB and chess.com is being ridiculous)

I'm just happy to say that most people that I call my friends don't share your vision of what it means to have a life well-lived, or how they define success, or have lived with this attitude of dirt and ruthlessness being necessary.

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