The B Lane Swimmer (2009) | Hacker News Reader

The B Lane Swimmer (2009)

holly.witteman.ca

131 pointsSchiphol33 comments

When you're the best (A lane) it's easy to be magnanimous or nice. Your reward was the win and that gives you all the peace of mind needed for this.

When you're the average or below average (C or D lanes) it's just as easy to be nice. Being far from the top means the competitive pressure is not as taxing and maybe even the effort is lower. In those lanes if you feel the pressure to be the best you can either become the best (winning is the reward), or learn to deal with it and "take it easy" (playing the game is the reward), or since you're pretty far from the top you can give up to relieve the pressure (not feeling the pressure is the reward).

But the B lane can be a bit of hell. You are competitive, you are so close to the top, and yet so far. Becoming the best is hard, giving up is just as hard, and learning to live with this "close but no cigar" situation is hard. Second best is the worst place to be. Almost all of the effort and qualifications, sometimes even more, none of the laurels. The most frustrating position. Nobody remembers the second best. All that might build up to a less than pleasant attitude.

Once you see it you recognize it all over the place. The player from the winning team offers to help his opponent up but never the other way around. The second best student is always far less happy than the one who just passed by the skin of their teeth. The candidate who won an election shakes his opponent's hand while the opponent is broken.

From The World of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time:

> Born one day after Lews Therin Telamon, [Demandred] had almost as much strength and almost as much skill. He spent years almost equaling Lews Therin's accomplishments and fame.

For students, I see another dimension. I taught an algebra class once where two students were competitive at the top of the class.

The boy liked math. The girl didn't. And I think it was painful for him to see her sometimes beat him on tests over material that he loved and she was at best indifferent about.

I guess I'll be honest with myself and say I'm probably the equivalent of the B lane swimmer in a certain area. Some might say I'm A but maybe there's always an A lane where you're B? I guess it depends on your goals; most of life isn't reduced to a single clear metric like speed.

One of the things I find frustrating in this particular area — and maybe not all areas are like this — is how much things like luck and questionable ethics separates A from B. I don't mean to suggest all of it is like that, or that A people are all unethical people who stumbled on their fortune by chance, but a lot of the differences between A and B that I see are due to things like B people being especially unlucky at where they landed their first job, or A people being especially lucky, or A people in fact being pretty ethically sketchy or outright corrupt about certain things. So I tend to get especially angry when I see these relatively big consequences from differences that don't really matter, or the differences aren't actually present, or people in the area professionally pretend all this stuff isn't going even though everyone wholly acknowledges in private it is.

So the more I think about it, the more I'm not really sure the swimming analogy is entirely apt. There you have a pretty clear criterion, and it's all about what lane you're in. In life, the criteria might differ from person to person, the lanes come with major consequences, and there's plenty of chances to game the criteria where they do exist. It's like if which lane you were in was determined by a lifeguard with a timer, but the swimming time differences between lanes were smaller than the error tolerance of the timing devices, and a majority of swimmers (but not all) were bribing the lifeguards for lanes.

The way in which the comparison is apt is that as you get "up" the lanes, the more and more stressful it gets, until you cash out or get a secure position or whatever, when it becomes worth it, whatever "it" is. So you're sensitive to BS until it doesn't matter because you've already got yours. As you go down, you're surrounded by people who don't really give a damn about trying to go up, it's just not a concern of theirs. So superficially the pattern of stress is probably similar. But in general, I'm not sure it's really the same processes causing that stress.

In my experience, something that really separates “A players” (in the career sense, rather than technical skills) from “B players” is focus on the metagame. Networking, schmoozing, manoeuvring, strategically chasing easier high-profile projects and side stepping poisoned chalices. Often this behaviour results in more rapid advancement at the expense of the people they they clamber over on their way up the ladder.

That doesn't really contradict the post. The equivalent in the swimming world would be the A lane swimmers who are secretly doping, and would have close to no chance of making it otherwise, at best a B or C lane swimmer without.

They can still be superficially very friendly and cheerful people, almost exactly like the genuine, bonafide, A lane swimmers.

Of course if you closely examined their every thought and action for hours on end you might end up with a different conclusion, but how many of those types of situations will the average HN reader ever encounter in their lives?

For the vast majority of folks the vast majority of the time, nearly all genuine and false 'A's are indistinguishable.

Everyone does ethical and unethical things. We all try to do more ethical things and fewer, or no, unethical things. But IME nobody is perfect.

When you're in second place, it becomes really easy to see all the unethical things the A swimmer is doing, and to forget about any of the less than ethical things you might have done to succeed.

And if someone is really doing something qualitatively unethical, it will often catch up with them. Be patient.

Nah. As a nice B laner over my career I've seen plenty of A lane jerks. Oftentimes the people in the A lane are driven by... something that forever goes unfulfilled. I've seen a few engineering departments that are built around these types. Unhappy, but intensely dedicated to the technical details of the job and they become a keystone of the team, doing some of the most difficult architectural work because they're the only ones who dedicate the mental space to know it all. I'd say one of my strong points is being someone who can interface with these A lane types without taking it too personally. That's not to say only jerks become A lane people, just that the jerks are definitely not mostly in the B lane in my 26 years of experience.

I think this is tied to the 90% effort model (which I thought was attributed to Carl Lewis, but I can't find a source).

The A group are pushing themselves, but they have a confidence of being at the top of the pack, and that slight bit of relaxation that lets their body flow freely through the water.

The B group are striving and pushing and tense, putting 100% effort in all the time to try to get to the A group. This extra tension in their body is actually slowing them down. But from a mental state, it is also putting them in a position of excessive competitiveness. They are more focused on beating the other swimmers to get into the A group.

The A group aren't trying to beat the other swimmers in the A group. They are trying to beat themselves. They want the other swimmers to be better, in order to push themselves to be better.

The C group know they are in the bottom half, and have very little to gain from hyper-competitiveness. Might as well get along with everyone.

The D group are just happy to be there.

I don't know if Office Space is the cultural touchstone it was 20 years ago, but I think this can be neatly summarized by the observation that: "But real gangsta-ass [gangstas][0] don't flex nuts 'Cause real gangsta-ass [gangstas] know they got 'em"

[0] A shockingly large amount of the dialogue in the movie has to be censored for broadcast television, including this song.

This is a well documented phenomenon in mammalian social systems.

Second from the top in the hierarchy is the most stressful (as measured in cortisol). It's 99% of the stress of the top with none of the benefit.

Do you have a source?

Good question because I have found the paper I had misremembered and it’s that the top chimp is way more stressed because no one wants to be number 2 but everyone wants to be number 1.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1207120

A friend tells me that performance enhancing drug use is pretty common on the high amateur, almost pro level of bicycling. These are folks who are very good and obsessed with the sport, but not at the pro level. But there's also no testing at many of their races so they can get away with the PED use.

No one is really sure what to do because these dedicated semi-pros pay lots of fees to support the races. If they're a bit strict on PED use, the registrations could really drop off. But on the flip side, the PED use drives away others who are competing fairly but just not ready to submit their body to all of those extra chemicals.

It's the same the whole way down in high schools for things like football.

I was big and for my age--I was over 6" by the time I was in 8th grade and could pull a 200lb stack on a lat pulldown exercise.

Some dudes who were middling 5 foot would come back absolutely jacked after a summer. I was big, working my ass off with weightlifting and couldn't remotely catch up.

And our school was a nobody in terms of sports.

It wasn't until decades later that I found out they were all juicing. I still wouldn't have done it (academics were my ticket to college--not sports). However, I would have been much happier as a high school student knowing why I could never catch up.

This is why I have a a HUGE problem with celebrities who are obviously juicing and lie about it. I don't care that you are juicing--you do you. It's the lie that I have a problem with.

All (or nearly all) of the top pros were using PED for a number of years.

Not just cycling. When I line up at the start of a triathlon it's pretty obvious that some of those other guys are geared. I don't really care because I know I won't be on the podium anyway and I just enjoy racing, but it's a little ridiculous. In theory all of the age-group athletes are subject to random testing at any sanctioned race but in practice I've never seen it happen.

"Why Bronze Medalists Are Happier Than Silver Winners"

A point that was not mentioned in the article is that depending on the sport, there is a gold medal match and a bronze medal match. Both the gold and bronze medalist won that match. The silver medalist lost. Of course the bronze medalist lost previous to that to get there in the first place, but shares with the gold medalist a final victory.

> Altogether, they found that thirteen of the fourteen gold medal winners smiled immediately after they completed their winning match, while eighteen of the twenty-six bronze medalists smiled. However, none of the silver medalists smiled immediately after their match ended.

What did the off podium finishers look like? I am not surprised that the winner looks happier immediately after a match ends than the loser.

It's because everyone knows the A's are A's, so they don't have any problem being nice, sharing tips, helping others along.

The B's are trying to become A's. Maybe they even think they're better than the A's, but their skill isn't acknowledged. The last thing they need is some dumb C coming up and competing with them as another B. Better to kick the C's to the curb.

Meanwhile the A's don't care, they're on top, after all, and life is good - let me share that blog post on clean code I saw the other day to my team's channel.

> The truly great researchers are generous and friendly; so are many of the middle of the roaders.

Academia is a field with unique characteristics that exacerbate bitterness and frustration.

- People who were successful students end up with a lesser social status than their friends who followed different paths

- Researchers constantly compare to each other. Everybody knows the publication record of everybody else. They keep awarding themselves all sorts of prizes and titles, and at this game, most of them are on the losing side.

So not only they have a relatively low income, but they feel like losers at work when they feel they deserve better.

Once upon a time I played 4th (ie. worst) division amateur soccer. It was about what you’d expect, lacking in skill but not in passion.

Our team was terrible and we got relegated to the social league. Surprisingly (to me at least), while the skill level was lower, the stakes seemed higher. The teams we faced seemed far more willing to get physical, play dirty, abuse the referee, and generally take out Sunday kick-around far too seriously.

I was a swimmer in my childhood/youth and changed to triathlon later and thus have some datapoints still pretty much anecdotal. Basically since swimming was my best discipline, I was always put in the A lane after some time tryouts. Arriving in a new club this meant displace some other ALaner and they were not that happy usually, so i cannot see this BLane pattern.

Always look for counter-examples to the trend:

The B lane swimmer who manages to be a nice person. The silver medalist who's genuinely pleased to have done that well.

Yeah, I saw some recent clips from women’s gymnastics for the individual all-around.

Beijing 2008: Shawn Johnson was favored to win the all-around title but came in second to Nastia Liukin. They both smiled. Maybe this is because they were on the same team and the Olympics is a “country vs country” kind of competition.

London 2012: Gabby Douglas wins the individual AA and the 2 Russian girls are in tears. They were distraught (Aly Raisman came in 4th. She didn’t smile but hugged Gabby immediately.)

Rio 2016: Simone Biles had no competition. Either way Aly Raisman was happy to place second.)

Tokyo 2020: Rebecca Andrade of Brazil appeared happy to place second to Suni Lee of the USA.

That's a good point, actually: if you're up against Simone Biles or Missy Franklin, it's really a race for 2nd place. So it's the bronze medalist who should have an attitude.

C probably feels spiritually close to D. B is scared anyone from C or D can shoot past them. Most A fear nothing from a C or a D and probably a B but exposed to the competitive edge of a B may act differently to them?

On this topic of toxic (or not: you decide) competitiveness "The master of Go" by Kawabata is a good read. Or "the Glass Bead Game" by Hermann Hesse

B lane people are can be nice if you're some kind of stepping stone to A, rather than a competitor.

For instance, B businesses are nicer to potential customers than some A businesses, who take customers for granted (due to monopolistic power or hubris or whatever).

Another domain you see this...political revolutions. Tend to be organized by the equivalent of the upper-middle class, rich-but-not-quite-nobility. High in social-economic status...but not quite high enough.

I’ve observed the same pattern in corporate world with folks which are close to promotion stage. Nice people suddenly become bitter and very hard to work with. Only the best stay nice.

Possibly by that stage they’ve been passed over a few times for (what they see as) spurious reasons in favour of less deserving colleagues.

Just thinking about this, I feel like it maps well to skill level driven stuff - you have recreational people who are easy going, those at the top who are secure, and the "petty little men" (to borrow from my experience with my high school teachers) who have a chip on their shoulder and something to prove.

I don't think it maps entirely to business / work though, where you can find insecure jerks at the highest levels. I was thinking about the *Gervais* "psychopath, confused, losers" framework that largely makes sense to me, and how the lanes would map. I don't think it's 1:1, as in the psychopaths are notionally the A-laners but they can still be insecure and jerks. The confused are probably the B-laners, though it's not clear they're all petty little men. And I think the losers map to the C and D just fine (note if you aren't familiar with the framework, losers isn't meant to be derogatory).

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

Anyway, just my initial thought.

Edit: I suppose it's a stereotype more than an iron law, there are presumably jerk A-laners and nice B-laners.

Girard's Mimetic Rivalry.

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