Hacker News Reader

Comment by user49598 | Hacker News Reader

It's kind of disgusting to encourage people to fuck up their bodies to win an athletic competition.

A lot of the things you could do to yourself to help you run faster next year are not exactly going to improve your health. And children need role models.

View on HN

>"It's kind of disgusting to encourage people to fuck up their bodies to win an athletic competition."

You know what else is disgusting? The fact that we have medicine out there that, because it's seen as "performance-enhancing" in sport, maintains a stigma of being disgusting and harmful.

The same people who tell you that taking steroids and other enhancers will instantly shrink your balls and kill your liver are the same folk who told you that smoking a joint would make you jump off the roof of your building. It's nonsense.

I can't wait for the day when humans are taking performance enhancing substances of all sorts, fully accepted by all, because they can enhance performance. Who doesn't want that?

If I want to make a living as a professional athlete and I don't want the side effect of these treatments, then I certainly don't want other people to take them, because I will be outclassed and won't be able to make living without screwing up my body.

The problem is, once an athlete begins taking performance enhancers, every other athlete in the sport has to as well, to stay competitive. Then suddenly those in the minor leagues/college are not competitive to move to the majors, so they start taking performance enhancers. But then high schoolers aren't competitive to move up, so high schoolers have to take performance enhancers.

This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if we had performance enhancing drugs that had no side effects. Unfortunately we don't. You seem sure that performance enhancers are harmless, but they most certainly are not.

The same is true of any training method which has harmful side effects or risks.

How do you distinguish morally between the (completely natural) risk of death by heatstroke during summer training and the risks of performance enhancing drugs?

I guess there is no moral difference, but a practical one of being able to _check it_.

Autoemotransfusion (or however you say in english "inject your own blood") is not the same as taking artifical drugs, but can be checked and it's not allowed.

Usually it's called blood doping (although blood doping also covers EPO injections).

The difference between training harder and taking drugs to be able to train harder is that your body is naturally only capable of so much. Eventually you will give out, and that is your limit. The point where you start feeling pain is the point where you know to stop. Taking drugs to increase this limit is where the risks lie; your body isn't capable of sustaining that level of performance. For example, caffeine might wake you up, but it puts you in a crash not long after. Your body isn't capable of sustaining that high of an adrenaline level.

Training regimes allow your body to tell you its limits, drugs bypass that to get you a new, unsustainable level where doing long term damage isn't just possible.. it's likely.

Eventually you will give out, and that is your limit.

Many natural athletes don't know where that point is (precisely) and harm themselves by pushing past it.

A serious athlete sustaining long term damage from training isn't just possible.. it's likely.

I can't comment on whether these drugs affect someone or not, but it is interesting to note that Feynman tried LSD once and then dropped it because he was worried about the potential effects it would have on his brain. In fact, a lot of the smartest people I know say that they don't do drugs not for any moral reason, but because they are worried they will damage their mind in some unforeseen way.

Even without doping, athletic training is not necessarily what you would call "healthy". Take an anecdotic example: A guy doing basketball professionally for years, and now requiring knee surgery because his knee is just destroyed.

I think it's the focus on extreme athletic performance that encourages people to "fuck up their bodies". I guess encouraging doping would make it worse, but then my expectation is that the athletes who actually win competitions already do doping most of the time.

I'm not saying sports should be banned. Just be aware of the costs.

Indeed. Or footballers with massive lesions in their brain from all the impact trauma. (And by massive I mean walnut-sized holes in their brain.)

I really don't understand this assumption that all performance enhancing substances will destroy your body. Not all doping is steriods. Some of it is for enhanced healing and recovery, something that should be researched. And in many cases abuse is the problem not use - as they say, the dose makes the poison. As we increase our ability to track and monitor drug response, internal vital statistics, and homeostasis; the notion of side-effects will become less nebulous. The problem is we are flying blind at the moment.

Do you know what site specific genetic therapies, drugs for cancer, HIV, malaria and performance enhancing substances have in common? In order to not do collateral damage they all require precise delivery to targets and an understanding of how a person's genome, protein networks and metabolism interact. Any understanding that comes from a better model of these interactions will have positive knock off effects on all the other areas. Just like we have the video game industry to thank in part for modern performance computing - monetarily motivated "doping" could also impact conditions like osteoporosis, obesity, Parkinsons and ALS.

Then there is an assumption that anything good must come with a cost. While it is true that nothing is free, it is not always the case that the negatives will outweigh or balance the positive. For example, in the short term it looks like anything beyond our current silicon based mouse, touch, keyboard paradigm is just pie in the sky. But if you were to go back to when computers were built from relays and vacuum tubes, their prediction of the future trajectory of computing would be drastically different from today's because transistors, ICs and VLSI did not exist yet.

Biology is very complex but not all the complexity is inherent. Some of it is due to approcah. And this is changing as quantitative approaches become more prevalent and biology continues to increase the ability of its practictioners to fix radios.

http://protein.bio.msu.ru/biokhimiya/contents/v69/pdf/bcm_14...

Controlled doping doesn't fuck up your body any more than "normal" training does. Reckless doping is a different story though.

It's kind of disgusting to encourage people to fuck up their bodies to win an athletic competition.

By what standard? Who are you to say what other people should do with their bodies? I mean, I can just as easily say that it's disgusting to suggest that an individual shouldn't be able to mod his body any way he wants. Why not acknowledge self-ownership, and just accept that you can do anything you want to yourself.

"Why not acknowledge self-ownership, and just accept that you can do anything you want to yourself."

Not the worst idea... but should someone who has done this have an absolute right to compete in a league with people who agreed not to do this, at least in certain ways?

There's a difference between saying it's illegal to take steroids and saying that if you take steroids, you aren't allowed to compete in the olympics or other sports leagues.

There's a difference between saying it's illegal to take steroids and saying that if you take steroids, you aren't allowed to compete in the olympics or other sports leagues.

Right, a given sports league should certainly be able to say "we don't allow PEDs" (or cybernetic augmentation or exoskeletons or whatever), while a different league might say "run whatcha brung."

Likewise, the world doesn't owe the PED taking athlete a venue to compete with his PED taking peers. If such a league forms, it forms... if it doesn't, then so be it.

But then again we're asking a lot of people in a lot of jobs to fuck up their bodies in order to make a living. Think about jobs involving large amounts of manual labor. However, even hackers have job hazards like repetitive strain injury. At the end of the day, being a professional athlete is just a job.

There's no way that opening this door to athletes would end well. Once the first story comes out that some guys heart exploded during a race due to doping, the whole thing would be shut down.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com