"Syndrome" Syndrome: or the Fallacy of "Special"

[Celebrim]

Huh? What is more fraudulent and deceptive than taking part in a competition when one is orders of magnitude superior to any of the other competitors?

I'm quite at a loss to see how anything fraudulent or deceptive takes place.

Any illusion of fair play has been shattered...

How? Fair play doesn't gaurantee equal odds of winning. Indeed, under fair play I might have no chance of winning. If I play the world chess champion fair and square, he'll beat me fair and square every time. What's fraudulant or deceptive about that?

....and even the faintest of hopes the other competitors might have of winning have been destroyed.

I'm beginning to see your problem. You think 'fair' in this context means 'not extreme', which is one possible definition fair ('we are having fair weather'), but not the one used in context of a competition. If I race Usain bolt, and there is a 'fair chance' of me winning then it is a very unfair competition indeed. Dash is playing by the same rules as everyone else. He's a eight year old boy that attends an elementary shool. The race is open presumably to everyone matching that description. How is he cheating?

And if you say, "Well, he's a super. He's clearly better than everyone else!", then where do you draw the line? Would it be ok for him to be only 10% faster than the other boys? How about 30%? If Dash drops out, would it be cheating for the next fastest boy to remain in the race? How do you know he isn't a super too? Who would decide what the limit of greatness allowed in a competition would be before you were disqualified from it? And, if you could be disqualified on the grounds of your greatness, wouldn't the resulting competition then just be a celebration of mediocrity? And, if you could be disqualified for being too fast, in what sense would the resulting competition be 'fair'?

In the case of Dash and Bob, I don't have to draw a line that skirts "human normal." Dash has super speed. On screen, it's made clear that he outclasses by orders of magnitude any runner without super speed. To run in a race where nobody but him has super speed, and win, is to cheat.

Why?

Likewise, Bob has super strength. On screen, it's made clear that he outclasses by orders of magnitude any weightlifter without super strength. To lift weights in a competition where nobody but him has super strength, and win, is to cheat.

Why?

Though the limits of "human normal" are creeping upward every decade, Dash and Bob are not nearly in the same league. Competing with normal humans, for them, is cheating.

I'm at a loss to see why. When they run the Olympic races, many participants come from small nations where there are few competitors and low levels of competition. These participants are wildly outclassed by the strongest competitors, and indeed would likely be outclassed by the third or fifth or tenth or 50th runners up of the stronger nations in that particular sport. Is it cheating for the faster, stronger, more skilled competitors to even be in the competition?

 

[Celebrim]

On the other hand, If I'm playing floor hockey (ministicks) with my 3 year old nephew, I can absolutely dominate him and make him feel bad. It's more fun for both of us if he has a good time and "wins"...

Speaking as a former 3 year old, no it isn't - at least not in the long run. At least speaking for myself, nothing so irritates a child as realizing that his victory is hollow because he's been allowed to win. If he doesn't realize how he's been cheated, sure, he'll have the thrill of victory, but if he actually cared finds you out, he's not likely to be happy about it. And if he didn't actually care, he's not likely to be bothered by being what you consider 'crushed'. In that case, he's probably not competing with you at all and may not even understand the concept.

If you let him win, he's been cheated out of a fair competition. He's been disrespected as a competitor. He's been lied to.

Someone criticized Dash for not winning the final race. I agree. When dash threw the race, that was cheating because Dash had decieved and disrespected the other competitors. If Dash no longer felt the need to win, he shouldn't have competed.

I used to play soccer in high school. I wasn't that good, but I enjoyed playing. Occasionally, we got crushed. I should have been quite put out though if the other team hadn't kept playing their hardest right up to the final minute. I can hold my head up high in defeat, but only if you don't look down on me. Play me hard as a mark of respect. I suspect that this feeling is close to universal. Time and time again we get stories of some down on their luck school, or small school punching above their weight, getting thumped hard by a bigger program, and time and time again there is an outcry by the parents about how this was 'unfair', 'mean', 'bad form', and so forth. Interestingly, you pretty much never here that from the players who are never as upset about it as the parents or our self appointed gaurdians are.

I used to play scholar's bowl in high school. We went to a national competition one year after placing second in the state, and we got thumped hard by the eventual winner - a team from Durham NC that had two Jepordy Teen champions on it. We got crushed. It was humbling. But it wasn't humiliating because the other team played their best rather than treating us like 3 year olds who had to have our feeling protected.

If you want to play a game with your 3 year old nephew where the goal is 'fun', then I suggest you find a game that you can compete more as equals than floor hockey. I get beat by my 4 year olds in 'Monkey Madness', 'Disney Yatzee', and so forth.

 

[Marius Delphus]

I'm quite at a loss to see how anything fraudulent or deceptive takes place. ... I'm beginning to see your problem. You think 'fair' in this context means 'not extreme',

No, I don't. I would argue you therefore don't see my problem.

How is he cheating?

If it's not cheating for the Flash to enter the Olympics and steal the gold medal from the fastest normal human in the world, then I give up.

 

[Celebrim]

No, I don't.

Ok, then which definition of 'fair' are you using?

If it's not cheating for the Flash to enter the Olympics and steal the gold medal from the fastest normal human in the world, then I give up.

What definition of 'cheating' are you using? In what way had the flash practiced deception? In what way did the Flash decieve the other competitors? In what way did the Flash violate the rules? In what way had the Flash taken something he didn't deserve?

If it is cheating for Usain bolt to enter the Olypics and steal the gold medal from the fastest normal human in the world, then I give up.

 

[Abisashi]

Is it cheating for a runner to be genetically engineered before their birth to be faster than any human ever has?

Is it cheating for a runner to be a cheeta? A cyborg or an android? A space alien?

I'm curious what people think. I think Dash is cheating because there is an unwritten rule that everyone is a normal human, and he has evolved beyond that.

 

[Ourph]

If you let him win, he's been cheated out of a fair competition. He's been disrespected as a competitor. He's been lied to.

I think the point of Dash not winning the race is that it can't be about "competition" for him. There is no competition. When you are orders of magnitude better than everyone else the idea that you are actually "competing" is laughable. When I score a goal against my 6yr old cousin in soccer, I don't feel that I've won any sort of victory (and to do so would be patently ridiculous). The goal of playing soccer with him isn't competition, it's play. If I played against him the way I play against other adults, I wouldn't be connecting with him or encouraging his interest in soccer and the whole point of doing that particular activity would be lost.

In the same way, running in the race for Dash isn't about competition, it's about participation. It's about interacting with his peers in a way that let's him connect with them. If he ran as fast as he could and won every race by several orders of magnitude he might be victorious, but he wouldn't develop any sort of comraderie with his peers. The lesson his parents are trying to teach him is that it's OK to have superpowers, but it's not OK to use those powers to dominate people who lack those powers (and yes, I mean dominate in both the competitive and the tyranical senses).

:edit to add:

I think the use of the word "cheating" is inaccurate. Dash isn't cheating by being super. But participating as a super in a race against normals is kind of pointless. It's like playing in a game of D&D where you get to add +100 to every d20 roll and everyone else doesn't. Of course you're going to dominate. But if it's that obvious, what's the point? At some point when you have such a great advantage, participating just becomes a kind of self-aggrandizing power-trip, not healthy competition with the possibility of actually losing.

 

[Cadfan]

I think the biggest problem with trying to derive political messages (or make political messages) from superhero stories is that there aren't any real life superheroes. The
unfairness that we feel when Dash wants to win races by just blitzing everyone else with special magical powers that he was born with and never worked for really hasn't got a real world equivalent.

Even someone like Michael Phelps got there by a combination of natural talent, body type, and insanely hard work over a long period of time. And even then, he doesn't exceed other real life athletes as far as the fictional Dash does. So our normal, every day life assumptions about fairness and who "deserves" victory are built around a set of assumptions that are violated by the superhero genre.

Basically, superhero stories tend to assume that some people are just plain born better than others (or instead of born, radiated, gifted, mutated, etc).

And in contrast, in real life, that assumption has existed in a lot of different contexts and a lot of different historical places, and has, in every case been false, and in many cases hideously evil.

So... yeah. Not sure you can draw too much from superhero comic morality, since it assumes an entirely different human experience than the one we actually have. I mean, we tend to think that its morally wrong to believe that, I dunno, people with blue eyes have a natural intellectual superiority to people with brown eyes. We think that this is morally wrong because its not true, and false beliefs like this have led to a lot of pain over the years. But if we lived in a fictional universe where having blue eyes meant that you'd be born as a comic book level supergenius, well, we'd need different morality, wouldn't we? But we're not in that universe, so imagining how we'd feel about blue eyed supergeniuses if they existed doesn't tell us a lot about how we should think about real life problems.

 

[Celebrim]

Is it cheating for a runner to be genetically engineered before their birth to be faster than any human ever has?

Not at present it isn't. Eventually, we might have to make a rule about genetic enhancement, but I foresee that would be a very very difficult rule to enforce. The problem would be proving that given the extreme variability in human genetic code, that the genes of the person in question weren't that person's naturally. After all, presumably Usain Bolt has various genes which make him a naturally faster runner than I am. Now, if I take a baby and modify it with Usain Bolt's genes, so that it grows up to be a tremendous runner, that person may not even know about his own heritage.

Would it then be cheating for that person to run with what Usain Bolt has naturally?

Would it be cheating if my parents were both olympic sprinting champions? Is seletive breeding not genetic engineering of a sort?

What if I modified the child so that he had the best possible combination of human traits for running possible? How could you screen such a person and by such screening prove that they were unnatural?

Is it cheating for a runner to be a cheeta?

Generally the rules for atheletic competition require that the competitor be human.

A cyborg or an android?

This is a growing and interesting issue. Until recently we created special categories of competion for handicapped individuals like amputees because we could not create parts which adequately replaced their missing limbs. However, as our knowledge of prosthetics increases, we risk the point where the prosthetic limb might be one day superior to the one it replaced either in specific sports or generally. At that point, we will probably place various limits on the sorts of prostethetics which are usuable in an open competition, for example, unpowered prosthetics only, or must be no less than a minimum weight, or whatever. It would then be much like we place limits on what a bat may be constructed from when we play baseball at the professional level. And at that point, if you used an illegal prosthetic in competition, then it would be cheating.

A space alien?

Generally the rules for atheletic competition require that the competitor be human. Presumably, if we encountered space aliens and we both enjoyed sports, we would likely invent an 'open competition' where members of both races could compete against each other. Very likely, one race would almost always or even always win the 100 yd dash, and the other would almost always or even always win the Marathon. If that were the case, we'd probably after a time get bored with competing in those categories and instead confine ourselves to inter-species competition that was interesting.

I think Dash is cheating because there is an unwritten rule that everyone is a normal human, and he has evolved beyond that.

Depends on what you mean by 'normal'. Dash is a normal human. He just happens to be superfast. Or conversely, Usain Bolt is a not a normal human, because normal humans can't run like that.

And in any event, if you break an unwritten rule, it can hardly be argued that you are cheating.

Evidently, the people of Dash's world are unable to identify what makes a person 'super', else the Parr's would have known that Jack-Jack was a 'super'. And, since the people of Dash's world can't screen for super powers, they have no way of constructing a rule saying 'no supers allowed' except one that is based on performance - "No runners allowed that can run a 100m dash in faster than 9.3 seconds", for example. So, if that is the rule, what happens if someone does his best and then breaks the speed limit?

 

[Abisashi]

Cadfan, I agree completely.

Edit: Celebrim, I think the real problem is that the world of the incredibles would have rules governing the use of super-powers in athletic events (assumable making them illegal, whether or not that is enforceable for reasons you suggest), but the movie didn't want to deal with the complexity of changes that would occur when a society discovered that it includes super-heroes, and so left most things default. I think it's a reasonable compromise for a movie, but it unfortunately leaves this topic non-profitable for debate.

 

[Mark]

The point isn't that Dash wants to win races, per se, but rather that he doesn't want to hide who he is.

(. . .) cheating because there is an unwritten rule (. . .)

Nope. Doesn't work that way.