Usain Bolt is a great sprinter, and has succeeded. He probably deserves that success. Lance Armstrong was probably a great cyclist, and succeeded. He probably did not deserve that success. have succeeded, and probably did not deserve that success. Professional athletics is specifically constructed to be an environment where the deserving succeed, and still frequently rewards players who don’t deserve success with success.
And to my knowledge Usain Bolt, despite being high profile and more financially successful than most Olympic athletes, is not particularly rich. Most peak-of-their-skill Olympians aren’t. (As a specific example, a large fraction of the US Olympic rowing team has worked as movers (at a specific moving company, which is not lucrative).
As I explained earlier (presumably before you asked the first time, but I’m not clear where you asked that since it isn’t anywhere in this thread), in social groups where financial success is treated as being evidence of virtue, manipulative people who acquired that success unethically are treated as being necessarily virtuous, because the world is just and they would not have received these rewards if it was unjust. This heavily rewards unethical behavior that benefits you financially, and tells people who are not financially successful that it is their own personal fault for not acting virtuously enough, not a structural problem that they’ll have to work around. It tells people false, counterproductive things.
It may be that the idea you’re intending to outline is substantially different so that it doesn’t have these effects, possibly by having a strongly-domain-specific concept of “success” and/or “deserve”. But if you’re measuring it with a naive concept of publically-displayable success and deserving, it’s going to have perverse, undesirable effects.
As a side example, consider financial markets, where exceptional success is weakly indicative of unethical behavior, since the extreme difficulty of beating the market honestly implies that those who beat the market are probably not honest. This can range from Ponzi schemes (Bernie Madoff) to engineering derivatives that will collapse in such a way that you will benefit massively while the economy will suffer. (This happened with the subprime mortgage market.) The more successful someone is, there, the less likely it is that they deserve it.
Usain Bolt is a great sprinter, and has succeeded. He probably deserves that success. Lance Armstrong was probably a great cyclist, and succeeded. He probably did not deserve that success. have succeeded, and probably did not deserve that success. Professional athletics is specifically constructed to be an environment where the deserving succeed, and still frequently rewards players who don’t deserve success with success.
And to my knowledge Usain Bolt, despite being high profile and more financially successful than most Olympic athletes, is not particularly rich. Most peak-of-their-skill Olympians aren’t. (As a specific example, a large fraction of the US Olympic rowing team has worked as movers (at a specific moving company, which is not lucrative).
As I explained earlier (presumably before you asked the first time, but I’m not clear where you asked that since it isn’t anywhere in this thread), in social groups where financial success is treated as being evidence of virtue, manipulative people who acquired that success unethically are treated as being necessarily virtuous, because the world is just and they would not have received these rewards if it was unjust. This heavily rewards unethical behavior that benefits you financially, and tells people who are not financially successful that it is their own personal fault for not acting virtuously enough, not a structural problem that they’ll have to work around. It tells people false, counterproductive things.
It may be that the idea you’re intending to outline is substantially different so that it doesn’t have these effects, possibly by having a strongly-domain-specific concept of “success” and/or “deserve”. But if you’re measuring it with a naive concept of publically-displayable success and deserving, it’s going to have perverse, undesirable effects.
As a side example, consider financial markets, where exceptional success is weakly indicative of unethical behavior, since the extreme difficulty of beating the market honestly implies that those who beat the market are probably not honest. This can range from Ponzi schemes (Bernie Madoff) to engineering derivatives that will collapse in such a way that you will benefit massively while the economy will suffer. (This happened with the subprime mortgage market.) The more successful someone is, there, the less likely it is that they deserve it.