Personal Science Week - 240627 Enhanced Games
Informed adults should be allowed to experiment, plus false things you probably believe
A new organization is sponsoring a version of the Olympics that allows performance-enhancing drugs.
This week we look at how allowing enhanced Olympics can benefit personal science.
Later this summer, you’ll be hearing all about the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, but if you’re a personal scientist you might be even more interested in the Enhanced Games. This is a serious organization that wants scrap today’s onerous drug rules and let athletes compete using any legal means necessary. They’re also offering a $1M prize to the first athlete who breaks an existing world record, which no doubt will be a common occurrence once the science is unleashed.
At first I thought this was bizarre—wouldn’t it encourage too much potentially dangerous drug use, causing permanent damage? As a personal scientist, I’m happy to see lots of experimentation, but ethically aren’t there some bad incentives here?
But after more thought I’m becoming convinced that this will help all of us, including personal scientists and anyone interested in, say, longevity or other areas of personal health that involve improving our bodies.
The Enhanced Olympics people argue that cheating is already quite common in the Olympics (up to half of players, according to widely-believed estimates). Did you know that 1/3rd of Olympic swimmers claim to suffer from asthma, making them eligible for steroid inhalers that are otherwise forbidden, but turn out to enhance performance? Some of the Olympic rules are absurdly strict; something like 25% of all products sold over-the-counter at GNC are disqualifying.
So if you’re going to use performance enhancers anyway, why not do it right? They’ll be required to use legal drugs only, working under an approved physician. The openness and transparency of the various treatments could turn into another, more intellectual, olympics that can benefit all of us. What really happens when you push a body to its limit and how can advanced medicine alleviate the downsides?
If top-notch, well-informed and fully consenting athletes want to experiment on their bodies, isn’t that a great thing for science? Their new discoveries will help everyone, especially if there’s an incentive to carefully track all the data collected and, presumably, for the doctors to later promote their successful protocols.
All old people suffer from sarcopenia, a wasting of the muscles that might benefit from the right drugs. But how much is too much? Can you counter-act the downsides with other drugs? Thanks to the Enhanced Games, we may finally get the data.
Incidentally, paid subscribers to PS Week have access to our own analysis of some areas of forbidden self-research including:
and more
More Cheating and ChatGPT
Last week’s PS Week mentioned how academics are using ChatGPT, often carelessly, for their academic publications, exposing shoddy editing practices even among prestigious peer-reviewed journals. Well, a few days after my post I learned about European researcher Dmitry Kobak, who analyzed every academic publication in 2024 and concluded that about 10% were assisted at least partially by ChatGPT. That’s up from only 1% in 2023, according to an analysis by Andrew Gray. Due to the way they are trained, there are many words that are over-represented in LLM output compared to actual human-written content. You can see a complete list of “over-represented words” on Github. Next time you read a document that uses words like “delve”, “meticulous”, or “prominence”, think again: you might be reading an LLM.
Read a longer, plus related discussion at InvestAI, the weekly publication I co-write with The Wednesday Letter.
False things you probably believe
Speaking of the need to watch what you read, here are a few things to consider:
There’s no scientific evidence that you should drink 8 glasses of water a day (According to a Dartmouth-run extensive review in 2002)
Have you ever heard of the “China Study”, first published in 2005 by Colin and Thomas Campbell who called it “The most comprehensive study of nutrition ever conducted”. Based on a 20-year, extensive data collection from China, it concluded that a vegan, all-plant diet was the best. If somewhere in the back of your mind you found that conclusion compelling, be sure you’ve also read the detailed counter-argument from Denise Minger, who shows why that study is wrong.
Remember Barry Marshall, who won a Nobel Prize for discovering that ulcers are caused by a bacterium, a fact he proved by drinking a bottle of the stuff? Respect his willingness to self-experiment, but please don’t think he was a lone dissident fighting a conservative Medical Establishment stuck in its ways. Turns out that his theory was actually quite well-accepted even at the time; Marshall became famous because he figured out which microbe was causing the problem. And the reason it took decades for doctors to treat based on the new discovery was not because stupid doctors didn’t believe him. No, it was because it took time to figure out the best antimicrobial treatments, and meanwhile the old anti-stress drugs did relieve the symptoms. Read the whole story “Bacteria, Ulcers, and Ostracism?” by Kim Atwood
About Personal Science
Listen to experts, but be skeptical. That’s the idea behind Personal Science, where we use the techniques of science to understand and solve personal questions. Often, but not always, Personal Science involves quantitative or statistical reasoning based on self-collected raw data, but the overall thought processes can apply to every aspect of daily life.
In general, Personal Science requires a skeptical, yet open-minded curiosity about the world, humility in the face of incomprehensible complexity, and a constant desire to be proven wrong. Personal Scientists, above all, rely on their own direct experience, never taking somebody else’s word for it. Nullius in verba — take no one’s word for it.
If you have other topics you’d like to cover, let us know or leave a comment:
Bodybuilding started having separate "natural" and "enhanced" competitions long ago... Most competitions also have (ever-evolving) rules around what gear is allowed (see e.g. the ban on "sharkskin" swimming suits) or how the race is done (e.g. no pacemaker runners). That's because they are meant to be inspirational games, not XPRIZE-style competitions. But there is value in both!