[HN Gopher] The B Lane Swimmer
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The B Lane Swimmer
Author : Schiphol
Score : 33 points
Date : 2023-09-02 07:29 UTC (15 hours ago)
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| elchief wrote:
| similar to https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/thoughtful-
| animal/why-b...
|
| "Why Bronze Medalists Are Happier Than Silver Winners"
| fgblanch wrote:
| 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.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| 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.
| pedalpete wrote:
| 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.
| Affric wrote:
| 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.
| version_five wrote:
| 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.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| 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.
| buran77 wrote:
| 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, 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.
| 23090jfd wrote:
| 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.
| ggm wrote:
| 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
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