The B Lane Swimmer (2009)

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.

Another domain you see this...political revolutions. Tend to be organized by the equivalent of the upper-middle class, rich-but-not-quite-nobility. High in social-economic status...but not quite high enough.

From The World of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time:

> Born one day after Lews Therin Telamon, [Demandred] had almost as much strength and almost as much skill. He spent years almost equaling Lews Therin's accomplishments and fame.

For students, I see another dimension. I taught an algebra class once where two students were competitive at the top of the class.

The boy liked math. The girl didn't. And I think it was painful for him to see her sometimes beat him on tests over material that he loved and she was at best indifferent about.

Not just cycling. When I line up at the start of a triathlon it's pretty obvious that some of those other guys are geared. I don't really care because I know I won't be on the podium anyway and I just enjoy racing, but it's a little ridiculous. In theory all of the age-group athletes are subject to random testing at any sanctioned race but in practice I've never seen it happen.

> Altogether, they found that thirteen of the fourteen gold medal winners smiled immediately after they completed their winning match, while eighteen of the twenty-six bronze medalists smiled. However, none of the silver medalists smiled immediately after their match ended.

What did the off podium finishers look like? I am not surprised that the winner looks happier immediately after a match ends than the loser.