Playing to Win
In an age of increasingly sophisticated LARPing, it would be useful to be able to tell who is actually playing to win, rather than just playing a part. We should expect this to be quite difficult: the point of mimicy is to avoid getting caught.
I haven’t come up with a good way to tell on an individual basis, but I do have a rule to determining whether or not entire groups of people are playing to win.
Consider: There are countless ridiculous anecdotes about bodybuilders. You hear about them buying black market raw milk direct from farmers, taking research chemicals they bought off the internet, fasting before a competition to the point of fainting on stage. None of this is admirable, but it can’t be easily dismissed. Bodybuilders are playing to win.
Startups are another fertile ground for ridiculous anecdotes. In the early days of PayPal, engineers proposed bombing Elon Musk’s competing payments startup:
