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The Tour de France is underway and it is already shaping up to be one of the grandest and most epic races in the event’s century-long history. If you haven’t seen a stage yet be sure to tune into the Versus Network that covers it every day, with repeat airings all day and evening. Lance is still in contention even after several crashes. In fact, I’ve never seen so many crashes in a Tour before. This event is so hard it is not surprising that, as usual, allegations and suspicions of doping have surrounded the race even before it began. Unfortunately, it appears that doping has long been a part of this — and many other — sports. Here is my explanation for why athletes in general and cyclists (my sport) in particular dope, why race organizations have such a hard time enforcing the rules, and what can be done about it.

In criminal organizations such as the Cosa Nostra in 19th century Sicily and the Mafia in 20th century southern Italy, the “omerta rule” is the code of silence, a tacit agreement among cohort members that the collective violation of the law means if you get caught you keep your mouth shut and under no circumstances cooperate with the authorities. The penalty for an omerta betrayal is ultimate and final — death.

Something like the omerta rule operates in the dark and dirty underbelly of doping in sports, or the employment of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) against the rules (and in some cases the law), in which a positive test leads to an obligatory statement of shock and denial by the guilty party, followed by a plausible explanation for how the drug mysteriously appeared in the blood or urine, ending in fines paid and/or time served and eventual return to the sport, no names named and no further questions asked.

After testing positive for steroids following his 2006 Tour de France victory, Floyd Landis obeyed the omerta rule, albeit in grander style than most, publishing a bestselling book, Positively False: The Real Story of How I Won the Tour de France, raising upwards of $600,000 for a legal defense fund, and taking his case to sports arbitration. The three-time Tour de France champion Greg LeMond told me in a phone conversation during the arbitration trial that Landis consulted him about what to do next, at which point LeMond encouraged him to come clean. “What would I gain doing that?,” LeMond recalled Landis saying. “You would clear your conscience and help save cycling,” LeMond replied.

Three years later Landis has apparently decided to take LeMond’s advice, confessing during the recent Tour of California that the “real story” of how he — and Lance Armstrong — won the Tour de France is drugs, lots and lots of PEDs: recombinant Erythropoietin (r-EPO) to artificially stimulate the production of oxygen carrying red blood cells, steroids and human growth hormone for recovery and the development of lean muscle mass, and blood boosting, or withdrawing your own blood early in the season and then re-injecting it during the Tour de France to boost red blood cell count with your own blood (thereby sidestepping the test for EPO while gaining a comparable advantage). In published emails Landis defiantly slapped the omerta rule across the face, naming names and providing details:

“I was instructed on how to use Testosterone patches by [Team Director] Johan Bruyneel”

“Mr Armstrong was not witness to the [blood] extraction but he and I had lengthy discussions about it on our training rides during which time he also explained to me the evolution of EPO testing and how transfusions were now necessary due to the inconvenience of the new test.”

Armstrong “tested positive for EPO at which point he and Mr Bruyneel flew to the UCI headquarters and made a financial agreement with Mr. Vrubrugen to keep the positive test hidden.”

“During that Tour de France I personally witnessed George Hincapie, Lance Armstrong, Chechu Rubiera, and myself receiving blood transfusions. Also during that Tour de France the team doctor would give my room mate, George Hincapie and I a small syringe of olive oil in which was disolved andriol, a form of ingestible testosterone on two out of three nights throughout the duration.”

It’s a good thing for Landis that the penalty for an omerta rule violation in sports is not what it is in the Mafia, or else he’d be the Luca Brasi of cycling and sleeping with the fishes. Why did Landis break the code of silence? The answer to this question, along with the larger question of why athletes dope, comes from game theory and something called Nash equilibrium, discovered by the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash (of Beautiful Mind fame), in which two or more players in a contest reach an equilibrium where neither one has anything to gain by unilaterally changing strategies. If each player has selected a tactic such that no player can benefit by changing tactics while the other players hold to their plans, then that particular arrangement of strategy choices is said to have reached a point of equilibrium.

Here’s how it works in sports. The point of an athletic contest is to win, and players will do whatever they can to achieve victory, which is why well-defined and strictly enforced rules are the sine qua non of all sports. The rules clearly prohibit the use of PEDs, but because the drugs are extremely effective and the payoffs for success are so high, and because most of the drugs are difficult if not impossible to detect, or the tests can be beat with countermeasures, or the governing body of the sport itself doesn’t fully support a comprehensive anti-doping testing program (as in the case of Major League Baseball and the National Football League), the incentive to dope is powerful. Once a few elite athletes in a sport defect to gain an advantage over their competitors, they too must defect (even if they only think others are doping), leading to a cascade of defection down through the ranks.

If everyone is doping there is equilibrium if and only if everyone has something to lose by violating the tacit omerta agreement. Disequilibriums can arise when not everyone is doping, or when the drug testers begin to catch up with the drug takers, or when some cheaters have nothing to lose and possibly something to gain by turning state’s evidence.

Which brings us back to Floyd Landis and Lance Armstrong, who for a decade have been in a state of relative Nash equilibrium. But when Landis lost his savings, his home, his marriage, and his livelihood, he reached a state of disequilibrium, and when he was turned down from even riding in the Tour of California after, according to Armstrong, making threats to the race organizers to let him in “or else,” he apparently decided to make good on his threat.

There is nothing more important for a sporting organization to do than to enforce the rules. If you don’t, athletes will cheat. Anyone who believes otherwise does not understand sports or human nature. As Landis explained in his confessional: “I don’t feel guilty at all about having doped. I did what I did because that’s what we [cyclists] did and it was a choice I had to make after 10 years or 12 years of hard work to get there, and that was a decision I had to make to make the next step. My choices were, do it and see if I can win, or don’t do it and I tell people I just don’t want to do that, and I decided to do it.”

Solutions

The only hope of salvaging professional sports is to change the game matrix. To that end I have five recommendations:

1. Immunity for all athletes pre-2010. Since the entire system is corrupt and most competitors have been doping, it accomplishes nothing to strip the winner of his title after the fact when it is almost certain that the runners’ up were also doping. Immunity will enable retired athletes to work with governing bodies and anti-doping agencies for improving the anti-doping system.
2. Increase the number of competitors tested, in competition, out-of-competition, and especially immediately before or after a race to prevent counter-measures from being employed. Sport sanctioning bodies should create a baseline biological profile on each athlete before the season begins to allow for proper comparison of unusual spikes in performance in competition.
3. An X-Prize type reward to increase the incentive of anti-doping scientists to develop new tests for presently undetectable doping agents, in order to equalize the incentive for drug testers to that of drug takers.
4. Increase substantially the penalty for getting caught. A 50-game ban on Manny Ramirez last year was a joke. No Major League player will take that seriously as a deterrent. Professional cycling has a two-year ban, which is a good start. But it’s not enough.
5. A return of all salary paid and prize monies earned by the convicted athlete to the team and/or its sponsors and investors, and extensive team testing of their own athletes.

Cycling is ahead of all other sports in implementing these and other preventative measures, and still some doping goes on, so vigilance is the watchword for fairness along with freedom.

The recent flap over the inopportune comments by General Stanley McChrystal and his staff in the presence of and even directly to a Rolling Stone magazine journalist, and the ensuing hue and cry “off with their heads” for what amounts to something akin to alcohol-fueled barroom B.S.ing and locker-room boys-will-be-boys jock talk, affords an opportunity to distinguish between public talk and private talk.

Private talk is what we say in private to our spouses, family, friends, and colleagues when there is a presumption of privacy such that one’s comments will not go public. Public talk is what we say when we want to make a formal statement or declaration with the intention of and responsibility for what was said. Too often we confuse these two very different forms of expression. Everyone is treating the private talk of McChrystal and his staff as if it were intended for public consumption. It is almost as if McChrystal had held a press conference and issued a formal public statement that Joe Biden’s new name is “bite me.” Surely we should recognize the vast gulf that exists between these two types of talk, and no one would want to insist that all private talk be held as if there were a microphone in the room that was on and broadcasting. Locker rooms and barrooms would go deadly silent.

Something similar happened to California Senatorial candidate Carly Fiorina the day of the primary election, when she was caught mocking the hair of her rival Sen. Barbara Boxer when she thought that her microphone was off, continuing with her private talk about Fox’s Sean Hannity and the cheeseburgers she wished she had eaten the night before.

And let’s not forget last year’s “climategate” flap in which the public discovered that scientists—shock of all shocks—are people who in private talk like everyone else, making fun of colleagues they don’t like, dissing rivals and competitors, and speaking colloquially as if they were not scientists investigating one of the most politically charged scientific issues of the past century—anthropogenic global warming.

On the other hand, if you are a General in charge of executing a war, a Senatorial candidate with aspirations of being one of the handful of people who can actually influence public policy, or a scientist who data and theory could alter entire economies for decades or even centuries, your private talk is not the same as that of everyone else’s. McChrystal knew he was talking to a Rolling Stone reporter, so as the head of hundreds of thousands of combat troops under the ultimate direction of the Commander-in-Chief at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., he should have been able to filter out his private talk. Ditto Carly Fiorina who, if she wins the Senate seat of a state whose economy rivals that of most countries, is bound to sit before microphones on almost a daily basis, so if she cannot discriminate between public and private talk now, had damn well better learn the difference. Likewise scientists whose opinions on climate change are used by politicians and policy makers worldwide to shape the direction of economic reform, have an obligation to presume that much of their private talk will be used publicly against them (and their recommendations) by those who disagree.

In other words, if you are in a position of power and influence, assume that the microphone is on.

Last week I blogged about lying: “Everyone Lies: Why?”

Deception is one thing, self deception is quite another. This week TED.com has posted my new TED talk, delivered at the last TED conference, in which I present material from my forthcoming book on the neuroscience of belief, tentatively entitled The Believing Brain, a central theme of which is how we are so easily deceived and how we deceive ourselves. Here is a brief summary of the thesis of the talk, although because it is so visual I strongly recommend watching the TED video.

Souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, government conspiracists, and all manner of invisible agents with power and intention are believed to haunt our world and control our lives. Why?

The answer has two parts, starting with the concept of patternicity, which I define as the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. The face on Mars, the Virgin Mary on a grilled-cheese sandwich, Satanic messages in rock music. Of course, some patterns are real: finding predictive patterns in changing weather, fruiting trees, migrating prey animals and hungry predators was central to the survival of Paleolithic hominids.

The problem is that we did not evolve a baloney-detection device in our brains to discriminate between true and false patterns. So we make two types of errors: a Type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it is not; a Type II error, or false negative, is not believing a pattern is real when it is. If you believe that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind (a Type I error), you are more likely to survive than if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is a dangerous predator (a Type II error). Since the cost of making a Type I error is less than the cost of making a Type II error, and since there’s no time for careful deliberation between patternicities in the split-second world predator-prey interactions, natural selection would have favored those animals most likely to assume that all patterns are real.

But we do something other animals do not do. As large-brained hominids with a developed cortex and a “theory of mind”—the capacity to be aware of such mental states as desires and intentions in both ourselves and others—we practice what I call agenticity: the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents. That is, we often infuse the patterns we find with agency, and believe that these intentional agents control the world, sometimes invisibly from the top down (as opposed to bottom-up causal randomness). Together, patternicity and agenticity form the cognitive basis of shamanism, paganism, animism, polytheism, monotheism, and all modes of Old and New Age spiritualisms.

Agenticity carries us far beyond the spirit world. The Intelligent Designer is said to be an invisible agent who created life from the top down. Aliens are often portrayed as powerful beings coming down from on high to warn us of our impending self-destruction. Conspiracy theories predictably include hidden agents at work behind the scenes, puppet-masters pulling political and economic strings as we dance to the tune of the Bildebergers, the Rothchilds, the Rockefellers or the Illuminati.

There is now substantial evidence from cognitive neuroscience that humans readily find patterns and impart agency to them, well documented in the University of Bristol psychologist Bruce Hood’s new book SuperSense (HarperOne, 2009). Examples: Children believe that the sun can think and follows them around and they often add smiley faces on sketched suns. Adults typically refuse to wear a mass murderer’s sweater, believing that “evil” is a supernatural force that imparts its negative agency to the wearer (and, alternatively, that donning Mr. Rogers’ cardigan will make you a better person). A third of transplant patients believe that the donor’s personality is transplanted with the organ. Genital-shaped foods (bananas, oysters) are often believed to enhance sexual potency. Subjects watching geometric shapes with eyespots interacting on a computer screen infer that they represent agents with moral intentions.

“Many highly educated and intelligent individuals experience a powerful sense that there are patterns, forces, energies, and entities operating in the world,” Hood explains. “More importantly, such experiences are not substantiated by a body of reliable evidence, which is why they are supernatural and unscientific. The inclination or sense that they may be real is our supersense.”

We are natural-born supernaturalists.

The Force of Ideas Over the Force of Arms

Shermer and Tony Blair

Last week I attended the Khosla Ventures summit at Cavello Point in Sausalito, California, an ex-army base converted to a posh resort, where the venture capitalist (he calls himself a “venture assistant”) Vinod Khosla brings together start-up CEOs and their venture backers who are together innovating new science and technologies for alternative and environmentally efficient energy sources. Vinod heard my TED talk in Long Beach in February 2010 (to be posted at TED.com in June) and invited me to explain why people believe weird things about money (“The Mind of the Market”, based on my book of the same title). Vinod hosted a fireside chat with Bill Gates and Tony Blair, and in the Q & A I raised my hand and asked Tony a question. By way of background…

Since I am in the business of spreading good ideas and debunking bad ideas, I ask this question all the time of a diverse range of people, in search of different answers to this difficult question. I believe in the power of ideas to free people and empower them—a fundamental principle that was born of the Enlightenment—but I also recognize that not everyone shares this belief, and since one of those Enlightenment principles is the freedom to disagree and the right to think and believe whatever you want as long as it does not interfere with my rights, then we can’t force people to embrace these Enlightenment values. On the other hand, we are tribal and we still live in a world with walls that are guarded by men with guns, and there are other tribes who would just as well terminate our existence or replace our Constitutional liberties with theocratic rule, we need a strong military. Thus my question for Tony Blair, and his eloquent and insightful answer:

Michael Shermer: “How can we spread liberal democracy, market capitalism, science, technology, education, the Internet, etc. globally, when there are people who are still essentially living in theocracies who, as you said, would just assume see us dead, who don’t believe in the education of women and children, who don’t believe in civil liberties and equal treatment under the law, etc., and how can we do so non-militarily? That is, how do we spread these ideas without imposing them on other people?”

Tony Blair: “It’s one of the great myths perpetrated in our own societies is that somehow people who live in oppressive or backward looking governments actually prefer it that way and that we just don’t understand their culture. You will often hear this in certain countries about the role of women when it is usually men talking about it, but any time you get the opportunity to talk to any women in those countries separated from those who might overhear them, believe it or not they tell you that they would prefer to be free and equal.”

“We have allies in this fight who are the people, most of whom want change. The thing is, however, you need the security means to stand up when you are confronted to answer back, and if you don’t you will get rolled over by them and there’s no use in thinking any different. However, the ultimate answer is not the force of arms but the force of ideas.”

“I think the 20^th century was the century of fundamentalist political ideology, but the 21^st century is going to be about religious or cultural ideology. The single most important thing we can do is also to provide a basis for peaceful co-existence. The best way of defeating these ideas is with better ideas. The better idea that we have in our way of life is not just about freedom and democracy, although I think those are important elements, it’s also about a basic concept of justice—the basic idea that anyone, no matter what their background, will get a chance to succeed.”

Liberty and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

This is the third essay in a series on the relationship between rules, freedom, and prosperity.
Read part 1 on Skepticblog.org and part 2 over at True/Slant.

I believe that the following commentary on the necessity of law and order has some bearing on what is unfolding in Arizona—when the rules are not clearly written or consistently enforced, people will take the law into their own hands because society cannot run smoothly without law and order.

In Part 3 in my essay series on the relationship between rules, freedom, and prosperity, I want to turn to one of my favorite films, John Ford’s 1962 classic, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, in which a clash of moralities unfolds in the wild-west frontier town of Shinbone, Arizona. There in the dusty streets and ramshackle buildings two self-contained and self-consistent moral codes come into conflict. One moral code is the Cowboy Ethic, where trust is established through courage, loyalty, and personal allegiance to friends and family, and where disputes are settled and justice is served between individuals who have taken the law into their own hands. The other moral code is the Law Ethic, where trust is established through the transparent and mutually-agreed upon rule of law, and where disputes are settled and justice is served between all members of the society who, by virtue of living there, have tacitly agreed to obey the rules. Only one of these moral codes can prevail.

In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the Cowboy Ethic is represented by two people, one good and the other evil. John Wayne’s character, Tom Doniphon, is a fiercely loyal and deeply honest gunslinger duty-bound to enforce justice on his own terms through the power of his presence backed by the gun on his hip. Lee Marvin’s title character, Liberty Valance, is a coarse and unkempt highwayman whose unruly behavior provokes fights with the locals, most of whom fear and loathe him.

The Law Ethic is represented by Jimmy Stewart’s character, Ransom Stoddard, an attorney hell bent on seeing his beloved Shinbone make the transition from cowboy justice to the rule of law. Employing the commonly-used flashback technique, John Ford opens his film at the end of the story with the funeral of Tom Doniphon, which is attended by an elderly Stoddard swamped by reporters inquiring why the now-distinguished U.S. Senator would bother returning to his native town just to be present at the memorial services of a down-and-out gunfighter.

When they were younger and coming of age in this western territory just slightly out of reach of the long arm of the law, Stoddard and Doniphon were of radically different minds when it came to how justice should be served, each believing that the other’s strategy is either outdated (Doniphon’s gun) or naïve (Stoddard’s law). Despite this difference, or perhaps because of it, they become faithful friends, both believing that in the end justice must prevail. When Liberty Valance arrives on the scene it is clear that he respects only one man, Tom Doniphon, because they share the Cowboy Ethic that men settle their disputes honorably between themselves. As Doniphon boasted, “Liberty Valance is the toughest man south of the Picketwire—next to me.” But Valance’s disdain for the milksop Stoddard and his naïve notions about the effectiveness of the law knows no bounds. Entering a restaurant where Stoddard is dining, for example, Valance berates him, taunts him, and finally trips the waiter, sending Stoddard’s dinner to the floor. As Stoddard meekly tries to avoid a confrontation, Doniphon enters and stares down Valance, who snaps back, “you lookin’ for trouble, Doniphon?” In his inimitable John Wayne drawl, Doniphon responds, “You aimin’ to help me find some?” Valance caves to Doniphon’s challenge and scurries out of the restaurant. “Well now; what do you supposed caused him to leave?” Doniphon wonders rhetorically. The sardonic response from a patron in reference to the impotency of Stoddard’s philosophy reveals which ethic is still dominant: “Why it was the specter of law and order rising from the gravy and the mashed potatoes.”

Despite Valance’s constant taunting, Stoddard holds to his belief that until Valance is caught doing something illegal there can be no justice. When Doniphon tells Stoddard “You better start pack’n a handgun,” Stoddard rejoins, “I don’t want to kill him. I just want to put him in jail.” At long last, however, Stoddard can take the derision no more, so he decides to take Doniphon’s advice that “out here a man settles his own problems,” and turns to him for gun-fighting lessons. When Valance challenges Stoddard to a dual, the overconfident naïf accepts and a late-night showdown ensues. In a darkened street, the two men square off. Stoddard is trembling in fear while Valance mocks and scorns him, shooting first too high and then too low. When Valance takes aim to kill, Stoddard shakily draws his weapon and discharges it. Valance collapses in a heap. Having felled one of the toughest guns in the west Stoddard goes on to become a local hero, building that image into political capital and working his way up from local politics to a distinguished career as a United States Senator. It appears that the Law Ethic prevailed over the Cowboy Ethic.

Not so fast. The man who shot Liberty Valance was Tom Doniphon. Knowing that Stoddard was no match for Valance, in a replay of the dual we see Doniphon lurking in the shadows and fingering a rifle, which he engaged to kill Valance at the crucially-timed moment when the two men drew their weapons. Holding to the cowboy ethic of loyalty and friendship, Doniphon takes the secret to his grave, where at the end of the story Stoddard is now paying his respect. When Stoddard finally reveals to a newspaper reporter the truth about who really shot Liberty Valance, the paper decides not to print the truth because, in what has become one of the most memorable lines in filmic history, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Despite this being a typical shoot-em-up western film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance contains many moral subtleties. The philosopher Patrick Grim, who called my attention to the film as a tale of moral conflict, notes that both Stoddard and Doniphon violated their principles, but they did so because this was the only means by which one moral code could displace the other. By agreeing to a dual with Valance, Stoddard adopted a form of conflict resolution that he previously deemed illegal and immoral, and after discovering the truth about who really shot Liberty Valance, he chose to live a lie of omission then capitalized on his unearned heroism. For his part, Doniphon violated his moral code by ambushing Valance from the shadows instead of facing him man to man in the street, and then hiding the truth about what really happened, thereby tacitly endorsing Stoddard’s faux use of the Cowboy Ethic in order to help bring about the Law Ethic. In fact, both men violated both codes of morality, and with ample irony the only person who did not violate his moral code was the scurrilous Liberty Valance. But in the end, as Shinbone grew in size the transition from one moral code to the other had to happen, and in this moral homily it was friendship and loyalty that facilitated the change. It was the psychology of trust between individuals that enabled a society of trust among the collective to come to fruition.

The fictional Shinbone embodies any small community in transition from an informal to a formal moral code and system of justice. As long as population numbers are low and everyone in a community is either related to one another or knows one another through regular interactions, the code of the cowboy can work relatively well to keep the peace and ensure trust and social stability. But when communities expand and population numbers increase, the opportunities for unchecked violations of such informal codes expands exponentially, requiring the creation of such social technologies as codes, courts, and constitutions.

Continue reading part 4 over at True/Slant.