[lathamcity]

I think there's a disturbing trend in our society towards trying to get something that's competitive by "hacking" it or cheating on it somehow. Either that or working insanely hard at the expense of your personal life and personal health. It ultimately leads to a raising of the standard so that only those people can really get what they want. "Hacking" the Y-Combinator application is an example of that. Suppose some people figure out how to hack it so that they can give the reviewers exactly what they want. Well, then the other people who aren't hacking it in that way are at a disadvantage. Then they have to hack too or be left in the dust. And it becomes this sort of arms race where the original point gets left in the dust.

The same example is true of taking adderall to study for tests. In high school, I didn't take adderall, but I know a lot of kids who did and they would remember information a lot better and score above what they should have been. So if there was some kid who was objectively a worse student than me and he was getting the same grades as me, we both look the same. If everybody started doing it, I'd be left behind or pushed into a lower bracket by virtue of being the only person who didn't do it - who wasn't willing to risk my health (I think, don't know too much about it) for a higher grade. I don't think this will happen, but there are a lot of other examples:

-Doping in bicycling

-Working an insane amount of hours on your startup/job

-Spending months/years studying for the GMAT to get into business school

-Corruption or lying in politics

-Autotuning in the music industry

-High school kids taking all these leadership roles and such things that they don't really care about to try to show passion and get into Harvard. Same for grad school applications.

etc. etc.

[sskates]

Are there any good examples of someone "hacking" the YCombinator application? The only one that comes to mind is where the founder of Instacart demonstrated that his service worked by ordering a beer for Garry. And that's not even close to anything on your list.

[skrebbel]

Are you sure this is a trend? Was it different some decades ago?

Also,

> -Autotuning in the music industry

Oh, come on. That's like not giving Tron an Oscar because they cheated their special effects scenes by using computers.

[Qworg]

That's different - special effects in movies make the impossible possible. A better actor couldn't conjure up the Grid.

A better musician COULD sing on tune. It is well within human capability. Autotuning is a quick hack to make up for not being able to sing.

[raverbashing]

Funny, I actually thought once that studying for the test was cheating.

I mean, either you learned or not, memorizing some things before the test won't make you better at the thing.