I completely agree with seriousness and aliveness, but think competitiveness is only applicable in extremely narrow, well-defined circumstances like some games, and that these circumstances aren't present in the real world. Sports is an edge case, since the boundaries are artificial, but not as abstract as the rules of, say, chess, and so have real-world gray area which is exploitable.

So I would argue that, most of the time, competitiveness leads to a much, much lower level of play in individuals, not higher. I see several routes to this:

1. Goodhart's Law can attack, and people can start trying to game the metric and play the system to "win" at the expense of making real hard-to-measure progress, and the field suffers greatly.
2. People under pressure perform much worse on the candle problem. Offering cash prizes or deadline threats can only motivate well-defined, mechanical thinking, except by drawing attention to the desired problems.

#2 seems to be the bigger contributor, from my perspective.

(As a point of clarrification: I fully agree that if you make sports a multi-billion dollar industry, you will attract the interest of enough people capable of ignoring their incentives and just exploring the problem philosophically. However, my point is that for an individual already focused on a particular problem, a deadline or cash prize is the last thing they need. It had the distracting effect of focusing the mind. (Also, more generally, these sorts of phenomenon are known as the overjustification effect, which is why any system built on incentives alone is doomed to failure.) )

This (#2) is likely to sound highly surprising, so let me expand the model a bit: The actual frame of mind you want to be in to make real, novel breakthroughs is one of detached, unhurried curiosity. The world is usually way to eager for tangible, measurable results, and so is way way way to far toward the "exploit" side of the "explore/exploit" trade-off (formally, the multi-armed bandit problem). Goodhart's Law strikes again.

Examples (of #2) to try and triangulate meaning:

If you actually wanted to win at a competitive sport, the way to do it is NOT to practice or compete. Everyone's already doing that, so it's an efficient market. The way to win is to look for loopholes which haven't been exploited yet.

Example 1: Moneyball fundamentally changed the way people thought about sports, by playing a fundamentally different game with a different goal (optimizing for return on investment, not winning/prestige/warm fuzzies).

So, of the top of my head, you might take a close look at which sorts of transhumanist enhancements might not be illegal yet. Can you stretch leg bones, create new drugs that aren't banned yet, (example 2) or recruit from untapped demographics which have some unique trait? Lets explore that avenue of the transhumanist approach.

I happen to randomly recall that ADHD meds stunt growth, so that might help make smaller gymnasts who are still old enough to participate in the Olympics. (Example 3) (I also happen to vaguely recall that China lied about the age of their gymnasts to get yunger into the Olympics, because smaller is apparently better for gymnastics.) So, since no one is going to ban a drug which a kid legitimately needs for non-sports reasons, ADHD meds sound promising. There are presumably health and moral reasons why kids are often taken off of ADHD drugs for the summer, to allow them to grow, but if you're a true creative Machiavellian focused solely on winning, you could probably put them in a school system without a summer break or something.

Meta discussion of these examples:

Note that all we've done here is randomly mash up transhumanism + sports, and see what relevant knowledge our brains already have which might be useful. Having 2 things I randomly recall suggested one approach, but we've hardly scratched the surface of the search space. In order to generate a few thousand new, better approaches, we might read more about extreme features (height/weight/body proportions/endurance/hormones/etc.) or different athletes. (I happen to also randomly recall that some tour de france champoin had testicular cancer and ridiculously high testosterone levels or something. Similarly, the swimmer Michael Phelps is bizarrely proportioned, with short legs and long arms.) Combining that with looking up whether it might be possible to induce such features should be fertile ground for ideas.

But, even that approach is extremely narrow. We could broaden it to looking for the key limiting factors in various sports, physical or not, and then researching how to overcome them. Or better yet, spend a lot of time thinking about which search spaces are excluded even by that broader methodology, and then search in them. The entire point is not to get sucked into one concrete path until you are reasonably sure you've exhausted all the search space reachable by human-like minds, and are at least starting you implementation in the right ballpark. You should still expect to pivot to different sports or approaches though, even halfway through implementation. Discard sunk costs quickly.

Back to gesturing at #2:

Some of this sort of creative problem solving may occur in sports from time to time. I don't follow sportsball close enough to guess exactly how inadequate/low-level-of-play sports is generally. But, the mere fact that people are bothering to waste time playing the object-level game, rather than concentrating all their efforts on the meta-game, isn't a sign of competence. That's probably for the best though, since any competent arms-race in just about anything is just a paperclip maximizer built out of human institutions instead of AI.

If there's something important that you actually want to make substantive contributions too though, then the trick is to figure out how to revolutionize the entire field, rather than wasting time making incremental improvements. That means thinking outside the box, and outside the "outside the box" box. Douglas Hofstadter calls this JOOTSing, for "Jumping Out Of The System". This is entirely distinct from merely repeating the innovation of a previous jump.

Saying “…so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of [me/you]...” over and over again isn't actually going any additional meta-levals deep, which is why Yudkowsky's Law of Ultrafinite Recursion applies to such situations. To win such a battle of wits, you have to completely upend the previous level of play, such as by building up an immunity to iocaine powder.

And such creative solutions require precisely the opposite mindset from the hyper-focused blinders which narrow attention to nothing but the object-level task at hand, to the exclusion of everything else. The odds of the ideal solution actually lying in such a tiny search space are infinitesimal.

Just because this is a rare chance to share some jai alai knowledge, the sport is actually very hard to be good at in the "you're good and win more often" sense because the way the ball bounces makes the outcomes more a matter of luck than skill. Yes, there is some skill involved, but the skill cap is relatively low beyond which being better at the game doesn't help you win more because it can't overcome the entropy introduced by the unpredictability of the ball. This is related to why it's primarily a sport that, when played competitively, is primarily of interest for paramutual betting: it's just a source of random noise you can use to try to exploit people's misunderstandings of how paramutual betting works. It's not interesting otherwise because in leagues skill doesn't seem to help teams win consistently enough for there to be much point in playing.

Sources: I lived in Florida and knew people who knew way more about jai alai than me.

when I frame things in terms of "adequacy" it seems at times a little distanced from the case, but when I frame them in terms of levels of play they end up much easier for me to work with.

Presumably the value of thinking in terms of levels of play for you is in drawing on your experience with various games being played at various levels of play; it might be good to be more explicit about this since presumably not everybody has such experience.

Competitiveness and aliveness seem clearly good and useful to track to me. I'm less sold on seriousness; I'm worried that it's susceptible to problems analogous to problems applying the absurdity heuristic, e.g. if you don't play video games much you might not think people take video games seriously and you would be very, very wrong about that.

Related but maybe easier to get a sense of is how strong the incentives are to try hard, e.g. do people get paid a lot for doing this, do they accrue a lot of status, that kind of thing (although this heuristic still seems like it risks coming to the wrong conclusion about video games, and also it mostly predicts Goodharting rather than getting good at the thing per se).

Another distinction worth making: there are games that are being played for their own sake, but only within their legitimate domain, and then there are games being played in ways that trade off success in other games people ordinarily play. Financial fraud and cheating on tests are instance of the latter, but so are war and professional sports, where athletes/soldiers often do things that wreck their long-run health in order to win a local contest. Bans on performance-enhancing drugs / chemical and biological weapons are attempts to limit this sort of osmotic effect of transferring resources across membranes, without altering the underlying incentive type. By contrast, consider the original Olympics, and Greek city-state warfare, which for the most part (excepting late Sparta) managed to remain domain-specific. This is very different from "not trying hard" - Greek amateur hoplite armies held their own against a massive Persian invasion including a large number of professional soldiers.