> I don’t see how you’ve arrived at marathons having any specific norms. No doping and no assault is pretty universal. Can you explain it better?

Sure. First, I'm going to leave 'assault' because I think it sort of changes the mapping between marathon running and speedrunning in an analogy-breaking way and adds ethical concerns that aren't really relevant to the point and practically don't exist for speedrunning anyway. I understood what the poster was saying, but I think it's not a great example.

Second, I'm going to suggest that like speedrunning, a marathon run is really against the clock. This isn't strictly true, but it's true enough for the analogy to work.

With all that in place, the apparent universality of 'no doping' is half the point. There are no marathons where you can choose to dope or not dope and they simply categorize you that way. Doping has a fair chance of ruining a career and disqualifying the participant from future marathons.

The other half of the point is that it doesn't have to be this way. We could have separate marathons for dopers, allow them to race together with non-dopers but categorize them differently, or even have specified paths to run but no organized marathon and allow people to get creative in speedrunning them. We could allow people to find shortcuts on trails to improve their time and then categorize them differently from those who follow the proscribed path. Yet we don't do any of it.

In contrast, speedrunning does allow this sort of activity. Tools are okay, but now you're categorized as TAS. You don't have to 100% the game, but now you're doing an Any% run. This does not exist in marathons. You can't take a short cut and get an "Any%" time, for instance.

Simply put, if a speedrunner finds a shortcut it is celebrated, but if a marathon runner happens to find a path down a vine that saves him 10 minutes of running, he's a cheater. These are two different ethical systems.

> The point was that speed runners are not operating with different ethics than any other competition, or society in general.

As you can see above, I disagree with this statement. I haven't read all the sibling and cousin posts, but neither the poster you responded to nor the top poster said the ethical system was bad; in fact both found it interesting. Both the marathon system of ethics and the speedrunning system of ethics seem to have the same moral or ethical basis in fairness, but the approach is different and therefore is the ethical system.

> “Anything goes” isn’t accurate as a description, and the top poster maybe didn’t realize that suggesting that exploiting game glitches somehow represented flexible ethics might be a bit presumptuous and patronizing, and also incorrect.

This is not my interpretation of the top post and I think it's extremely ungenerous. He expressed surprised that a system designed to work around the rules still develops a system of ethical rules. His edit then points out that honesty is a core tenet of the ethics of the group.

The edit was a response to multiple people including me calling out the framing of game exploits as a reflection of ethics at all, and it was an explicit admission of having done that, and perhaps indicated a change of perspective. You are contradicting that post.

I can see why you’re dropping assault now, since it undermined @krisoft’s argument. It was a mistake to defend it. And as for doping, you agree with me that anti-doping rules are universal? Okay so marathoners don’t have different norms than other sports, or at least you’ve run out of examples.

I disagree with your equating of TAS and doping. But that’s mostly irrelevant anyway. There is no ethics of TAS outside of a competition that disallows TAS. The only ethics we’re talking about is the ethics of cheating, which is universal; whether or not the agreed upon rules were broken. It’s the same for speed runners as it is for marathoners.

That’s a wholly inadequate and inappropriate response to my post.

I have only read the edited post and don’t know if in addition to the addendum he also edited the original post. If that is the case then there may be context here I don’t have, so feel free to educate me there, but I stand by my interpretation of what I’ve read here. I think you might be confused and trying to make this personal between us doesn’t convince me otherwise.

I’ve edited my post above, before I saw your reply. I’m not making anything personal here, I’m debating you. If you don’t like that, then don’t state your disagreement with me and invite argument.

BTW, you lobbed an ad-hominem with “extremely ungenerous” which is why you got my retort that was edited out. Maybe you didn’t realize you were already making it personal yourself?

Personally, I think you’re confused about the difference between rules and ethics. Yes, we’re talking about different sets of rules. But we have not been talking about different sets of ethics. The difference between a speedrunner’s shortcut being good and a marathoner’s shortcut being bad is rules, not ethics.

You ignored the entire content of my post to make essentially a personal attack because you think someone recognizing that your interpretation of a post is ungenerous is ad hominem. I wasn’t making an argument. I was telling you what you’re arguing against isn’t what was said or at least wasn’t what was meant.

Then you edited your post completely to essentially attack a point that wasn’t really mine, that you wouldn’t see the way it was actually meant, and that I was already conceding for expediency since you yourself claimed you didn’t understand. I posted to you because regardless of who posts you seem to not understand their point of view and want to “debate” about things they didn’t say or if they did say them they didn’t mean them the way you took them.

You’re doing this in several response not just to me. But I’m sure it’s just because I don’t understand the intersection of rules, ethics, and morals. I’m just confused.

Have a nice life.