Learning and writing about ethics and ethical topics is hard. I ought to know, since I misspent part of my youth receiving philosophical training. Even with my advanced degree and interest in the subject matter, it is difficult to stay completely informed about every facet of philosophy in general or ethics in particular. I’m not the last word on much anything, so far as I know. However, I am well versed in the basics and have an adequate grasp on things ethical. I’m not far off the mark when I offer commentary that would be accepted by people who “practice” (if that is what it is called!) ethics every day.
So it may come as a surprise when I tell you that I don’t like ethics. Or rather, I don’t like discussing ethics with people who aren’t philosophers, and even then, the discussion usually isn’t much better.
There are many reasons for my reticence about discussing ethics: 1) the routine conflation between normative and applied ethics (the difference between what should be the case and how ethical rules actually work in the real world) leads any discussion nowhere quickly, 2) the typical lay perspective that what one believes to be “right” or “good” is opinion (that “murder is always wrong” does not seem to be merely an opinion) or 3) the converse- what one believes to be “right” or “good” is fact, regardless of whether the moral judgment in question is something everyone can agree upon. Lastly, 4) trying to take what is a dense and very long running discussion and distilling it into a short format for discussion with people who aren’t privy to the larger history of ethical thought is a very frustrating exercise. The amount of backfilling required for some interesting discussions is usually more than what people are ordinarily interested in doing, at least at the level at which I am interested in discussing. It’s a large disconnect and so I just wonder about these things to myself and do not trouble the world with what I think, which I happen to know doesn’t bother the world at all.
Considering my interest in ethics and, obviously, amateur radio, when the HamJam crowd invited Doug Grant, K1DG- the current USA record holder in the CQWW SSB and CW contests and the CQ160 Meter contest along with being the Director of Contest University at Dayton Hamvention and the Chairman of the 2014 World Radio Team Championship– to give his presentation on contest ethics, I couldn’t wait for the opportunity to listen to his presentation. And then I couldn’t go. I’m told it was a pretty good presentation, though the main focus was on the upcoming World Radiosport Team Championship in 2014. Bummed that I didn’t get to see the intersection between radio and ethics presented by someone in the know, I looked around to see if I could Doug’s presentation online. With tremendous ease, I found his presentation from Contest University at Dayton Hamvention on Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zVmyTStOd0
Before I offer my criticism for your review, let me be clear here- I have no personal issue with Doug. I’ve never met him in order to form an opinion such that I’d either like or dislike him. I’m sure many will make the mistake that I am taking issue with Doug personally- this isn’t so. I certainly share his view that we should work to reduce the amount of cheating in contests; I simply disagree with the manner in which he directs us to pursue this goal. While Doug is happy to tell you he wasn’t a psych [sic] major, but just an engineer, I confess to not being trained in college as an engineer, but rather as a philosopher. In the spirit of getting things right, as Doug and myself both want us all to do, I offer my alternative view to what he discusses in his presentation in the hopes that I’ll clear up things that are inconsistent, poorly thought through or would otherwise result in sub-optimal rules for radio contesting.
After listening to Doug’s lecture on YouTube, I was taken aback by a great deal of what I heard, not because I was shocked about what he said but because of what he didn’t say. There was a great deal of talking about ethics and cheating in contests without getting very specific about either one. Some questions come to mind: How do ethics relate to radio contests? What sorts of detection techniques are in place to prevent cheating and what is their efficacy? How much cheating is going on? How do you combat it? What sort of cheating is it? Who is doing it? Doug offers limited answers to some of these questions and no answer to others. Yet, these (by no means all) are the very questions that are at the heart of what it means to enforce good behavior in contests- so they all should be answered, even if the answer is “I don’t know” or otherwise found lacking. Finding the starting place from which to go look for an answer is just as important as knowing what the answer should look like.
Let’s start with the first question: how do ethics relate to radio contests?
When the question of contest ethics comes up, many somehow feel like a contester should tell us what ethics is, are or should be. I don’t follow this line of thought because I think people who are actively engaged in an activity that they are attempting to regulate inevitably have a hard time eliminating self-interested/benefiting rules. A topical example is Wall Street having a hand in trying to regulate itself; I do not believe anyone can say that this was ever a good idea, especially considering the recent recession.
Of course, this is all well and good- but impractical. You can’t have an arbiter design rules independent of the participants and expect success. Someone has to come up with the rules and enforce them. And so we have come up with different procedures for developing rules and implementing their enforcement. These work, more or less, as intended.
The question, as posed, seems to me to be too broadly conceived. I believe that the relation between ethics and contesting should only concern how the rules are constructed and their application by the sanctioning body. Here we are concerned with what sorts of actions are acceptable in a contest, which is dictated by how a fair system is designed that can enforce the same standards for all participants in order to ascertain where people legitimately place against members in their participating class. This concern isn’t just about rules that we simply assign for everyone to follow. After all, cheaters, by definition, aren’t going to follow any rules that could impede them towards their goal. And we shouldn’t be concerned with why people cheat, because the answer to that is certainly multifaceted and also of no import to the problem we are trying to solve. Our focus can’t simply be about rules themselves, which is bundled up with the meaning of “ethics” in contesting. Instead, the real intersection between ethics and amateur radio contesting should focus on fair rules that can provide the appropriate data needed to accurately label the winner and determine who, if anyone, is cheating.
What sorts of detection techniques are in place to prevent cheating and what is their efficacy?
It wasn’t until the advent of cheap computing that enabled easy checking of logs. Until that point, logs were submitted on paper and many operators used dupe sheets to help keep an error free log- a completely normal practice of the time and one modern logging software performs as well. Since checking paper logs during this period was a tedious and lengthy affair, it is probably safe to assume that many people who added in calls they did not work were able to slip a few past the contest sponsors. Not so with modern software like CBS (Bob, N6TV), SH5 (Dmitriy, UA4WLI), RCSS (Bob, K0RC) and Logview (Tim, EI8IC), which can very quickly sort the data in any log. If you also correlate the data from the various spotting networks against submitted logs, you are approaching the limit by which data can be forged. So, the wholesale addition of calls into a log is no longer a viable technique by which people can attempt to game the system. And with the approval of the Cabrillo log format by the ARRL and CQ in 1999, the continued refinement of statistical and relational techniques to determine whether or not someone is cheating actually means we should see fewer successfully cheat- at least in this form.
Doug mentions that we probably won’t be able to detect cheating in an CW only contest if only one operator is indeed operating; the same would be true for any digital mode. He also mentions it would be difficult to catch a cheater who is running more power than is allowed by license. I agree with him that there won’t ever be a way to determine who is behind the key in a contest, especially if computer sent CW/macros are heavily used such that a difference of “fist” cannot be determined. In which case, that’s as far as is possible to go in looking for cheaters and we should no longer concern ourselves with such, unless definite proof can be supplied to the contest sponsor.
I do wonder about his other claim- using excessive power- and we may find in the future a device created, and seeded across multiple locations, which would be able to determine, through signals analysis and field strength readings, whether someone was indeed running too much power. But this has yet to happen, and so I concur with Doug that this is currently difficult to prove without some sort of insider information.
In both cases, the rules are truly unenforceable, baring a report or some technological advancement. In which case, the natural question arises- why have these rules at all? An interesting question, but beyond the scope of this missive. Let us continue by examining how pervasive cheating has become in radio contests. Hint: not very.
Why are people cheating? Are there many of them? How do you combat it?
By focusing on who cheats or why they cheat, you don’t get to the bottom of how to properly insulate your contest from such attacks. Doug spends entirely too much time asking the wrong question here, because it does nothing to further contesting dialogue. He starts off in this line of questioning around 17:52 minutes into the presentation when the hypothetical amateur contester is explaining radio contesting to someone unfamiliar with the matter:
Radio Amatuer: “We operate to see how many stations we can contact in a certain amount of time…”
Outsider: “How do you know who won?”
Radio Amateur: “Send logs in…”
Outsider: “How do you prevent cheaters? If no one is watching the participants, how do you know competitors aren’t breaking some rule?”
Which, I argue, is not a natural progression of questions. This question certainly could arise, but doesn’t seem to be the natural first question someone would ask; it reveals more about the asker than the subject itself. Imagine a similar dialogue about baseball:
Baseball Fan: “The object of the game is to score as many runs as possible in 9 innings…:
Outsider: “How do you know who won?”
Baseball Fan: “The score is tallied at the end…”
Outsider: “How do you prevent cheaters?”
Baseball Fan: “We don’t! Stealing bases is encouraged!”
And so on. A crusade against cheaters is tilting at windmills, because neither the windmill or cheater is listening (and there aren’t that many cheaters; see below). While I’m sure it wasn’t meant to come across in the manner I perceived it, Doug comes off as a bit out of touch or perhaps adding filler for the presentation. If this isn’t a wasted opportunity to cease discussions about the nature of cheaters and instead take a different tack, I don’t know what is.
In fact, the best example I can think of regarding cheating involved someone who wasn’t trying to boost his contest score, as it were, but rather the amount of new entities he could activate without actually being there. Don Miller attempted to activate many new entities- many of his operations were later overturned- in order to… gain more respect, be liked more? Does it really matter? His actions directly resulted in the ARRL increasing the amount of evidence required to gain certification for a DXpedition. In this narrow sense, his actions were successful in developing rules to combat similar future behavior. But does anyone remember his name or even care about what motivated him? Of course not. Once we’ve seen some trick used to circumvent proper competition, we simply create a rule to close the hole. That should be our focus.
The real news here, however, is that there really aren’t that many cheaters. Or maybe I should say detectable cheaters to be fair, albeit redundant. In the 2011 CQ WW DX Phone contest, only 5 logs were withdrawn after an inquiry to their legitimacy and 60 or so people had to be requalified to the proper class. Out of 7500 entries, less than one percent being suspicious seems to me to be a great statistic! Imagine how many people are cheating on their income taxes and I think we’d all assume that the number was somewhat higher than one percent of filers!
Lastly, Doug recommends combating cheaters by calling them out on the air during their infraction, which seems to be a very bad idea- Laura Smith of the FCC doesn’t recommend this for real rules violators (QST December 2012 Interview, pg.59) and it seems like her advice would be a better standard for determining how to fight poor behavior. If you find something amiss in a contest, record it and send it to the sponsor. It’s all you really can do.
The Unwritten Rules
Doug says at the 28:00 mark, “Just because it’s not specifically prohibited in the written rules doesn’t mean you can do it.” Actually, the converse is true. Unless it’s specifically prohibited, you can do it.
Rules should, insofar as possible, be plainly articulated in the most parsimonious way. It’s simply not enough to say that, “just because it isn’t written doesn’t mean…” and expect this to cover everything. If you want people to follow behavior in a contest, it needs be listed and fully articulated. To expect otherwise is inconsistent with normal endeavors in any sport. Are there any unwritten rules in golf? Baseball?
If a contest committee cannot be bothered to make any particular behavior prohibited, then one can hardly blame people for trying to push the rules to new frontiers. And with so few people even having the appearance of cheating, it seems stranger still to hesitate to change the rules due to any perceived backlash which would result from said.
Conclusion
At the end of the contest, the rules should both help determine the winner and who, if anyone, is cheating. A strong contest committee should be able to stay ahead of the curve of potential rule violators. And since there doesn’t seem to be a large problem with cheaters today, if a committee does not act to maintain a fair and equitable contest, it seems very strange to suggest that it is the participants who should do so through the use of things like calling people out on air or following unwritten rules.
The best that can be done is to continue technological advancement in log analysis software and report rules violators to the contest committee by use of on air recordings. Once these are completed, all that remains is to get on air and have fun. Worrying about what others are doing is certainly one way to spoil your own fun- so don’t.
Thanks. The Don Miller reference/story was an interesting read.
I saw his presentation, but like most live presentations that I see, I probably retain or analyze 10% or less in real time. It was good to review part of his presentation, in particular the 28 minute ‘unwritten rules’ segment. At the time of HamJam, I wasn’t mentally critiquing his comments and was basically agreeing with him on that point. Reviewing the video, I’d have to say that many of his so called unwritten rules were examples of written rules, so WTF? I have to agree with you, not because I like you of course, but logic dictates that a truly unwritten rule is simply not a rule.
It’s interesting how we see things on a second view, isn’t it?
I think the two biggest areas that could be improved is to cease any discussion of unwritten rules and the nature of cheaters. You can’t have unwritten rules in any contest, so the language gets confusing and we start talking about things- as you mentioned- already covered or of no relation to conduct in a contest. And you really do yourself a diservice, in my view, when you start talking about the nature of wrongdoers. I’m not sure professionals (what kind?) can talk about such matters without having a superior tone. I don’t think that was Doug’s intent, but it really detracts from the overall message.