Comment by hn_throwaway_99

I like your framing, because this dynamic occurs in so many places. Pretty much everyone was doping in cycling during the Lance Armstrong era - if you weren't, it's highly unlikely you would have been remotely competitive. Similarly, there were tons of mortgage brokers in the mid 00s who could see that everything would end badly - but if you were an exec at a mortgage company and weren't willing to give a loan to anyone who could fog a mirror, you'd greatly underperform your competition in the short term, and you'd be canned long before the end game became apparent.