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Comment by brimble | Hacker News Reader

"Have to", maybe not. Will perform better if they do, probably. Will be outcompeted by others if they don't, many of whom only did better because they used drugs, yes.

It took me half a lifetime to really come to grips with it, but fact is, winners absolutely do use drugs. William S. Sessions' anti-drug arcade game ads lied to me.

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Be careful with this line of thinking. It can lead you to justify some extremely unhealthy habits. You'll justify it by saying it's fine, you're getting things done. But the cost will always be there, either physical or mental.

Agreed and note that 3 of 4 paragraphs in ei8htyfi5e's post were describing the costs:

> Anyway, it took 2 days in bed for me to recover after. Brutal.

> my brain stopped processing information in the 30 degrees at the edge of my peripheral vision on either side.

> makes your pee smell

On the other hand, the cost of not using those things can be not getting a good job, or not being able to do your job, which has costs too. A small difference in work done can be the difference between keeping a job and getting fired.

Don't worry, I'm still taking it pretty easy. I'm just not surprised when I see someone who's very successful and seems far more alert and energetic than I could possibly be without some serious uppers—mystery solved, they're very probably on some serious uppers.

Maybe school shouldn't be a competition with winners and losers.

That is impossible because there is limited supply of the things you want to achieve with your education, e.g. a tenure track position, and the demand is always higher than the supply.

Shhh don't tell them, let them stay unambitious. It makes it easier for the rest of us.

This is true only if your range of available strategies is constrained to a closed competitive subsystem. The actual range of available strategies is unbounded, given unlimited rationality.

School is just a part of life, and life has limited resources. There will always be winners and losers. At least, until (and if) we reach a point where the total sum of resources exceeds the total demand for them.

Is the score what makes a student a winner, though? That is what parents have to learn to curb.

The score is supposed to be representative of your knowledge in a subject. And the entire point of going to school is to become more knowledgeable in a subject so you can apply it somewhere in your life.

If the score was not an indicator, then it serves no purpose.

Unfortunately, academic scores in most of the world stopped representing knowledge and started representing rote memorization long ago. They are a very, very poor indication of knowledge.

Well, if success in life is measured by getting the highest score, then we are really doomed.

Maybe most schools but I went to the top school (most years) so it was. …and I had imposter syndrome, so I did everything I could to keep pace.

Capitalist life is a competition with winners and losers. The losers are basically debt-slaves, and the winners are modern royalty.

ALL LIFE is competition regardless of whether it's capitalistic or not. People need it or they're miserable. Competition is not a bad thing.

Competition is a bad thing when it squeezes out cooperative strategies with superior outcomes. This can be expected to be more frequent in a society perfuse with pro-competitive and anti-cooperative incentives. Competition is conceptually aligned with defection strategies. The fitness landscape generally has fragile optima at cooperative strategies. That said, competitive substrategies may contribute to the beneficial outcomes of a cooperative superstrategy of which they are a part.

Not all life is competition. Ecosystems in general are a complex web of cooperation. One could say that all life is cooperation with equal merit.

Yes, it's a sliding scale like everything.

The idea that competition should not exist and is some outcome of "evil" capitalism is absolute ridiculousness. I was responding directly to that asinine comment.

Life without competition doesn't exist, nor should it.

Maybe all of your life is competition, but mine certainly is not. It's an unhealthy attitude to have in your private life as far as I'm concerned.

I did not say all my life is competition, it was a generalization that life cannot exist without competition. Reading comprehension bud.

It's a natural attitude that's innate to human survival. You need competition or you will be a miserable mentally unhealthy person. You're in denial if you don't realize this truth.

This ridiculous socialist utopia where everyone is at peace doing finger painting all day doesn't exist. It's a good way for your society to collapse though. Competition is not some artificial outcome produced by capitalist economic systems.

Capitalism has nothing to do with it. Schooling in China is and was even more competitive, making competition in American schools look like child's play. This was the case even before China opened up and introduced market reforms in the 90s.

I hate that I feel so congruent with this comment.

My favorite thing is more often than not, the faces of anti-drug campaigns tend to be celebrities/athletes who were caught in a drug scandal, and do this campaigning to improve their public image.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is a prominent example.

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