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Comment by marcan_42 | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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