Hacker News Reader

Comment by hardwaregeek | Hacker News Reader

The fundamental issue is that all of education and childhood accomplishments have become cynical, overly competitive games. Science fairs are now attempts for a child to piggyback off of a lab’s existing work and claim they discovered it. Sports are a vehicle to college admissions. Disability claims become another way to gain an academic advantage. It’s no surprise that the 30 under 30 are filled with scammers and criminals. It’s what we’re teaching students who want to get ahead.

View on HN

My kids are in things that seem like competition doesn't really need to be a thing and places undue stress on those involved. I'm left wondering, why does everything seem to turn into a a competition with schools (or humans in general)? Why can't folks just do something without needing to compare themselves to others? I'm guessing science fairs (and similar things) didn't start out as a competition, why "poison the well"?

I don’t think this is part of humans because so many of us genuinely chafe against the system. I think it’s because of power and hierarchy and signaling. It’s like when you play board games with a friend and then they turn it into a competition and then it’s not fun anymore. At least with a board game you can walk away. But if it’s your child’s future on the line you will be just as competitive even if you don’t want to be.

So long as there are humans who want to amass power in some way and treat it as a zero sum game, there will be other humans forced to play similarly. Prisoners dilemma.

This is why I like the recent rise of cooperative board games. Clue is an older example, but there are more of them these days.

The answer to "why?" is fairly straightforward, in a way, but hard to see the causality of directly without seeing through all the steps to get there. This is a consequence of two economic factors: globalism and wealth inequality. When there is a strict and unbalanced economic hierarchy, parents will rightfully do anything they can to ensure their children move up the hierarchy or stay on top of the hierarchy. When you are on a hierarchy with everyone in the world instead of just those local to you, the contrasts that must exist to reinforce the hierarchy become larger to remain statistically significant over the larger population. When society had less economic inequality and was more geographically restricted in its entrants, the drive for competition was minimized and other priorities could come to the forefront.

We didn't get here overnight, but economic inequality dominates as a causal factor for nearly any socioeconomic phenomena you can identify in 2026. This is what happens when the top 10% of income earners comprise 50% of consumer spending, and you need to be in the top 15% of income earners to afford permanent housing. If you're a 30% parent (better off than 70% of households), the most important thing you can do for your children is to ensure that they end up in the top 15% or better yet the top 10%. Anything you can do that will help that end, is worth doing, and every moment becomes a competition to set things up as the earlier you do it the bigger the impact in the results.

There's a reason why home prices are correlated to with school district access, why every children's activity becomes a competition, and why in the wealthier (but more rat-racy) parts of the country people spend huge money on private tutoring, education, and training for their children almost from birth.

Many people enjoy competition and find it motivating. This is why sports are so popular, and why many organized activities tend to become competitive. Not everyone enjoys it of course, but the people motivated enough to organize large science fairs are probably highly motivated in general and that tends to corelate with competitiveness.

Not to mention that any large event takes funding. It may not be "for profit" and even if most or all the needed resources are donated there will be people competing for those donations.

Possibly a most archetypal example of Goodhart's law:

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

Parents find kids get ahead by not only good grades but also by winning in science fairs, sports, or disability claims, so they figure out ways to game those systems . . . and, their value as a measure is eliminated.

With few exceptions, these are now only a measure of how well their parents gamed the system.

I think there's more than that. When your parents think the earth is flat it's hard to learn science. George Bush's "No Child Left Behind" we're finally seeing the ramifications across our country. When you can never fail you can never learn.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com