by fao_ | 2025-11-16 15:34:54+00:00
> If you fail, figure out what you did wrong, and improve, that's competition.

I very much disagree, it's a collaboration between yourself now, yourself in the past, and yourself in the future. You aren't competing with your older self, you can only improve by setting up recording and measurements, and doing analysis — all of that requires cooperation and is fundamentally collaborative.

> 'diversity of thought' has nothing to do with race, gender, or culture.

It absolutely does. Each of those represent social and psychological constraints on what solutions you are able to find and broach based on your identification of each. Each of those represent how you are treated differently within society, which limits or defines your experiences, which is a part of shaping how you think, which in turn limits the solutions visible to you. There's nothing wrong with this, and it's perfectly normal, but it is important to get a broader sampling across these points in order to arrive at the best decision. If your circle consists of entirely cis, white men, then you're making the same sampling bias that has led to thousands of small university studies being rejected.

A very real example of this is the way we look at deer. For decades, it was assumed by the men that studied in the field, that deer groups have a leader that decides where they go, because when the "leader" sets off to a new location, they all look towards the leader and follow them. It took a woman entering the field as a scientist and doing more observations to realise that actually that leader was more or less just a deer chosen to tally the vote — they all look in the direction they want to go, but one deer is nominated by the group to tally the votes and acts on the consensus of the group. The hundred-odd men, probably more, that had done studies of deer before that point had been so hierarchically minded that they hadn't considered an alternative explanation, which made them blind to the actual behaviour of the deer.

It's a quaint example, but there are millions of examples just like this one, where taking a statistical sampling of people within one race, gender, or culture ultimately skews the possible result space. And that's important for keeping an open mind and being able to explore the total result space.

> This isn't competition, and there is a place for it..

Many people treat game jams as competitions! Ludum Dare (the OG game jam) was explicitly called a "competition" and had winners, and runner ups, and such; however, by approaching a game jam in that way you lose a lot of what makes them fun and worthwhile experiences — namely, collaboration!

> Most learning like this happens if you get stuck on something and don't want to spend lots of time on it (although failing until you succeed will allow you to learn 5X more).

I disagree with both of these points. Back when I was employed in tech in my mid-20s, I would regularly run ideas I'd had past a group of 30 - 60yro people who were (racially-diverse, gender-diverse) tech leads, programmers, etc. It was a huge, huge boon to my abilities, and allowed me to hone a sense of what was worthwhile to pursue, what was a dead-end, etc. along with honing my skills for being able to look at things from a new angle. That, along with pouring over the c2wiki as a teenager (and thus reading the OG discussions about technologies that are commonplace today, from the people who were major players in the invention and adoption of those technologies) were amazing for expanding and refining my perspective and "approach to problems" toolbox. I cannot recommend this enough, and at no point did it involve competition :)