> Competition implies a provider of gifts and those who chase those gifts. The provider will always use faulty proxies to determine who to provide to, thus becoming disproportionately important to the process. Acquiring the gifts is always disproportionately more important than anything else.

I think we are on the same page with respect to the dangers.

I am reminded of the experiments in which rats are getting hits of dopamine. What is it called? Behavioral conditioning? Skinner conditioning? Very simple, but very powerful.

And this I think is the specter that haunts Science/Education. Sheer force of collective habit maintains the status quo. There is lots of evidence for 'work' (even workaholicism) but paradoxically diminishing results. I am reminded of those students who write down everything the lecturer says in class but don't have the time to understand what the lecturer is trying to get across.

> You can't truly channel competition anywhere because it's always routed to itself.

Here we sort of disagree. I agree that it is potentially an uncontrollable positive feedback loop but I think competition (and also our sense of fairness, demotism, voting, equality) can be channeled.

To use an analogy, these instincts we have are like Water or Electricity. Dangerous but controllable to great effect. The goal of good governance is to 'traffic shape' these forces into productive causes.

Competition in the wild is simply Hobbesian violence, one man against the other. It requires the halter of a market with its price system and exchanges to be funneled productively. There are huge problems of course but we at least know a halter actually exists.

What I am calling 'fairness' in its natural state is a powerful raw instinct to enforce conformity and uniformity among the tribe members. There is an obvious biological connection to these instincts, to our genetics, our genes in their voting blocks trying to spread their influence. This is known in biology as R selection, where the system is optimizing for volume (the overall hypothesis is called R-k selection).

In my opinion there exists no 'halter' (as of yet, but I hold out hope) for fairness. I do not believe a proper mechanism has yet been invented by humankind. Yes humans build institutions to control it, like standardized education, democracy, republics, but I am unconvinced as to their strength against a sudden surge in the tide of popular feeling. Sooner or later, like the rise of the Communists, brute strength wins out over elegant attempts to moderate, basically mob rule followed shortly by blood rule with tyrants. Year Zero. A Reset. It has happened countless times in history.

Democracy leads to entropy. Competition has the potential to take us to Moloch.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Basically you either need to choose your poison, or we need to come up with a better system. I currently err on the side of Moloch, because it is a slower death than the alternative.

> A lot of bad things are caused by instincts that come naturally. That's actually specifically why I pointed those two out: they're natural, and they're extremely dangerous and we should always be aware of them creeping up and keep them in check.

> Instead, we created whole institutions to worship them.

That's about the size of it, yes.

> The "mediocrity is everywhere" thinking is part of the problem, as it drives everyone to worry about how "mediocre" they look and rush after the best thing ever all the time, instead of calming down and doing the right things. Publishing a failing study is mediocre. Helping people in need is mediocre. Doing a little bit of fitness to keep yourself healthy is mediocre. Yet, that is exactly what we need more of.

> I think you were trying to say something else.

This is interesting, thank you. You're quite right that over-optimizing is a threat (Moloch) but I shall reformulate my complaint here.

Mediocrity is a threat (Entropy), but, and I feel this is important, if we have enough fields or subfields of exploration, avenues of research then Mediocrity basically loses its meaning. The division of labour allows everybody to potentially be a winner.

It does not eliminate average results but it disperses them over a large area, which should mean net progress across the board is higher. Does that make sense?

> Mediocrity will always be everywhere because it's a mathematical fact - most people are in the middle. So, yes, it's everywhere. That's tautological.

We all know smart people achieving mediocre results (via Molochian competitions).

We all know not-as-smart people achieving, if not success in the sense of being on the first page of a top ten Google search results, achieving success in their local maximum.

In my opinion the second is in some sense smarter than the first because they are better adapted to their niche, they have a better foundation on which to ultimately progress.

I suppose I could summarize my feeling on the subject by saying I care more about increasing the whole population's IQ (or other metric) by 1 point, than about collecting the 'cream of the crop' and curating talent, because although the second initially appears most impressive, the truth is that the whole network benefits much more from the first.