[tux1968]

> It takes maturity and humility to step back

It also takes energy, focus, and intellectual capacity. All of which are being removed from the current effort at hand. There is a real cost to continually reevaluating the situation. Sometimes you just have to put your head down and plow ahead.

This is why having competition is so powerful. Someone will likely be working hard at the right problem using the right strategy.

There is no perfect strategy that will always result in using the fewest resources to generate the best solution. We have to accept inefficiencies and wasted efforts.

[TheOtherHobbes]

You don't solve perverse incentives with competition if the competition rewards perverse incentives.

Competition isn't a panacea that makes everything bad go away.

It's almost an institution in its own right, and is just as likely to suffer from Shirky-like problems as anything else.

[tux1968]

> Competition isn't a panacea that makes everything bad go away.

Nobody said it did.

I'm not making a moral claim, i'm saying that it is a matter of reality that nobody can predict the future perfectly and that effort from any individual is a limited resource. So it makes sense sometimes for an individual to just press on in the direction they've chosen, and not "waste" time reevaluating too often.

You can either have one central authority that dictates a single direction, and forces all effort down a single path. Or you can have a more diffuse strategy that explores the solution space in multiple directions simultaneously. Competition, in the context I was referring to it, is basically just the difference between breadth first, or depth first search. I wasn't making a claim about what motivated the search in the first place.

[soks86]

How else can you possibly solve it?

Competition solves everything.

Who gets to mate with who has been answered by competition our entire existence.

Striving for non-violent, yet fair, competition is what advancing the world is about.

[alexashka]

You've described cats. Now describe humans.