%%Formatting
\font\twelverm=ptmr7t at 12pt
\font\fourteenrm=ptmr7t at 14pt
\twelverm \baselineskip=24pt
\parindent=0.5in

%%Header
\headline={\headline={Rohrer \pageno}} \nopagenumbers \vsize=9in
{\obeylines\parindent=0in
Holden Rohrer
Jones
AP Lang
4 Nov 2019
\centerline{\fourteenrm Competition's Bare Utility}\baselineskip=28pt\par}

%%Content
% Competition is bad?
% Why do people compete if it is so dearly harmful? Proving they're better? The propriety of the challenge?
% Hedonic treadmill: even when not competing, humans grow weary of good things extremely quickly
% Cooperation, or merely a lack of challenge as alternative
% Transcendentalism: Competition shouldn't matter because all that matters is goodness
% Thesis: Competition creates real value in society despite its individual psychological harm.
% Gains from competition: in athletic endeavours, people have gotten faster and better than they ever would have otherwise.
%                         Intellectually, people want to beat out their peers for the right to the "most relevant" idea, which has created a good portion of science (despite the normative cooperation)
%                         Political growth

Humans, by their very nature, want to be good (in the sense of performance).
Life is, in many cases, a search for meaning, and that meaning often derives from being good at something.
People are also social creatures: we deign to be surrounded by others because they ease our natural discomfort and wariness.
Naturally, competition of the athletic, intellectual, and even moral sorts arose within society.
Alfie Kohn recognizes that, psychologically, competition is harmful; no matter where one falls in the hierarchy of competitors, he or she is anxious and unhappy even at the top.
But this doesn't contradict the fact that great gains have been gotten by competition: athletes are stronger and faster than they ever could have been before, scientific intellectualism is bolstered by great individual efforts, and politicians serve more accurately to their constituents because in each of these fields, competitors hold them accountable.
Despite great gains from cooperation, competition has been the best way to derive massive individual productivity gains from the population despite its psychological downsides.

These individual gains in productivity are useful because society as a whole becomes more able and because that individual can now accomplish significantly more, especially in conjunction with their other talent or other skillful persons.
These gains in productivity from competition also strengthen the ability of competition to drive more innovation and hard work in that field.
It's the idea that ``once someone sees it can be done, everyone will try to do it.''
In the machine learning field, for example, which is growing extremely quickly because of rapid iterative growth, computers couldn't differentiate between black-and-white handwritten numbers no more than a couple decades ago.
But now, because of growth in that field, every tech company uses Artificial Intelligence to choose what to show the user next and to rapidly classify even highly complex content like video into distinct categories like music, games, or vlogging.

It might be considered that raising the bar could create some psychological unease, but the social gains are well worth it.
Competition can even be seen as cooperation over a long enough time span.
Racing cars, for example, often develop new technologies like ``fuel injection'' or new materials for the bodies of the cars, and while these are immediately the result of competition, eventually every company takes advantage of these highly benefical innovations and in several cases, applies it to consumer cars.
On a long-term societal scale, competition drives the creation of new technology and improves the quality of whatever field that competition is occurring in.
On a short-term individual scale, however, competition certainly creates some degree of anxiety, but that anxiety is well worth it and even desirable.
Boredom is a common experience because without stress, without anxiety, people feel unmotivated.
While in certain cases, motivation can be derived internally, that motivation still consists (in many cases) of a need or deep desire to expand one's abilities or to achieve a specific task.
Perpetual anxiety is not a state to be fought against but rather an ultimate goal (in moderation, of course).

Success being dependent on absolute measures means that the metrics quickly become outdated, and if they aren't, those metrics must be based in competition.
The growth of musicians over time demonstrates this clearly.
A number of judges looked at students coming out of Juilliard compared to the work of classical masters like Bach or Beethoven and found that the skill levels of either were highly comparable and the Juilliard students won out in some cases.
This is because innovation and competition drive humanity to become better, and while musicians don't compete against eachother in the sense that a sprinter or a baseballer does, they at least compete against past musicians.
It is a violinist's calling to improve their own stature compared to ``the bar'' of the day, which moves with the average quality of a musician and thus derives a pseudo-competitive atmosphere.

Regardless of the field, competition requires individuals become better, which helps their field and in turn society improve as a necessary result.
Cooperation is a natural aftereffect of this competition because people are not wholly unwilling to share their secrets to success, but even when success is fully dependent on the failure of others, the anxiety experienced by one or several individuals is not enough to outweigh the growth visible to the group.

\bye