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Competition is only valuable as a means to attain greater cooperation. Once you start sacrificing cooperative results by taking shortcuts, worshipping selfishne

by Retra 12y ago

Competition is only valuable as a means to attain greater cooperation. Once you start sacrificing cooperative results by taking shortcuts, worshipping selfishness, or keeping your failures secret, then your competitive environment is doing more harm than good. It is good when a team _gets together_ to beat an opponent. It is good when a company _works with it's clients_ to build a better product. So cooperation is the other system that, in reality, actually fixes the problem. Almost every significant human achievement has been a result our mastery of language, which is clearly a tool of great cooperation, not of competition.

cmdkeen 12y ago
Why do we cooperate though? Internet Explorer didn't get better through cooperation, despite having a big team, until there was competition. The Space Race was competitive with the Soviets. Cooperation isn't the inverse of shortcuts, selfishness or keeping failures secret. Cooperation between companies that are supposed to compete, the forming of cartels, is a really bad thing after all. Humanity is competitive, social creatures. Cooperation starts at the family and tribal level which morphed into nation states (eventually), but it is fundamentally driven by competition.