Thank you!

perhaps if they had been fully digested this would have been better received?

Yes, but cannot do more alone.

I'm not sure how much LW belongs in this category

Self-improvement, honesty with confessing weaknesses, non-judgementalism

It can make people ingenious. this bit was unclear to me

Necessity the mother or invention or how they say it. Competition is similar. Look at http://robogames.net/index.php

attitudes efficient for competing are not efficient for improving I don't think you've backed this claim up. I think I might disagree with you here

The linked article, but already becoming a common knowledge: praising children for being smart makes them lazy, praising children for effort works better for development. The issue is, competitions of the kind "the prize goes to those who try hardest to run fast" are rare and difficult. Competitions are typically "prize goes to those who run quickest". This amounts to praising children for being smart.

I may disagree with this do you mean there are, or what are you referring to with they?

Dojos with belts

As a point of nomenclature, how about instead of "testing" competing and instead of "learning" fostering? To me those terms seem closer to the what you're describing, but that's mostly aesthetic, might make the idea clearer for some people.

Compete-in-learning? Simple example, reward the delta, reward the improvement of the score compared to the previous score? Sounds good, but it is so easy to fake a bad first score. Too easily cheated, gamed. Besides, the real world does not care about effort. This is actually the issue. At some level testing needs to reflect the real world, which cares only about results.

I think this is an area effective altruists should look into, have official rankings for amount donated, though would it really be effective altruism or effective signalling?

This is a bit too idealistic I think - showing off money is showing off power, and donating reduces, equalizes power. Having said that, just like Bruce Lee had fights using his left hand only, self-handicapping through donation can be a pretty strong signal indeed, so it may be a good idea.