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Coscott comments on Rationality, competitiveness and akrasia - Less Wrong Discussion
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I think competitiveness can cure arkasia for many people, and I wish more schools took advantage of this fact.
Isn't that one (usually unspoken) purpose of grades? In Norway, discussion of grades usually revolves (on the anti-grade side at least) around their creation of winners and losers, and how bad it is to be a loser.
Perhaps, but in many schools grades are kept secret (at least they are at my university), thereby destroying their ability to foster competition. On the other hand, I know some Japanese schools post grades in public areas, in rank order no less.
I think a good compromise would be to give everyone a histogram with anonymous results of their classmates, and an arrow "you are here". So you know whether you are good or bad, but if you are bad your classmates don't know it's you. (Perhaps as an exception, the best one or the best three names could be made public.)
Every time my employer does some form of numeric feedback, I ask for essentially this. (I usually phrase it as "so, is that in the top 10%, the bottom 10%, or what?")
Every time, my employer refuses to answer that question in a reliable way.
At this point, I just ask the question rhetorically.
This seems to have worked for me. For the first part of high school I was a terrible student, then in one technical lab-based class with a lot of opportunity for student interaction, I started getting way better grades on the quizzes than everyone else, and earned the admiration of some of my peers for it. I thought "This feels kinda good," and next year (my last year of high school) I got straight As in all classes. And then I got more straight As through 4 years of undergrad.
Yeah, maybe every school is an anti-akrasia school to some extent.
Doesn't work for most in a large pool. If you're motivated by competitiveness and know that second-best in your school is the best you can hope for, why even bother?
I can see that. However, I am especially interested in the education of the person who is the best in the school. So much more progress is made by the top 0.1% intellectual elite.
A valid point in high school, where there are few enough very smart people that each has enough hope of being the best that it's worth competing. But if you're the top student in your high school and go to a college where you have a chance of being the top student, odds are you have gone to the wrong college rather than that you're just that awesome. If you're usually the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room, and all that. And if you're mainly motivated by competition, the small pond is quite tempting.