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There are ballet competitions and I think parents do care about how their children's perform in them. The kind of parent that forces their child to play piano every day also cares about performance.
The kind of hacking that Wei Dai did that lead him to write the b-money paper also isn't about winning. It's exploring ideas and having fun with them.
Having a kid spent time with computer programming means that he's much more likely to engage in innovation than having the kid spent time with piano or ballet. Both piano and ballet are heavily codified and don't encourage innovation.
Most discussions on LessWrong are also not about direct winning but about free exploration. The fact that people spend their free time chatting on LessWrong instead of working for the Man, suggests they already understand that working for the Man isn't everything.
You seem to have misunderstood my comment as some kind of salvo in a STEM vs. arts rivalry, with the result that your comment reads like a counter-attack in such a battle. This is probably due to cliché-rounding.
In point of fact, a perceived opposition between STEM and arts is a manifestation of the very thing I was complaining about. Thus, to have written the kind of comment that you appear to be responding to would have been the very last of my intentions.
I would direct your attention to the sentence immediately following the excerpt you quoted:
... (read more)