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AnarcheAmor wrote

Also, focusing on "fun" ignores other ways in which competition can potentially be positive (e.g. by helping people benchmark & clearly measure their progress in various athletic/creative endeavours, providing positive feedback that encourages further self-improvement).

There is nothing that competition does that individual achievement or cooperation doesn't do save for excelling at creating ire between people. If you want to open up another pandora's box of a conversation, we can go into how useless and inefficient competition is but I feel like that should be saved for another thread.

Honestly though, if you want proof of my point, read this entire comment section. Being competitive in our argumentation has done nothing positive for nobody here but most definitely has negatively impacted the discourse, to the degree that OP felt like healthy discussion has been thrown out the window. Even just between me and you, I certainly won't come away from this discussion any better for it, not for any fault of yours of course but rather the nature of our discussion thus far. Like this comment was supposed to be longer to address your arguments but I realized that my tone was hostile so I deleted most of it because, by the end of the day, you aren't going to suddenly change your views, I won't, and we aren't really doing the original article any justice arguing points back and forth. I only kept the one counterpoint to transition into this paragraph.

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masque wrote

I certainly won't come away from this discussion any better for it, not for any fault of yours of course but rather the nature of our discussion thus far.

I think it's possible that, in the process of formulating arguments, one or both of us may have better clarified our own understanding of our position.

Ultimately, I just don't think it makes sense to characterize the negative outcomes of bad instances of competition as arising from "competition itself" while simultaneously denying that any positive outcomes from competitive situations come from "competition itself." But I guess the disagreement here is abstract enough to not really matter in the grand scheme of things, so I might as well stop arguing.

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