There are several angles to this where it would be helpful to know the structure of competition:
- Sports/video games
- Economic competition
- War
- Love (although not necessarily adversarial)
In this tract I am more focused on sports as the application. This isn’t because the tract doesn’t discuss the others, but I am trying to avoid going deeply into the techniques for each – and as will be shown, the technique dominates the winner in the vast majority of these situations. Also, in war and economic competition, we more clearly can call out the division of RPS and technique in a templated way, and hence these are far more suited to a specialized treatment. (I don’t pretend to understand love in a way systematically to treat it with any confident authority.)
Why then should you read this? Because we spend a ton of money and time on sports/video games/other similar items, and I have particular agendas to save you money and time. Hence when you understand the concepts below, it should have significantly beneficial application. Of course there are translationals, but as noted previously I think it better to approach those directly.
We would consider competition beneficial if the means by which you become the winner would benefit you for winning the competition (e.g. the war), or because you would develop other skills (hand-eye coordination, muscle, teamwork) and are getting a discount in some way (e.g. because it’s fun, because you have to exercise anyway).
For winning the competition, only professional athletes in certain sports in the West (slightly different in poor countries, it can be a way up and out) possibly economically can benefit from winning as such. This is because non-professional sports’ going labor rates for the stakes (60+ hour weeks) are over $100K/yearly for demand skills, which are relatively easy to acquire compared to throwing 100 MPH fastballs, reading a defense and delivering accurate passes, or shooting 40% from beyond the arc. Hence only the jackpots (including endorsements) from major sports leagues economically can be rational objects of pursuit. Practically speaking, very few women even could consider such a rational approach, and most (90+%) high schoolers are already out of the rational scope, especially given that most college scholarships aren’t necessarily wise uses of the time (because you are exhausted and pushed into less rigorous courses).
As for the fame (not the money), your name rapidly is forgotten. The rules of the sports keep changing, so your records are either forgotten or disregarded. To say “I am best”/champion, do you even remember all the American gridiron Super Bowl winners? If you were the greatest in the era of killing receivers, who’s going to consider you the best in the era of skirts? As soon as you retire, you are slow and your skills decline; as soon as you stop winning, people stop thinking you’re the best, or the greatest. “Can”/potential, many players have those things, but only a subset have the chance and actually cash in on it. Do you want to be remembered as “he had great potential”? No, as a competitor you only want to defeat everyone in the most decisive way possible, demonstrating complete physical and technique domination, ideally perfection. But even if you become champion, Father Time will take your speed and strength; he will also take your reputation as others (maybe not even as skilled) gain their accolades. Even if you dominate everyone, your very domination can cause people to consider your era one of “weak competition”; others will question your competition, and you can’t choose by your own will to have competition as strong as you. Even that assumes that people may still care about the games you played, which by definition, if they are games they have no larger meaning. When you compete for fame, you are building castles in the sand.
Consequently only side benefits could justify participation of the masses in sports and similar competitive items. What side benefits could be had from sports (not video games or others)?
- Cardiovascular endurance
- Strength (but practically this doesn’t work, see below)
- Agility and similar hand-eye coordination
- Various competitive skills like anticipation, RPS strategy, game script
Of these by far endurance and conditioning is the most reliable benefit. However, most sports don’t come close to developing this in a good way. The average soccer game lasts longer than 30 minutes, which practically is all the high intensity cardio you ever could use in any occupation short of bicycle courier. In other words, there is no occupational application that would compensate for the mileage you are putting on your cartilage, the ligament tears, etc. Other sports are worse – organized gridiron (American football) is a total endurance joke, baseball is sitting around for 90+% of the time.
The problem with developing strength via sports is you must have well-matched partners. You can’t develop strength without injury if you are going up against a much stronger opponent, nor can you develop any strength if you are going against a much weaker opponent. The type of technique you use in the weight room to develop strength depends on max lift vs. average lift balance, but it operates in a very narrow band for optimal results. Strength is a great occupational benefit, but sports aren’t a good way to develop it.
Agility and other body skills also can be developed via sport and actually make good sense. The problem is, when do you use throwing small balls through your UCL? Throwing pigskins? Hitting small balls on the ground? Throwing balls on a smooth arc? When in real life do you juke someone, or put a foot in the ground and hard pivot? Pilots and other similar operators do use this type of skill, but it’s calibrated to cockpits and situations that mostly aren’t the same.
Finally we come to the question of competitive skills. The critical question in “competition” vs. “training” is the matter of which techniques and when. If “training”/technique dominate, your competitive skills will not result in victory, which means the artifice of “competition” has no meaning, as the outcome of the competition doesn’t signal to you your proficiency in competitive skills (because you would always lose regardless of your competitive skill). Hence a competition only can be used as a proxy to develop competitive skills (vs. you just applying what you studied and learned elsewhere) if you play with players that have roughly similar technique. In sports that means they have to be about as fast as you, about as strong as you, you can’t have too much difference in ball skills. However this naturally opposes to technique development: normally you want to compete against better players in order to develop your techniques to the maximum potential. So the average sports setting is not a very efficient means to develop the competitive skills, as mastering the technique gives a big advantage but requires a big commitment in the weight room and in the field drills.
Moreover RPS strategy, game script, and other similar matchup/setup based approaches rely on high team coordination, which also is developed in practice and used in the game in order to assure high execution. They also require preparation in the film room, which is definitely not a physically challenging activity. If you are the inferior RPS player, a game that rewards those things won’t give you much time to reverse the tide against an opponent who is well prepared and characterized your patterns, strengths and weaknesses. Hence, with the exception of certain in-game adjustments, the game itself isn’t really being used to get better at the game; it’s more a measurement of your non-game training. That still has value, but it becomes inefficient or beside the point of sports, which was to go outside and have fun while getting better.
If we were to discuss video games, obviously you lose most of the physical component (except for the repetitive stress injuries you will incur, which are even worse in the context that most people work at the keyboard and already are vulnerable to these types of injuries). That leaves you with the competitive skills only; the amount of competitive skills vs. technique very heavily depends on the specific game. So it really is only fun (you better have fun with technique and practice if the game is high technique) and competitive skills.
The other question with side benefits is, what is the translational value of the competitive skills? Where do you use a “game script” in the same way? Where do you have RPS items?
Modern war goes far beyond any of these in the level of technique and preparation that leads to combat advantage. Building a modern jet fighter is a $10+M effort, involving a number of specialized disciplines that have no direct civilian economic equivalent, let alone a sports or competitive analogue. So RPS is a part of it, but it comes after so much investment and intelligence gathering, and is so constrained by logistics (e.g. attack at Normandy vs. Pas de Calais) that in a properly fought, total war (vs. the usually incorrect limited wars), the RPS elements are less important to victory.
As for economics, physics and the market prices at any given time dictate what you can make something for. You are trying to anticipate demand and also to anticipate larger shifts in supply fundamentals that may cause you to invest or divest owing to the reduced opportunity for profit. Your consumers do not “outplay” you, they don’t necessarily know they need something and they probably aren’t planning ahead enough for your film room preparation to matter, assuming they think they even can forecast far enough for you to make a meaningful adjustment. Your competitors will pursue competitive strategies relative to your posture, but consumer macro is far more important – and none of those strategies matter if your cost of production is much better or worse than your competitors’. Furthermore, if you are in the R&D economy, you are not competing against their counter-move, all of you likely are trying to build the same sort of thing, but with whatever technical approach you think will get you to the finish line first. Intel and TSMC both want to build it smaller, but they don’t know how. Hence it usually is not a head-to-head competition where the opponent’s action mostly dictates your correct response, it is an assessment of technique/prospect gathering/understanding of the subject domain, which relates specifically to the task at hand and has only limited translation between economic sectors, let alone sports.
This was a rather long explanation, but you can see the fallout:
- Why the **** are we doing high school sports, especially football, lacrosse, and baseball, which break down the athletes and deliver very limited benefit in the games?
- Why the **** would you allow any sort of head-contact sport like soccer heading or any tackle football, when you know the economics are all about intelligence and technique?
- Why the **** do we do any serious competitions, which lead to training and competition injuries, instead of properly conditioning our bodies?
- Although video games can deliver good competitive skills, you have to be super careful about repetitive stress injury. The real issue is more of those competitive skills are unlikely to benefit you in any way unless you plan to be a military commander one day, and even then you probably are better off with war sims and such, instead of trying to take other games and translate the skills.