If the “every participant gets a prize” mentality diminishes the strength of soul and psychological vigor, even worse is a society in which there are no prizes or competitions. Although, I am not sure if the former is the case, I do believe competition, as such, needs a hearing.

Plutarch rightly points out in the Lives, (no, I don’t remember which, it might have been Pericles or Marius), that great leaders know how to motivate with the right mix of public honors and material benefits for excellence. And although sometimes people talk about our society being very competitive and “capitalist”, etc, I don’t really see it in anything beyond sports and a few video games.

Good competitions foster the nascent drive for the honors towards good ends. Yet, good competitions are still undersupplied. There are no Logic Competitions. Math, Computer Science, Robotics, and Chess all have tournaments. Each requires specialized knowledge that builds on aspects of logic combined with specialized skills. But there is no broad-based logic competition.

In Henry V, Henry exclaims that “if it be a sin to covet honor, I am the most offending soul alive.” This virtue and oftentimes vice has been greatly tamed by our society. “Upon my honor” is a rare and fairly meaningless phrase. We don’t live in an culture covetous of honor, and those who do obsess about how many buildings have their name on it or their honorary degrees or swear undying revenge for slights against them most of us think are super weird.

But a drive for honor and respect still exists subdued.

For character traits, there is no guild. Math, Chess, Computer Science, Sports have guilds built to their honor. Careers and pathways reach to the sky for the best to excel and compete. However, those who are involved in those are heavily self-selected and the skill is heavily specialized, non-transferrable, and clearly valuable. I think people should compete in these defined furrows. But we need more lanes.

I would like to see a Logic Tournament format take shape that is minimally reliant upon specialized tools, vocabulary, or advanced mathematics and casts a wider net to students who find different features of the world salient. Of course, this is all closely tied to math ability, but many people self-select out of math things, while still seeing themselves as logical. So riddles, puzzles, allocation games, logical analysis, and social predictions, while being reducible to math, do not override many young people’s sense of fun.

I would like a Logic tournament to combine Raymond Smullyan’s inventiveness, LSAT’s arguments analysis, game theory’s equilibrium thinking, and both grammatical and traditional logic.

To play should feel the way the Uriel’s dialogues in UNSONG or Godel, Escher, Bach feel delightful and awe-some.

https://ensuredone.com/projects/2023-buridan