An a priori justification for pursuing excellence?
 

As the title suggests, IS there an a priori justification for pursuing excellence? Of secondary concern to me is what fosters "mediocrity" -- the idea that achieving your goals "most of the time" and "about average" are okay? I'm having difficulty finding a benefit in striving towards difficult goals when things can be achieved at an "acceptable" level all of the time.

I've attempted to abstract it, but it directly relates to my own life. I have the option to start things long before they'll come to fruition, such as studying weeks before a test. In doing so, I could guarantee myself a score in the 95% or better range.. I would likely learn more. I enjoy learning, but I don't see the benefit of that over studying the night before (cramming) and achieving an 80% of better?

For those of you with intrinsic motivation, what do you see as a realistic rationale for achieving excellence over settling for "okay" for the rest of your life? At the moment, I see no benefit of the former.

Suppose you have to install a program on all the computers in a computer lab.
You could just go around to each computer indiviually and install the computer and it would take you about 30 minutes.
You could also design and write a program that would automate the install process by allowing you to command the computers to pull a program to be installed off a server and installing it on themselves. Designing and writing the program would take about 2 hours of research, 25 minutes of coding, and then 30 minutes to install th program you just wrote on all the computers. It then takes 5 minutes to install the first program on all of the computers simultaneously.

So lets see... 30 minutes or 3 hours. Why the fuck would anyone do the 3 hours?
Over the long run, doing 3 hours of (fun) coding work once will save you 25 minutes of repetitive drudgery every time you have to install a new program. About a half-dozen updates later you've come out ahead in terms of time used.

So it's largely a matter of looking at the return on investment over the right timescale. If you study for weeks NOW you might only get +15% on the next test. But if you settle for 80%, you're going to have to make up for that 20% hole in your knowledge at some point... assuming you're actually learning anything useful, of course. If the only time you'll ever use the knowledge is the test itself and never again.. meh, what's the point?

I'll do my best to be an Aristotelian for the time being:

Different people succeed in cultivating virtue to different degrees. Thus, some people are very virtuous in all the meaningful ways and some are not. The existence of people who fail to attain significant levels of virtue is neither proof nor disproof that the cultivation of virtues is a worthwhile pursuit.

Onto the main question: is there an a priori justification for pursuing excellence? The answer is: Yes.

Excellence is another way of saying human fulfillment. What Aristotle means by pursuing excellence, then, is attempting to accomplish one's telos. The a priori justification for pursuing excellence is that it is the way to complete the goal of human existence, which is to seek perfection among all the virtues. I think of the old Army slogan, "Be all that you can be."

In relation to mediocrity, or more precisely with being satistied with mediocrity, I'd wager that those people are perpetually stuck on the slothful side of the virtue of industriousness. All virtues are about locating the means between two extremes and people who are satisfied with mediocrity are not in the right location along the axis of that particular virtue, whatever name you'd like to give it.

The benefit to working very hard and excelling is that, combined with the proper cunning and ambition, it will allow you to accomplish far more than someone that is satisfied with mediocrity: working hard makes it easier for you to accomplish your goals later in life.

Earlier this year I had a programming assignment. It had to fufill certain requirements. My Program had just what was nessacery, no comments in the code, the readme.txt file was 2 lines long, and I finished it less than 5 minutes before it was due.

I got 98%

My friend's program had more lines of comments than lines of code. His readme was 2 pages, with ascii drawings, and was all done a t least a week early.

He got 99%


This was of course due to how the assignments were assesed. They were run through a marking script, meaning my bare minimum code did as well as his well writen.

Basically for the most part, I'm doing what is required and no more. On the other hand, for things that interest me, I'll often go well above what would be required to pass a course. This may not work well in the furture, but for now, I am, at least, happy. I'm doing what I like.

What I'm trying to say, and rather inelloquently I might add, is that while trying for excellence is fine, if it's not something you care about, you're probably better of doing just what you have to, and applying yourself elsewhere.

They really need to structure a programming class so that some of the assignments are maintaining code written in previous assignments. Nothing teaches the value of commenting like trying to figure out what the hell one of your own programs does or why you wrote it that way.

True. The point I was trying to illustrate, is that "going the extra mile" often isn't worth it.

when you ask about an a priori justification, what exactly are you looking for? particularly when you try to look for it with reference to such socially variable/almost arbitrary categories on the order of "excellence" and its presumed inverse "mediocrity"?

i like politicophile aristotle post above and think it comes as close as any i can think of to answering the question, but it switches the terms at the same time.

And the point I'm trying to illustrate that in the short term, going the extra mile doesn't seem to be worth it. Putting in a little bit of time and effort now can save you a lot time and effort later. But this spate of examples doesn't really address the thread's orignal question of a priori justification.

You could justify it on the front of keeping your options open. If you settle for mediocrity at any point, it becomes that much more difficult to persue excellence. By failing to "go the extra mile" today, it just means you'll have to go two extra miles tomorrow to catch up. But that doesn't sound very convincing to me, either.

It's also a question of how excellence is rewarded. If you are a fast and efficient worker... you are, more likely than not, going to be "rewarded" by being unfairly burdened with more work than your average fellow cow-orkers.

Ok, going the extra mile in academics. I'd rather focus my attentoin on things I like, work on my own projects, and cruise through the rest. In the computer industry anyway, you're better off being able to say "Look at this website I made" or "this game I made" than pointing to some bits of paper, even if they have A's on them.

For me it's knowing that I've put 100% into whatever it is that I've done or am doing. Anything else is like feeling it's a half-hearted attempt.

Kahlil Gibran wrote in The Prophet, that to work with love is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit... for if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half a mans hunger.

It is something that gives my life meaning and depth. So I think it's a personal perspective and choice. For me, it is a choice to truely give of myself, for without my heart I cannot see another purpose for life or for living.

Not sure if that's actually a "realistic rationale" for another though... *shrugs* :D

Of course not. As you pointed out yourself, you got an A on your program, too, though you probably have a much shallower understanding of programming than your friend. Grades aren't worth "going the extra mile" because they're essentially without value. You go the extra mile for the inherent educational value (in this case) of going the extra mile itself.

If you do get a job as a programmer, you will eventually learn the value of "more comments than code" and "2 page readme's" when you get a job that takes more than 5 minutes. Or when you've done a bunch of uncommented "5 minute jobs" on a single project that's been shuffled around to a couple different departments, subtly broken, and now sent back to you for debugging... and you have no fucking clue what all that glob of uncommented code does because there are no neat divders to show where one of those "5 minutes jobs" ended and the next begins. And that's YOUR OWN code. Let's not even talk about how much you'll love getting to debug some other guy's code that in addition to being uncommented, doesn't even follow your thought process n how certain things are done. Or better yet, it's commented, but not in a useful way.

There is an inherent value to understandng a problem to the point that you can explain the solution in plain language (I.E. comments and readmes) before you solve it. You don't comment code because it will get you better marks (though you pointed out that it doesn't have much affect on the grade) so you can point at the assignments later and say "See? A! I am so smart." It so you pick up the habits that make you a better programmer so when you point at a website or a game you've written other people can read it and go "This guy is smart." and not "What the hell is this guy doing?".

What I'm getting at is that if you "go the extra mile" as a habit, then, even when you're NOT putting in the effort, you will churn out a better product than someone who was content to just "get by" because you have a better understanding of both the underlying material and how to do the work efficiently.

It annoys me that failure is now seen as politically incorrect.
In the UK they are trying to instill an attitude of 'deferred success' rather than bring disillusionment to kids or feelings of failure.

I cannot see how that can prepare us for life. No wonder people have a hard time accepting that someone doesn't want or love them.