Not only can you turn the badges off in your profile but you are barely even encouraged to participate. I have absolutely no idea what badges I'm missing and I have never once done anything to achieve a badge that didn't come to me by naturally using github.

I really don't get why some of you think that github would be drastically different without badges.

edit: Here I took a screenshot of where to disable it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36681101#36683016