People tend to come up with very different distributions of wrong. - xh3b4sd

Distributions show us that the world is not just black and white. Many people live in a world in which the glass is either half full or half empty. But that line of thinking is far too simplistic for a life worth living in a complex world. To clarify, we are not talking about the act of distributing physical goods here. When we talk about distributions as a concept, then we talk about the realm of statistics. Distributions describe for instance how often different things happen relative to one another, or how many things there are of a kind. We could for instance visualize the distribution of how late the bus arrives around the corner over the course of next week. On such a distribution we could for instance see that the bus is always a couple of seconds late. We could see that the bus is more than one minute late about 10% of the time. And we could see that the bus never came once, because the wheel fell of the wagon. Distributions can show us what is rather right and rather wrong. Distributions can show us how real the world really is. Because the data underlying distributions may highlight how relevant any given case turns out to be according to hard numbers.

If you believe that some aspect of your life is totally true and 100% real, then you are making an absolute statement. Cognitive science shows us that nothing is ever as bad or as good as we make it to believe. The mental traps that we create for ourselves can be found in the difference between the absolute and the relative. And while absolutes and relatives too unfold on some distribution, being too close to either side of any extreme would suggest to me that we may be out of balance once more. Not understanding how fundamental distributions are in this universe causes some of the largest displays of cognitive biases in our societies today. Anything even remotely related to blockchains and politics provides a basket of misunderstandings and cognitive shortcomings. All of which make life harder for everyone, for no apparent reason.

The political spectrum unfolds on a distribution, just like everything else in life. Most notably, our generations are marked by left and right ideologies, as either end of those extremes caused history to be rewritten many times within the last one hundred years. Extreme positions are rarely the answer. Especially if the extreme position itself is on the wrong end of the wisdom distribution. The Powerlaw Memo is all about understanding the world around us. Because every one of us is the architect of their own life. And every one of us impacts the very environment that we all share in extraordinary ways. So extraordinary that some of our actions cause ripple effects through space and time, leaving a world behind that will never be.

Last week we talked about having the right insight, but drawing the wrong conclusions. We covered the insight that everything in life is subject to power structures. What we did not do is to talk about the wrong conclusions that many draw from this life. The conclusions that I want to discuss here can be found on one of the extreme ends of the political spectrum. On one hand, those ideas speak very loudly about fairness and equality. But for some reason those ideas prefer to give everyone a fish to eat, instead of teaching everyone how to fish independently. Being for empowerment of individuals, but not sustainably empowering individuals with competence is dishonest at best. The resource that truly impacts the lives of most people over time is not money, but competence. Because competence scales a social system in a decentralized fashion so that everyone able may help to lift up everyone around them. But instead, some of the conclusions drawn amidst the extreme ends of ideologies prefer to provide the notion of a world god. The picture of a wonder healer. An entity that can be trusted as if ordinary folk better not worry about nothing no more. The tragedy in all of this is two fold. For one, the world god represents a single point of failure, which is a mechanism designer's way of saying that you better trust nobody in the first place if you want to survive. And two, offloading responsibility to somebody else achieves the opposite of well being, because a lack of responsibility breeds complacency, which is the perfect ground to nurture famine. There is a saying in society that goes something like this. You are the average of the 5 people around you. That statement in and of itself is not only true, but it also describes a distribution. So, where do you want to be on that distribution? Who do you want to be?

I do not want to spend any time thinking about partisan mind viruses, because once you are too far gone, the system itself takes over and runs with it. Once you are so far away from reasonability, it is almost impossible to communicate. So much so that inducing any kind of soft fork choice in behaviour gets out of reach entirely. What I want to highlight for those who are still able to comprehend, is the systems point of view of a self righteous society. A society whose citizens have many opinions to share, even though they never really achieved anything themselves. Masses of entitled individuals repeating marketing ideas that many before them have also just recycled from somebody else before them. The poster child of the trend that we are describing here is the European Union and their struggle with themselves. I believe for some time now that there is very little that may safe Europe in the decades to come. In fact, the situation is so bleak within the minds of the many, the only thing waiting at the end of the tunnel is once again, war. Not so much because of external aggressors, but rather because of the enemies within. Because of the wrong conclusions that elected and unelected officials alike draw time and time again.

The crux of it all maybe best described in what we think "good" really means. The wrong conclusions almost always entail an element of what it means to really help somebody. I am not sure how well a society is doing in which the government spends tax payer money on syringes so that heroin addicts can get a clean shot. But never mind, the situation is way worse. The single biggest mistake that society gets wrong is the opposition of either left and right simply because an idea is coming out of the wrong direction. The typical way of thinking nowadays goes something like this. Any policy on the right end of the spectrum is automatically understood as fascist and racist. And that is simply not how distributions work. If we want to separate the world into left and right, then each side unfolds on half of the entire spectrum. It is therefore impossible that all right policies are equally located at the worst end of the extreme. And so the gap between wanting low energy prices and another holocaust is rather large. The dishonesty to label the very much needed competence as socially opposable does all of society a huge disservice. We need the good parts of right wing policies just like every parent has to keep their children in check once in a while. The key to a successful life is balance, because this world is not just black and white. Distributions, rule everything around us.

Mechanism designers can choose to create rules that do one of two things. We can create rules that allow for a certain behaviour to emerge, and we can create rules that force a certain behaviour to vanish. I have no way of proving any of this, but I would claim that most systems work well if the rules for behaviour to emerge and the rules for behaviour to vanish are somewhat in balance. That is to say the "for" and "against" rules must be rather equally distributed within any given system. A system is not a system if it has only "for" rules, because then it is a free for all. And a system is not a system if it has only "against" rules, because then it is just a prison. Power is always taken, and the crumbling systems of our time prohibit far more for the many than they enable for the few. Policy makers of our day and age tend to understand their job description to be something that prohibits. I would argue that failing societies have those types of "against" policy makers in common. The result being that governments regulate their own citizens to death, simply because their mandate of protection was utterly misunderstood.

And so we make a hard cut for the number of the week, because crypto must rule everything around us. 88% is the amount of priority fees on Solana, which tells me that crime is alive and well over there. The priority fee is mostly paid by individuals who want to be first in order to extract more value than thy neighbour. Today, almost all of Solana's revenue is based on the emerging behaviour of extraction. A behaviour enabled by an ecosystem. We know this to be rather true because almost all volume on Solana originates from the memecoin industrial complex. Or how I like to call them in the wake of LIBRA, weapons of mass destruction. 90% of anything is not a distribution anymore. 90% of anything is basically the whole pie. Priority fees on Ethereum range between 15% and 40%, with a vastly more diverse economy of utilization. That is how I like my chains. Diverse and distributed.