Editing Talk:Action At A Distance Scales Exponentially (section)

== Unconsidered as a Cost ==

A common form of inherently flawed plan is the "if only we'd all agree". Stated in this form it's obviously idiotic, but people will frequently bring up the idea sufficiently obscured. A classic example from recent times has to be in pandemic response: If only the Republican states also agreed to do X we could have had fewer deaths. But often X is something that anyone could have predicted Republicans would not have gone along with like staying home for 6 months, not seeing one's family, etc.

Because [[Action At A Distance Scales Exponentially]], making us all agree is a massive effort. That's where all the magic is.

Another common example is "If Elon Musk spent all his wealth he could solve X" but even that's untrue. He could not solve most of the world's problems this way. If he wanted to solve starvation, the coordination systems he'd devise would have to:

* be sufficiently able to be fraud tolerant that pushing in money at one end creates output at the other end
* successfully overcome opponents who benefit from the current system (including many who claim the opposite)
* fight the incentive by participants in the structure to create more structure<ref name=pournelle />

Most of these things end up being instead like pushing a structure of matchsticks around on a table. You get a lot of loss in the structure until the stuff reaches the end.

Costs are not even always