Thread by @AgustinLebron3

Watched the new Bond last night.

I think I've discovered a common cognitive error which I'm going to label the Physical Embodiment Fallacy.

In this and many other superhero movies, the bad guy creates/steals some horrifying new piece of technology which is going to kill millions, enslave the world, etc.

The solution in every movie is simple: kill the bad guy and destroy his evil lair.

I.e. eliminate the physical embodiment of the problem, and the problem is solved.

This is, of course, insane. The problem isn't the poison factory, it's the fact that someone has discovered how to create such an effective poison.

Even if you kill the guy, the knowledge doesn't die with him.

And even if, by some miracle, the bad guy was the only guy who knew the information necessary to create the superweapon, that's still not good enough.

All you need is the knowledge that a superweapon _of this type_ is even possible. That's more than enough.

You see this in trading all the time. When you're trying to find new trading strats, by far the hardest part is knowing where to look. What ideas to investigate.

Even knowing a tiny amount of information like "competitor X is making money doing Y" is HUGE.

Just knowing this is almost all you need. If you have smart people, an analog of Linus's Law applies.

"With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."

If you know where to look, all problems are easy.

Genies never get put back into bottles.

Useful knowledge always expands to fill available brains precisely in proportion to its usefulness.

Bad guy super-weapons won't die just because the bad guy died.

/END

Addendum:

Maybe the essential thing that makes crypto people different is that they can see and avoid this cognitive error better than others.