Sometimes you can believe the right thing for the wrong reason.

It's dangerous to encourage people to believe false things (or quietly fail to correct false beliefs) if they lead to correct conclusions though. Such strategies may work in the short term, but the world is chaotic, and generally a wrong-but-helpful belief today will become a wrong-and-harmful belief tomorrow.

We learned this with the whole 2020-era attempt to try to convince people that covid is not airborne so that people would not hoard masks and leave them for emergency staff. It ended up leading to really harmful misconceptions that are still persisting.

Great point about how short-term misinformation can backfire! This echoes a larger problem in both public health and decentralized systems—trust erosion. Once you undermine trust by prioritizing short-term gains, you create long-term vulnerabilities.

I wonder if there’s a parallel to blockchain governance: even if we implement a decision-making process that works now (but is based on imperfect assumptions or incentives), it could create systemic issues down the road. Do you think decentralized governance structures can better adapt to chaotic, evolving environments than centralized ones?