I actually think the growth of app layer is exactly the time that good social philosophy is needed *most*.

Analogy: imagine that C++ had been made by a totalitarian racist fascist. Would it be a worse language? Probably not. C++ is general purpose, there isn't much surface for bad social philosophy to wreck it (or good social philosophy to improve it).

Ethereum L1 is not quite in that position: someone who doesn't believe in decentralization would not add light clients, or FOCIL, or (good forms of) account abstraction; someone who doesn't mind energy waste would not spend half a decade moving to PoS... But the EVM opcodes might have been roughly the same either way. So Ethereum is perhaps 50% general-purpose.

Apps are ~80% special purpose. What apps you build depends heavily on what ideas you have of what ethereum apps (and ethereum as a whole) are there to do for the world. And so having good ideas on this topic out there becomes crucially important.

https://x.com/owocki/status/1911160442728419681

the unspoken part here is:

we don't have infinite devs, attention and capital.

if devs work on pump dot fun, they don't work on polymarket. 
if attention is moved to memecoins, it's taken away from quality projects.
if vcs pump speculation-centric apps, they don't fund value generation-centric apps.

Building @kiwi 
Writing @ https://kanfa.macbudkowski.com/

and yeah, sure pump dot fun might lead to some innovation.

but what are the chances that if we put all these devs, attention and money into other project, it'd produce more innovation and less collateral damage?

what's more, speculation-first products create a vicious circle that are hard to break (linkrel)

what's more, speculation-first products create a vicious circle that are hard to break (linkrel)

https://kanfa.macbudkowski.com/speculation-market-fit-trap

Your point makes sense in terms of resource allocation, but from a marketing and crypto reality perspective, it’s not that black and white. Projects like pump.fun, while they may seem silly, often attract attention, onboard new users, and even spark unexpected innovation. 
Not all devs are driven by long term value creation, and attention isn’t always a zero sum game , sometimes it grows rather than just shifts !