Your conclusion doesn't at all follow from your premise. It's at best a modern-malthusian position, that those who are strongest at information extraction shou

Your conclusion doesn't at all follow from your premise. It's at best a modern-malthusian position, that those who are strongest at information extraction should survive. (As opposed to Malthus's original proposition, that only the wealthy should survive). But this begs the question: what makes "information extraction" the thing that we should optimize for at social scale? If we can make it so that everyone has access to correct information, there will no longer be a need to compete on information extraction. This similarly tracks with Malthus's wrongness: we don't actually need to compete on food prices, as we've got enough to go around, there isn't a shortage of food for only the wealthy. And this is true at world scale. Barring some kind of massive catastrophe, we aren't at risk of global starvation where a Malthusian approach would make sense. > This is part of why so many tech luminaries were ahead of the curve in detecting the COVID-19 problem¹: they are secular information extractors for the most part, untainted by petty identity. Taking this to its logical conclusion, you are saying that it is a better outcome that the CDC was wrong, as some tech luminaries made money, than if they had not made money and the CDC had provided superior initial guidance, saving thousands of lives.