The exposition on quantum woo was lovely, but the analogy to decentralization falls flat. The difference is that when lay people talk about decentralization, th

The exposition on quantum woo was lovely, but the analogy to decentralization falls flat. The difference is that when lay people talk about decentralization, they seem to have a pretty decent - though often imperfect - idea what they're talking about. I think most folks who throw around the word "decentralized" use the term as a stand-in for some degree of "censorship resistance". Which is reasonably true! They might not understand the social consequences of this, or they might not care; maybe having free (as in speech) transactions between disparate people is worth the social cost of somewhat increased ransomware. There are fair criticisms of people who talk about decentralization - I notice there are a lot of (facebook-hating, mostly) people who seem to think decentralization will bring privacy or control of your data - but overall I think most people use the word decentralization correctly.