I think about how a successful and robust ecosystem is one in which there are many parasites at every level of the food chain. If your ecosystem doesn’t have pa

I think about how a successful and robust ecosystem is one in which there are many parasites at every level of the food chain. If your ecosystem doesn’t have parasites then it’s not operating with nearly the amount of interconnectedness or efficiency that it could be otherwise. It’s similar to that idea that floats around where $0 lost to fraud is not the optimal amount. If you over index on removing fraud from your system eventually you will spend more on monitoring and removing it than you save on the fraud itself. That is time you could have spent building more things that make money. The ecosystem is a beast of its own and the optimal state of the ecosystem is /not/the optimal state for any actor within it