Tim,
You are deeply right. Two additional observations to add to your broth. One a very rich self-made man made to me in walking in a hall at Carnegie Mellon back in the 1980s. Another about how climate change modelling can help us control the flow of misinformation/disinformation.
1. So I asked this very very rich polyinvestor guy...how did you make all your money? His answer, roughly quoted: "I have always watched what distinguished the beliefs of people approaching 40 years old and just older than 40 desired. When you are over 40, your decisions change the flow of money, below they do not. So I invest in the distinctly new ideas/desires of those just under 40. It almost always works." By his view, we need more people in power (at the level of people who controlling the micro expenditures of money) just under 40 to more agilely survive in faster times. (P.S. I was in my mid 30s..asking me a lot questions too..as a founding director of Robotics at CMU.)
2. Here is a paper on how to use climate modelling to understand paths of deceit both in our personal lives and in their flow over the earth. And yes, your granularity reduction view works here just as perfectly in that meta world of "Paths of Deceit."
(And I think the math is remarkably the same).
