---
description: Even proven innovations like futarchy stall at hundreds of users because core contributors burn out repeating basics while valuable insights get lost in ephemeral channels
type: claim
domain: living-agents
created: 2026-02-16
confidence: likely
source: "Living Agents & Knowledge Scaling"
---

# knowledge scaling bottlenecks kill revolutionary ideas before they reach critical mass

Futarchy is a governance system using prediction markets to make better decisions. It works -- early implementations manage millions in assets. Yet only about 300 people actively understand and use it. The bottleneck is not the idea's quality but knowledge distribution: core contributors spend their energy repeating basic explanations in Discord and DMs while sophisticated insights disappear into Twitter feeds and chat histories.

This pattern is general, not specific to futarchy. Documentation becomes outdated. Discord knowledge gets buried. Twitter insights vanish. FAQs cannot capture evolving understanding. The result is that revolutionary ideas die not because they fail but because they cannot scale understanding fast enough to reach the community size needed for elaboration, stress-testing, and adoption.

Since [[the internet enabled global communication but not global cognition]], the tools that enable broadcasting ideas globally do not solve the harder problem of building shared understanding. Communication scales trivially; comprehension does not. The gap between broadcasting an idea and building a community that can elaborate it is where most coordination innovations die.

---

Relevant Notes:
- [[the internet enabled global communication but not global cognition]] -- explains why existing channels fail to scale understanding
- [[collective intelligence requires diversity as a structural precondition not a moral preference]] -- scaling knowledge to diverse communities is structurally required for the intelligence to work
- [[trial and error is the only coordination strategy humanity has ever used]] -- knowledge bottlenecks prevent us from even trying better strategies

Topics:
- [[maps/livingip overview]]
- [[maps/LivingIP architecture]]
