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When all is so clearly lost, have a look at this beautiful little discussion of the exponential function https://www.pseudorandom.com/implementing-exp
Someone should make one for total beginners; it's wonderful when you see for the first time how the space of additions is mapped into the space of multiplications, and how a function can describe its own change, and the change of its change, and so on...
And don't miss out on the beauty of standing on a single point on an infinitely smooth line, and vibrating the ground below your feet so that the expanding Taylor wave traveling from it forms exactly the landscape you want
The game is especially beautiful when you are not alone on that line. If you couple yourself with others, like neurons do in a brain, you can play it together and create worlds and selfs and gods between yourselves.
But take care: once these worlds become valuable, farmers will move in to till the hills, and grifters flock to the sites of creation to tax the farmers. The creative sources of this world will often be seen as disturbances, and be too unlike the farmers and grifters to prevail.
It's a dynamic that David Chapman describes ( https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths). It affects music, academic disciplines, public institutions, hacker communities, AI research... Once a space gains economic value or status, it is colonized by 'experts' incapable of original acts of creation.
Once the status of a member of a community no longer depends on the ability to create, but on the ability to gain power and status alone, it will gradually decay into a simulacrum of its former self, while the original creators become irrelevant or are driven out.
Corrupted subcultures will simply die, but corrupted social institutions will cling on to their turf and seek to expand it. For this reason, working societies need mechanisms to spot and kill decayed institutions, so new things can grow in their place and serve their role.
When the selection process within political parties leads only to senile or corrupted candidates, it may be necessary to shut down DNC and RNC. If healthcare regulation and disease response needlessly kill hundred thousands and ruin millions, it's time to replace FDA and CDC.
If academic disciplines fall prey to scholasticism, to organized charlatans, to political activists or to credential milling, there must be a way to shut them down or let competent thinkers and new paradigms take their place.
There seem to be three main approaches to deal with increasing corruption of social institutions. The most straightforward is to install a top level administration that is hard to corrupt, and enforce either purity of purpose, or results oriented competition from the top down.
The American approach seems to be to accept institutional corruption as part of the human condition but to set such high incentives for innovation that it can outrun the decay of the established infrastructure. This road seems to have come to an end.
The third approach (e.g., Japan) accepts the co-existence of a civilized and a dark political and social economy, whereby the established Mafias fight and optimize each other ruthlessly, farm the civilized parts of the economy, and protect it from parasites to keep it efficient.
