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distributions of outcomes, instead of winner-take-all distributions. We don’t know as much as I believe we one day will about the implications of specific network designs, but we already know enough to improve what we do.
    Winner-take-all distributions come about when there is a global sorting of people within a single framework. Indeed, a bell curve distribution of a quality like intelligence will generate a winner-take-all outcome if intelligence, whatever that means according to a single test, is the only criterion for success in a contest.
    Is there anything wrong with winner-take-all outcomes? Don’t they just promote the best of everything for the benefit of everyone? There are many cases where winner-take-all contests are beneficial. Certainly it’s beneficial to the sciences to have special prizes like the Nobel Prize. But broader forms of reward like academic tenure and research grants are vastly more beneficial.
    Alas, winner-take-all patterns are becoming more common in other parts of our society. The United States, for instance, has famously endured a weakening of the middle class and an extreme rise in income inequality in the network age. The silicon age has been a new gilded age, but that need not and ought not continue to be so.
    Winner-take-all contests should function as the treats in an economy, the cherries on top. To rely on them fundamentally is a mistake—not just a pragmatic or ethical mistake, but also a mathematical one.
    A star system is just a way of packaging a bell curve. It presents the same information using a different design principle. When used foolishly or excessively, winner-take-all star systems amplify errors and make outcomes less meaningful.
    Distributions can only be based on measurements, but as in the case of measuring intelligence, the nature of measurement is often complicated and troubled by ambiguities. Consider the problem of noise, or what is known as luck in human affairs. Since the rise of the new digital economy, around the turn of the century, there has been a distinct heightening of obsessions with contests like American Idol, or other rituals in which an anointed individual will suddenly become rich and famous. When it comes to winner-take-all contests, onlookers are inevitably fascinated by the role of luck. Yes, the winner of a singing contest is good enough to be the winner, but even the slightest flickering of fate might have changed circumstances to make someone else the winner. Maybe a different shade of makeup would have turned the tables.
    And yet the rewards of winning and losing are vastly different. While some critics might have aesthetic or ethical objections to winner-take-all outcomes, a mathematical problem with them is that noise is amplified. Therefore, if a societal system depends too much on winner-take-all contests, then the acuity of that system will suffer. It will become less reality-based.
    When a bell curve distribution is appreciated as a bell curve instead of as a winner-take-all distribution, then noise, luck, and conceptual ambiguity aren’t amplified. It makes statistical sense to talk about average intelligence or high intelligence, but not to identify the single most intelligent person.
Letting Bell Curves Be Bell Curves
    Star systems in a society come about because of a paucity of influential sorting processes. If there are only five contests for stars, and only room for five of each kind of star, then there can only be twenty-five stars total.
    In a star system, the top players are rewarded tremendously, whilealmost everyone else—facing in our era an ever-larger, more global body of competitive peers—is driven toward poverty (because of competition or perhaps automation).
    To get a bell curve of outcomes there must be an unbounded variety of paths, or sorting processes, that can lead to success. That is to say there must be many ways to be a star.
    In schoolbook economics, a particular person might enjoy a commercial advantage