On the Impossibility of Learning Fairly in Private
Every distributed system faces a fundamental coordintation problem: how do you produce collective intelligence from local knowledge without destroying the locality that makes the knowledge valuable?
It’s the same problem markets solve with prices, organisms solve with nervous systems and countries solve with constitutions. The answer also seems to be always structurally the same: you need a communication protocol that compresses local state into messages, and the compression itself must be lossy in the right way - preserving what is useful for coordination while discarding what’s private.