The theory you’ve never knew you needed to know

Can

TAGBON

Explain

These pictures?

Actually TAGBON is the only theory that can accurately explain those pictures and other strange phenomenon.

Freedom, Edges, and the Nucklehead Principle

TL;DR: The moment you give real freedom to real agents, the distribution of behavior widens. That means more brilliance and more bone-headedness. Systems that pretend life is tidy, linear, and absolute get blindsided. Systems that expect edges—and design for them—win.

Why absolutist worldviews keep face-planting

Reality is not a spreadsheet with “Yes/No” cells; it’s a spread. Where variance is part of the function—speech, art, invention, markets, open inquiry—the good and the bad ride the same lever. Clamp the “bad” by bluntly trimming extremes and you don’t get a safer version of the same thing; you get less of everything. That’s the Law of Partial Absolutes (PAL) in action: clip the edges, lose the spread; keep clipping, lose the thing.

Absolutist frames—“never offensive speech,” “zero failures in research,” “only fitness-maximizing motives”—sound strong because they’re linear and pure. In the wild, they fail because the world is fat-tailed and mixed-motive. As soon as a model bans what actually happens at the edges, the edges keep happening and the model starts writing fan-fiction to explain them away.

TAGBON as an analytic tool (not just a joke)

TAGBON—There’s Always Gonna Be One Nucklehead—isn’t cynicism; it’s extreme-value common sense. Scale up agents or time and your probability of no one doing the spectacularly dumb thing tends toward zero. The mirror image (TAGBOH, the hero) is symmetric: the same freedom that permits a saboteur permits a saint.

Why this matters for data & risk:

• Forecasting: Plan for “the one” who will jailbreak the rule, post the doxx, light the illegal fireworks—and for “the one” who will sprint back into the fire.
• Policy: If your fix for bad outliers is “remove the worst, again,” PAL guarantees you also remove the best. Smarter: cap the harm channel (buffers, bright-line bans, accountability) while keeping the capability channel open.
• Analysis: Heavy tails (power laws, Pareto spreads) are normal in open systems. If your model treats outliers as “noise,” your model is the noise.

“But evolution explains all of this, right?” — Not cleanly

Evolution as biology is indispensable. Evolution as a total story of mind and meaning runs thin at the edges. When you open freedom up, you don’t just get more mating displays; you get:

• Anonymous heroism that burns personal fitness (the stranger who dives into freezing water, the medic who refuses violence and still rescues seventy-five men).
• Artistic monomania that consumes resources for beauty alone, far past any reputational payoff.
• Truth-telling that ruins your career when silence would pay.

Sure, post-hoc “inclusive fitness” stories can be drafted. But as anonymity rises and reputational return drops, the fitness-only curve predicts those tails should collapse. They don’t. TAGBON/TAGBOH predict they won’t: with freedom and scale, someone will choose against narrow payoff, for good or for folly, because agents are not just vehicles for genes; they are choosers with values.

This is not a “gap”; it’s a pattern: the richer the freedom, the fatter the edges—both kinds.

Concrete anchors (science you can point to)

• Open systems go heavy-tailed. Creative outputs, venture returns, citations, virality—again and again the curve is power-law: a long run of small outcomes, a few giants. Outliers aren’t bugs; they’re baked in.
• Relax constraints → spread widens. When rules or costs ease (new platforms, deregulated markets, open APIs), you see more variance: more scams and more breakthroughs, more nonsense and more genius.
• Guardrails beat truncation. Targeted safety (seatbelts, circuit breakers, content rules against threats/doxxing) lowers harm without flattening excellence. That’s PAL’s exception: fix failure modes, don’t shrink the spread.

(If you want footnoted case studies, we can add them, but the backbone is robust across domains.)

A friendly experiment you can run (really)

Freedom Dial Lab:

• Recruit groups for a 60-minute “build something cool” challenge.
• Condition A (tight spec): precise requirements, step checklist, strict review gates.
• Condition B (freedom): broad goal, minimal constraints, safety rules only (no injuries, no fires, no doxxing of the judges).
• Measure: outcome variance (novelty scores, failure incidents), best-of-show quality, number of “what were they thinking?” moments, and number of “how did they even do that?!” moments.
  Prediction: Condition B shows wider spread—more duds and higher peaks. If the worst overwhelms, add buffers (mentors, timeouts, tool training) and rerun. You’ll see harm fall while variance (and top quality) remain high.

Now you’ve demonstrated PAL and TAGBON/TAGBOH to normal readers without a single Greek letter.

Why reductionist models keep getting caught flat-footed

If your worldview demands that everything be black-and-white, or that motives always collapse to fitness math, the world will feel like a daily jump-scare. Music moves people who gain nothing by being moved. Strangers risk themselves for nobodies. A few will torch their chances for a joke. You’ll call these “anomalies.” Everyone else calls them Tuesday.

Common-sense read: Free agents + stable laws ⇒ edges.
Design read: Keep the spread; engineer guardrails.
Theistic read: A Creator who values free love and real virtue designs a world where love and virtue require stakes.TAGBON/TAGBOH isn’t an embarrassment to such a world; it’s a signature of it.

The closer (with a grin)

Give a population genuine freedom and two arrivals are guaranteed:

• one citizen with a ladder, duct tape, and a baffling plan for the ceiling;
• one citizen who quietly holds the ladder so nobody dies, then stays late to fix the lights.

If your “solution” to the first is to outlaw ladders, you’ll never meet the second. That’s not safety; that’s smaller life. Keep the ladders. Post a sign. Train spotters. And expect both the nucklehead and the hero—because in a free world, they’re coming either way.