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Life is fractal, but markets are square

161 points by paraschopra 7y ago

0n34n7 7y ago
And now we are using these top-down developed computers to try and simulate bottom-up phenomena (like pattern recognition) and call it AI (well Neural Networks to be specific)
- dmos62 7y ago
  What would a bottom-up developed computer be like? Can you elaborate on top-down/bottom-up in this context?
  - partomniscient 7y ago
    I don't think the question you posed makes sense. If it was bottom up developed, it would be adaptive, and therefore not a computer as such. Adaptive systems manage to handle new input (or fail). The computer is only going to do what it's been programmed (however poorly) to do. One of the things required for computation is predictable repetition - same inputs, same outputs. This is why error recognition/correction is so important for things like physical ram and ethernet packets - it's effectively trying to filter out any bottom up behaviour that could affect the environment of the computation/information transmission. An ever so slightly different environment would affect the same inputs in a bottom up system - think along the lines of butterflies affecting weather systems by flapping their wings. You could claim everything that happens is a result of 'some computation' but then you end up in semantic arguments how to define 'life' (or how to define what's 'computable', which is it's own entire problem). A couple of books from back in the day in my life relevant to this were these two, and they're still probably a good place to consider things from even today. https://www.stevenlevy.com/index.php/books/artificial-life https://www.stevenlevy.com/index.php/books/artificial-life https://kk.org/outofcontrol/ https://kk.org/outofcontrol/
    - rtkwe 7y ago
      The Ur example of a bottom up computer would be the brain. It works on disparate unformatted inputs and can translate to a context appropriate output and while there's no programming language for the mind (unless you want to stretch a bit and say speech) you can instruct one in the particular ways you want input manipulated into outputs.
  - jonnycomputer 7y ago
    the brain, probably. or a rock.
cjfd 7y ago
Markets are very much fractal too. One should notice that there are companies of every size presumably distributed according to a power law. Pretty much the definition of a fractal. Seems like an ideologically motivated piece to badmouth markets which is popular. And if one is from the other side of the spectrum one would say that in many instances these big companies get incentivized by government regulation. On both sides there is too much of a knee-jerk reaction and too less appreciation that things vary greatly per sector and per case and in some cases one side of the opinion spectrum is correct and in other cases the other side.
- paraschopra 7y ago
  My point is that the transactions in a market are always on a few dimensions (price, packaging, utility, etc.) while our daily experience isn't like that. I agree with you that on a higher-level there's an emergent richness within the markets too (as captured by power laws) but it's less rich than the lived experience.
  - ajuc 7y ago
    > price, packaging, utility these are abstractions, you can invent similar abstractions for "our living experience" and reduce it to a few variables as well. I don't get what's your point other than "markets bad, life good".
    - paraschopra 7y ago
      The point is that even reducing our lives experience to few abstractions like happiness makes them a limited view of what’s going on (via millions of years of our evolution) If abstractions were successful at addressing issues, the self-help industry would have eliminated unhappiness. Our thinking is linear, we abstract rich phenomena into few categories that we can verbalise our understand. In that process, richness is lost.
      - ajuc 7y ago
        Abstractions are leaky, both these about markets and these about lives. It's ok, we know they leak details, we use them to get results faster. Markets are part of living, so it's not surprising that life as a whole is more complex than small part of it. But I don't see any qualitative differences, just a difference in degree. And millions of years of evolution isn't a very good argument - because rate of evolution is much quicker for culture than for biology. Nature was stuck on unicellular life and in oceans for billions of years. We got from walking to driving, flying and interplanetary travel in a few thousand years. What's going on behind all that richness in the universe might be very simple. We think it is actually very simple - a bunch of numeric fields and a few simple rules of how they interact. > Our thinking is linear, we abstract rich phenomena into few categories that we can verbalise our understand. I'm not sure what you mean by linear. People are certainly capable of thinking nonlinearly - for example people can understand recurrence. Abstraction also isn't the only kind of thinking we can do. We can be exhaustive as well, it's just slow and often doesn't contribute much to the result so why do it. > In that process, richness is lost. What do you exactly mean by that?
ajuc 7y ago
Markets are the opposite of top-down linear design. Markets are full of feed-back loops and chaotic behavior. Markets are the way for people to cease top-down planning and still get things done. If we understood markets like we understand a chair there would be no economic crises. As for suburbs - give them 500 years and then we can talk. You need time to accumulate all the changing pressures into something that looks organic - visit any old city in Europe :) All trees of particular species look the same when they start - after 100 years they usually look different because of the interplay between environment and them. Same with snowflakes and other traditional examples of fractals - including mountains and coast. Suburbs are just starting, in a few centuries they will be as organic as old cities are. Oh and regarding "linearity" of human inventions - it's much easier to make a mess than to make a good orthogonal design. If you don't limit yourself and write a code adding features as you need them you will end up with something that is very much organic, and that's not a positive - we call it "spaghetti-code" because when you try to change anything - it changes stuff in 100 different places. Orthogonality in design isn't a byproduct of human limitations, it's a thing we constantly fight for, and we do that because it has advantages. You can easily optimize it and modify it for various purposes.
- oeuviz 7y ago
  If we understood markets like we understand a chair there would be no economic crises. Well, maybe there would be no unwanted economic crises.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Try unexpected, because one man's economic crisis can very well be another man's creative disruption of a very large market.
- Barrin92 7y ago
  some utopian idea of 'the market' resembles bottom-up processes yes. But the modern market (and given that the author chose to use chips as an example) does not. The modern economy is to a very high degree planned, mind you not only by the state, but by corporations. The corporation itself is a top-down designed entity, internally displacing markets. Everything that enables modern productivity gains occured in the context of streamlining, designing, and ordering production. The shift-worker at the conveyor belt at a 400k population company isn't exactly comparable to the medieval merchant on the local bazaar. And I suspect that the author is implicitly critizing this, but there's a reason why this development took place. Even if the rigidly designed chair doesn't appear to be innovative, top-down design actually is. Even ardent capitalists like Schumpeter recognised that there is more inherent dynamism in large monopolies than there is in some natural, unordered market. You can't go to the moon by climing up trees as the saying goes, and that's why nature without design never made it there. The nation state, the modern company and all those institutions won because the incrementalism found in bottom-up design is inherently limited.
koliber 7y ago
This was a fantastically straightforward explanation of something that is very elusive to explain. It reminds me of Christopher Alexander's "The Timeless Way of Building", but 500 pages shorter and less meandering.
m12k 7y ago
'Markets' was a poor choice for the right hand side, as they are in fact bottom up. 'Naturally occurring structures are fractal, but human abstractions about them are square' would be much closer to the point, though not as catchy.
keymone 7y ago
our emotional response to seeing two wolves is probably about twice that of seeing one wolf. but response to seeing 100 wolves and 200 wolves is probably about the same. point being - there's plenty of logarithmic thinking in our brains, so we're not that linear. i fail to come up with similar example for exponential thinking, we probably really can't comprehend that. Edit: typo
- anoncake 7y ago
  > our emotional response to seeing two wolves is probably about twice that of seeing one wolf. I think it's closer to equal. One wolf is a danger, two wolves is a danger. Especially when one wolf causes maximal fear, two wolves can't appear any more dangerous.
antoniorosado 7y ago
I really liked this post :)
Nursie 7y ago
This is littered with bland assertions "4/ Because our mind can only accommodate thinking in one dimension (time) or at best two dimensions (map)," Really? And a chair, a 3D object, is your illustration of this?
ForHackernews 7y ago
I think "Reality has a surprising amount of detail" [0] is a better restatement of this same basic idea. Also, I don't think it's true that humans are "incapable of grasping non-linear, complex interactions" -- it's just that hard things are hard. If you can save yourself a huge amount of effort by using a first-order approximation, you should absolutely do that if you can get away with it. There's a reason civil engineers don't typically concern themselves with relativistic effects. [0] http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...
- paraschopra 7y ago
  Yes, I love the essay you mention. Well, not understanding complex systems is ok when you are designing bridges. But first order approximation fails horribly while designing policies. As a simple example, Indian subcontinent where people aggregated in clusters over many thousand years got divided into India and Pakistan via a simple almost linear boundary. Result: hundreds of thousands of people displaced and died during ensuing mass migrations.
watt 7y ago
The essay does not support the summary (or conclusion). Markets are just as bottom-up as anything.
protez 7y ago
The significance between top-down vs. bottom-up has been compiled and showcased by Matt Ridley, in his book, "The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge." It says most of human beings are incapable of comprehending evolutionary design like free market. It's true. OP labeled markets as an example of top-down phenomenon.
mapcars 7y ago
Nice article, a few comments I would like to add >If philosophers can’t answer what makes the life meaningful Philosophers fail here because it is beyond thinking and experience based, so one can not file a paper saying I found it - even if it is correct, it will not have any impact on others. >how can governments maximize it? Governments need not maximize it, they just need to create fair conditions for everyone, people inevitably will get there themselves, exactly as it's stated later: >A revolutionary idea is that governments should leave people alone so they could pursue their well-being >because the human mind is incapable of grasping non-linear, complex interactions The word "mind" is not specific enough, what mentioned here is intellect. There are other dimensions to mind which are capable of much more than we can imagine.
- dmos62 7y ago
  > >If philosophers can’t answer what makes the life meaningful I think the question is answered, in that it's shown that the question is misguided. It's the problem-solving aspect of our minds that earns to find meaning, even in things that don't inherently have it, which is most things. What is the meaning of this geopolitical event? What is the meaning of the big bang? If that little problem-solver inside us can't distinguish the validity of these questions, then you experience compulsive meaning seeking. So I agree with you, it's beyond "thinking".
  - Retra 7y ago
    The question has been answered over and over again. People asking this question don't want answers, they want a mystery to be in awe of.
lordnacho 7y ago
I'm afraid this article is faux-profound gibberish. What is linear, one-dimensional thinking? Doesn't say, and it's not a common term, either. What is the difference between top-down and bottom-up? Or rather, what is top and bottom? I wonder if this is AI generated. Lots of interesting buzzwords, glued together in sentences that don't create a whole. Like that picture that looks familiar but you can't recognise any object in it. Nature and markets are almost the same thing when you look closely. Evolution is a kind of algorithm that operates in many ways. You need just imperfect memory and selection to generate all sorts of patterns, in biological life, as in the economy.
- dalbasal 7y ago
  The author of the referenced post, Venkatesh Rao is a unique cat. The terms/concepts are from him and he's been building up a lexicon for years. He deals in abstract concepts, and it's semi-humourous by intention. The most widely read but is a long series on a "nature of the firm" concept developed by analysing "The Office." Top down, in this context, means something like Canberra. A city that was built from comprehensive designs created a priori and a formalized (legible, in Venkat's terms) decision making processes. Bottom-up means something like language, which is created by people using an illegible (more or less meaning impossible to describe mechanically) and distributed decision making processes. Personally, I think bits of it are quite brilliant.
- IAmGraydon 7y ago
  “I'm afraid this article is faux-profound gibberish.” Precisely.
- KirinDave 7y ago
  > What is linear, one-dimensional thinking? Doesn't say, and it's not a common term, either. I think this is poorly worded, but it reminds me of the sentiments expressed in the widely acclaimed "Seeing Like a State" by Scott and "Predictably Irrational" by Arielly that talk about how human cognition is wired on rather straightforward reward systems that tend to lead to local optimization and are bad at recognizing confounding. > What is the difference between top-down and bottom-up? Or rather, what is top and bottom? These terms have much better history in political philosophy and economics, referring to the direction in which authority flows. In the economics context, this is often presented as the polarizing views of Marx (a strictly work-generates-the-value-bottom-up approach) vs Burke (who implied the desire of the wealth is the sole determining factor of value). In a political context this is a conflict between authoritarian strategies (e.g., statism, monarchism, etc) and anarchistic ones (see 1920's Spain or the Free Territories of the Ukraine on a similar time for well-documented and more modern examples). These are a different axis than a lot of modern political discourse follows, but were quite important at the beginnings of the 1900s. > Nature and markets are almost the same thing when you look closely. An interesting theory, but I suspect a lot of economists and a lot of biologists would require clarification. > Evolution is a kind of algorithm that operates in many ways. You need just imperfect memory and selection to generate all sorts of patterns, in biological life, as in the economy. This isn't a particularly useful or predictive insight. You're saying, "Algorithms exist to express both these systems."
VMG 7y ago
The author confuses government with markets multiple times
soVeryTired 7y ago
I do wish the author had gone with 'complex' and 'simple' instead of 'fractal' and 'linear'. I don't see anything particularly 'linear' about a chair, for example. Regarding the 'top-down' vs 'bottom-up' dichotomy - I don't really see why one is better than the other. I agree that humans tend to begin with a concrete idea and iterate on their designs from there (a 'top-down' approach). The article seems to be driving at the notion that nature's emergent, bottom-up approach is somehow better. But beyond the observation that the amazon rainforest is more diverse than a monocultural man-made forest, I don't think they really substantiate why that is so.
- paraschopra 7y ago
  Yes, I used the words in the title somewhat liberally. I don’t think there’s anything universally good or bad about top-down planning. It boils down to context. Recognition of contexts where top down planning might fail is a desirable thing.
  - soVeryTired 7y ago
    So is recognition of the limitations of bottom-up 'planning'. For all its impressive biochemistry, nature never managed to invent the wheel :)
    - paraschopra 7y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Rolling_animals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Rolling_animals
      - soVeryTired 7y ago
        There's a difference between a wheel and a ball. A wheel has an axle.
    - clairity 7y ago
      nature didn’t evolve a wheel (at least it didn’t stick around, there were probably plenty of attempts) because environments aren’t uniform enough to use it as a primary mode of movement (which facilitates finding food, escaping danger, finding mates, etc).
kulu2002 7y ago
Nice article. But I don't understand from where the 'markets' came in picture. Probably 'Life is fractal, but human understanding about it is square' btw Markets can also be bottom up...
paraschopra 7y ago
Hi everyone. Author here. There are multiple comments criticising the choice of word ‘markets’ so I’ll explain my motivation here. Yes, both biology and free-market economy are unplanned. However, just because life had a billion years of headstart, biology is much more complex with several levels of emergent structure (ATP, mitochondria, cell, organ, organism, family, tribe). All such systems interact and influence each other in ways that we don’t fully understand (or perhaps can even hope to understand). This richness came about by a blind process of natural selection. Markets, relative to biology, are much simpler because products and services are designed not by a blind process but motivated individuals. Perhaps, as someone else pointed out, I could have called it 'abstractions'. But the point is that what we produce in markets (like a chair) is limited by the human mind’s ability to understand and design for the complex system that’s a human. In that sense, I call markets square. Because they only address the richness of nature bluntly, the subtlety of nature is necessarily lost in market transactions because it is human mind that’s doing transactions. If we give markets millions of years, yes, perhaps the “invisible hand” will create the same richness and subtlety in offerings and transactions that we see in nature. But I’m not so sure about this. Maybe our mind will prove to be a limitation in our ability to design solutions for complex systems. The overall point of the essay is to do with our inability to comprehend complex systems, but our tendency to act as if we do. Hope this clarifies.
- dalbasal 7y ago
  In some senses, I think it might be worth avoiding "markets" as a canonical example.. for two reasons. One is that the ground is not just well covered, it's been a major ideological battleground for at least the last 150 years. The invisible hand of the market has had countless brain cycles, books, and political sermons dedicated to exposing it. We're hyper-aware (and paranoid) of it. We've basically been inventing invisible hand detection devices, and everyone is sure that their device is the accurate one. The second reason is that it's inevitably unclean as an example. Governments are usually taken as non-participants in markets, alternatives to markets and such. Reality is much messier. Governments are simultaneously participants, regulators and alternatives. More importantly, there's a tendency to think of markets as being made of people, where in fact they're largely made of companies. Companies are institutions made of people, like (sometimes very like) governments... but they aren't people. They're another thing, another(aside from markets) way of organising economic activity.. Ronald Coase started his nobel-winning line of enquiry with the question "if markets are so great, why are companies run like totalitarian regimes?" As you say, markets are both top down and bottom up.. in a mesh of ways. Most importantly... fresh examples help with fresh thinking. How about "languages" instead of markets. They're made by people, evolve in organic-like ways, are undirected.... The invisible hand is far less visible here. Most people have barely noticed its existence.
anoncake 7y ago
> 1/ When humans wield their power in the world, they are limited by the linear nature of their thinking. The best example of this linearization is the top-down planning of modern suburbs. You can't demonstrate that humans cannot think linearly by showing an example where they didn't. > Contrast this with how nations and states emerged in a bottom-up fashion. Except in the Americas, Africa, the Middle East (European colonization) and Europe (Congress of Vienna, changes after the world wars). Australia is a special case (with only one souvereign state), I don't know enough about Asia. > 2/ This transformation of what looks like random, irregular structure into more orderly structure is because the human mind is incapable of grasping non-linear, complex interactions. We comprehend information linearly and hence our planning of the world around us is linear too. Would you please stop insulting my species? > 3/ This tendency of making sense of the world dooms apparently well-intentioned projects. When we plant a new forest to “save” our earth, we transform an earthly, fractal landscape into a two dimensional monoculture. Foresters are perfectly capable of planting a mixed forest. When they didn't, it's either because the forest was planted a long time ago when monocultures appeared to be a good idea or for economic reasons. > 4/ Because our mind can only accommodate thinking in one dimension (time) or at best two dimensions (map), I'm pretty sure my mind manages 3 dimensions. We also can deal with problems that have more dimensions, just not using spatial thinking. > our designed objects ignore the messy intricacies of the real world. Our designed objects ignore some messy intriaces because there are a lot of them. > It’s apparent in all objects designed by humans, including the humble chair. That humble chair is not excatly state of the ergonomic art. > 7/ [...] Governments optimize what they understand and wellbeing, being a product of evolution, is a mix of factors is that cannot be intervened into in a top-down manner. Doctors optimize what they understand and health, being a product of evolution, is a mix of factors that cannot be intervened into in a top-down manner. > 8/ A revolutionary idea is that governments should leave people alone so they could pursue their well-being in a bottom-up fashion via social interactions in their local area. In fact, that’s how the world was before the advent of nation-state. The modern concept of a "nation" is relatively recent, it has only been invented in the 19th century. Governments that do things other than leaving people alone have existed for millenia. In fact, "not leaving people (completely) alone" is kind of what governments do. The idea that governments should leave people alone is called "liberty" which is derived from a latin word with the same meaning. So if it's a revolutionary idea, that revolution must have a long time ago. Organizing the state in a bottom-up manner, giving the lower levels of government more power than the upper ones, isn't a new idea either. The Holy Roman Emperors didn't really rule their empire, at least in modern history. Also, the absence of a state is perfectly compatible with top-down government. The chief of your tribe won't leave you alone. Chance are you cannot even elect them, making the tribe more top-down than a democratic state. > 9/ Nation-state was inevitable because humans reasoned they could efficiently defend against enemies if they pooled their resources. Maybe the state was, this is not really specific to nation states in particular. However defense from enemies is far from the only role of the state. Even hardcore classical liberals agree that it should keep the peace, major infrastructure projects require a major organization and sometimes eminent domain, Robin Hoods and charities cannot replace a welfare state. > Notice what got lost in this optimization of defense: the complex, local web of interactions that everybody was a part of, and yet nobody understood. If you don't have any social life beyond interacting with the state, you probably should get help. > 12/ [...] Perhaps nature is able to do it because it has no foresight. No one forces you to use your foresight. Forsight isn't incompatible with bottom-up design/emergence either.
dghf 7y ago
> 8/ A revolutionary idea is that governments should leave people alone so they could pursue their well-being in a bottom-up fashion via social interactions in their local area. In fact, that’s how the world was before the advent of nation-state. That depends on how you define "people". In much of mediaeval Europe, for example, it was the heavily armed aristocracy who were left alone "so they could pursue their well-being": the lightly armed or unarmed peasantry that they ruled over, not so much. (And when the latter did attempt to pursue it in an unapproved manner, they were put down with violence: see Wat Tyler's Revolt, for example.) > 9/ Nation-state was inevitable because humans reasoned they could efficiently defend against enemies if they pooled their resources. Notice what got lost in this optimization of defense: the complex, local web of interactions that everybody was a part of, and yet nobody understood. That suggests that a nation-state was a collaborative exercise of its people as a whole, rather than the result of the consolidation of power by its monarchs over time. That sounds more like a "Just So" story than history.
- looeee 7y ago
  > In fact, that’s how the world was before the advent of nation-state AKA the Golden Age fallacy
  - arthev 7y ago
    Sounds like you might have a case of the fallacy fallacy :)
    - LeonB 7y ago
      Or this could be the fallacy fallacy fallacy, an infinite regress of fallacy? :-)
  - KirinDave 7y ago
    Large-scale organized governments are a technology enabled by (at a minimum) writing and mathematics. It's not so much a golden age as a tautology to say that before those things existed these structures had less authority.
aloer 7y ago
Two months ago I wrote this comment in a thread about the healing power of gardens/nature: I've had a theory for some time now based on my own observations: A big part of why nature is so calming is the absence of repeating patterns. In our artificial life everything follows standardized forms and patterns. It's a sterile world. The most obvious example being rectangles and perfect 90 degree angles everywhere. But I would also count things like uniform colors, evenly spread (artificial) light, predictable sounds etc. That makes me think that somehow something like this absence of patterns - and the knowledge/assumption for our brain that they are not to be expected in nature - helps us. The beauty in this is that nature _is_ full of patterns. But on a different level, no two patterns are ever the same. When you look at a green tree you simply won't assume to find two leaves with the same color and shape -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19693343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19693343 A comment by patcon linked the following article: http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/is-consciousness-fractal http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/is-consciousness-fra... A fascinating read about fractal patterns in nature and how they feel “just right” to us
- paraschopra 7y ago
  Thanks for linking the article and the comment. Both were fantastic reads.
mikorym 7y ago
Whereas this may be useful for a social science class, I don't think it is useful for a more precise discussion. PS: Why call this bottom up vs. top down? That terminology sounds imprecise and confusing to me.
- jonnycomputer 7y ago
  it wouldn't be useful for a social science class because it is not precise enough.
magpi3 7y ago
> 1/ When humans wield their power in the world, they are limited by the linear nature of their thinking. The best example of this linearization is the top-down planning of modern suburbs. Contrast this with how nations and states emerged in a bottom-up fashion. Gardens and gardeners are one challenge to this assertion. A gardener can plan things and yet also be aware that much of what will happen is beyond their control and even sometimes their understanding.
macawfish 7y ago
Maybe markets were once a useful way of communicating supply and demand for the greater good, but nowadays the way they're often used perverts that communication via exploitative usary.
- macawfish 7y ago
  Downvote me all you want but it's said that vacant homes outnumber homeless people by 6 to 1. That's a complete and utter failure of "the market" to communicate actual supply and demand. (https://www.mintpressnews.com/empty-homes-outnumber-the-homeless-6-to-1-so-why-not-give-them-homes/207194/ https://www.mintpressnews.com/empty-homes-outnumber-the-home...)
kitten_smuggler 7y ago
This was neat, good job!
jonnycomputer 7y ago
Is "our inability to think fractally and nonlinearly" a linear or a nonlinear idea?
jnordwick 7y ago
This this a lot of r/iam14andthisisdeep buzzword bingo.
synlatexc 7y ago
"And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery" - Whitman
__MatrixMan__ 7y ago
I think about squares often, well rectangles really. Practically everything I see is a rectangle. I go to a rectangular building and poke little rectangles to fill my rectangular screen with glyphs bounded by rectangles and tesselating on the screen like rectangles would--and I see it all through my rectangular glasses. Why? Well, recycles tesselate--so that's one property that rules out pentagons, say, as our shape of choice, but why not triangles? Or hexagons? This question, I think, is similar to another one: why was euclidean geometry developed more than a thousand years earlier than the non-euclidean ones? Is there something more human about right angles than some other one? (look up the playfair's axiom, you'll see the angles I'm taking about) It's everywhere. Prime numbers are those special ones that can't be expressed as a rectangle of dots on the page. Why do we define multiplication this way? Is there something perhaps arbitrary and anthropocentric in our preference for right angles? If so it would explain why the distribution of the primes is so unpredictable. I think it is because we live at the bottom of a gravity well and have an adaptation (building things) which makes that matter. I also think that if we could rid our mathematics of that bias, it would sort of trickle up into other domains and allow our constructs to take on more richness, like you see in the fractal side of the fractal vs rectangle images presented in the article.
- rtkwe 7y ago
  > why was euclidean geometry developed more than a thousand years earlier than the non-euclidean ones? Because euclidean geometry is the geometry we experience at a human scale. > Why do we define multiplication this way? It's not actually multiplication though, it's just a convenient representation of the repetitive addition that is actually multiplication. It's a clear way to show to children that we've taking 9 dots 3 times to get 27. It's a tool to teach and interface to a mathematical concept. Much the same as why we use rectangular screens instead of hexagons or anything else. It's the most convenient to manufacture and address because of how repetitive and similar each row is when you think about the arrays of pixels that make up the screen. Desks are mostly rectangles because it's easy to cut straight lines and they match well. Then when you have a lot of rectangular items it makes sense for the containers of those items (ie buildings) to be rectangular too so they fit and pack well without any weird gaps and wasted space. Also I'm not sure where you're coming from with the "bias in our mathematics" most higher level math (as early as Calc3 when you start dealing with multivariate integrals one of the most important skills is converting from cartesian coordinates to spherical or cylindrical because it often drastically simplifies the problem) includes a lot of different coordinate switching to simplify representations to simplify the math of solving a particular equation or reasoning about a system.
RocketSyntax 7y ago
Where exactly are markets mentioned? Look up the definition of laissez faire in relation to free markets.
ralusek 7y ago
Markets are as complicated as nature itself, and that complexity comes from scarcity. If you open a floodgate, there is a market for which water molecules will make it through first. Those nearest, those not in a grid lock, those in a solid vs liquid vs gaseous state, etc. If you add conscious decision making to processes bounded by scarcity, you get immeasurable complexity. The markets of the natural world brought the animal kingdom from amino acids. Natural selection is a market for gene participants to access scarce resources and propagate, and look what's come of it. Human language and slang is a shifting market for utility and signaling. Who you associate yourself with is a market bounded by extreme scarcity. Who makes you laugh, who listens, who you've known longest, who is physically nearest. Freedom is markets and markets are complicated.
bkohlmann 7y ago
I really enjoyed this. That said, The Godfather of fractal theory, Benoit Mandelbrot, wrote a book entitled “the Misbehavior of Markets” which is a deep dive into why markets exhibit fractal behavior (he even goes so far as to do the coastline zoom for stock market data).
Proven 7y ago
> Nation-state was inevitable because humans reasoned they could efficiently defend against enemies if they pooled their resources. Until one day I realized State is my only natural enemy.
xtiansimon 7y ago
This reads like a design manifesto. Reminds me of texts from the early 20th century (post-WWI, pre-WWII). The logic seems cohesive up to about #7 philosophy and government. Maybe the digression to the authors other works is better made in a footnote? I can take the conceit of ‘markets are square’, but only to the point where you show us something new that solves the problems described. Othesrwise, I feel the same as another commenter, the article descends into ‘faux-profound gibberish‘. I don’t believe the narrative thrust gets past it’s shortcomings, - the author’s facile contradiction ‘governments should leave people alone’ AND ‘nation-state was inevitable‘ - the author’s assumptions about fractals as complex and sophisticated. It’s been demonstrated that surprisingly few rules can lead to great diversity. Fractals are exactly this phenomena, but at a conceptually large scale. Makes the fractal argument seem like a McGuffin - I don’t believe the Amazon org-chart is the best we can do (‘the map is not the territory ‘).
pier25 7y ago
No, the length of the coastline doesn't change depending on scale. The map is not the territory. Also, you can have forests growing thanks to a conservationist top to bottom approach that do not look like a grid.
vannevar 7y ago
The author has the right idea, but the wrong target. The problem is not that we have top-down planning; as he notes, that goes back as far as the beginnings of civilization itself. The problem is that, due to technology and the increasing concentration of wealth, top-down can now encompass vast scales that it could not in the past. A human-planted forest isn't a big deal when it's a handful of people planting a few acres. The tree mono-culture in the small patch gets absorbed over time in to the greater, more heterogeneous whole. But now one corporate entity can transform millions of acres in a short time. Corporations can blanket thousands of cities with scooters, release a new food product that instantly appears in millions of stores, or pepper the landscape with identical franchises virtually overnight. It this kind of massive centralization of power that should be drawing the author's criticism, not the mere notion of top-down planning.
corporateVeal27 7y ago
This reminds me a lot of the book The Evolution of Everything by Matt Ridley (author of the Red Queen). It's effectively an anthropological study that goes over how bottom-up self organizing systems occur even in human sub-cultures

161 points by paraschopra 7y ago

And now we are using these top-down developed computers to try and simulate bottom-up phenomena (like pattern recognition) and call it AI (well Neural Networks to be specific)

dmos62 7y ago
What would a bottom-up developed computer be like? Can you elaborate on top-down/bottom-up in this context?
- partomniscient 7y ago
  I don't think the question you posed makes sense. If it was bottom up developed, it would be adaptive, and therefore not a computer as such. Adaptive systems manage to handle new input (or fail). The computer is only going to do what it's been programmed (however poorly) to do. One of the things required for computation is predictable repetition - same inputs, same outputs. This is why error recognition/correction is so important for things like physical ram and ethernet packets - it's effectively trying to filter out any bottom up behaviour that could affect the environment of the computation/information transmission. An ever so slightly different environment would affect the same inputs in a bottom up system - think along the lines of butterflies affecting weather systems by flapping their wings. You could claim everything that happens is a result of 'some computation' but then you end up in semantic arguments how to define 'life' (or how to define what's 'computable', which is it's own entire problem). A couple of books from back in the day in my life relevant to this were these two, and they're still probably a good place to consider things from even today. https://www.stevenlevy.com/index.php/books/artificial-life https://www.stevenlevy.com/index.php/books/artificial-life https://kk.org/outofcontrol/ https://kk.org/outofcontrol/
  - rtkwe 7y ago
    The Ur example of a bottom up computer would be the brain. It works on disparate unformatted inputs and can translate to a context appropriate output and while there's no programming language for the mind (unless you want to stretch a bit and say speech) you can instruct one in the particular ways you want input manipulated into outputs.
- jonnycomputer 7y ago
  the brain, probably. or a rock.

cjfd 7y ago

Markets are very much fractal too. One should notice that there are companies of every size presumably distributed according to a power law. Pretty much the definition of a fractal. Seems like an ideologically motivated piece to badmouth markets which is popular. And if one is from the other side of the spectrum one would say that in many instances these big companies get incentivized by government regulation. On both sides there is too much of a knee-jerk reaction and too less appreciation that things vary greatly per sector and per case and in some cases one side of the opinion spectrum is correct and in other cases the other side.

paraschopra 7y ago
My point is that the transactions in a market are always on a few dimensions (price, packaging, utility, etc.) while our daily experience isn't like that. I agree with you that on a higher-level there's an emergent richness within the markets too (as captured by power laws) but it's less rich than the lived experience.
- ajuc 7y ago
  > price, packaging, utility these are abstractions, you can invent similar abstractions for "our living experience" and reduce it to a few variables as well. I don't get what's your point other than "markets bad, life good".
  - paraschopra 7y ago
    The point is that even reducing our lives experience to few abstractions like happiness makes them a limited view of what’s going on (via millions of years of our evolution) If abstractions were successful at addressing issues, the self-help industry would have eliminated unhappiness. Our thinking is linear, we abstract rich phenomena into few categories that we can verbalise our understand. In that process, richness is lost.
    - ajuc 7y ago
      Abstractions are leaky, both these about markets and these about lives. It's ok, we know they leak details, we use them to get results faster. Markets are part of living, so it's not surprising that life as a whole is more complex than small part of it. But I don't see any qualitative differences, just a difference in degree. And millions of years of evolution isn't a very good argument - because rate of evolution is much quicker for culture than for biology. Nature was stuck on unicellular life and in oceans for billions of years. We got from walking to driving, flying and interplanetary travel in a few thousand years. What's going on behind all that richness in the universe might be very simple. We think it is actually very simple - a bunch of numeric fields and a few simple rules of how they interact. > Our thinking is linear, we abstract rich phenomena into few categories that we can verbalise our understand. I'm not sure what you mean by linear. People are certainly capable of thinking nonlinearly - for example people can understand recurrence. Abstraction also isn't the only kind of thinking we can do. We can be exhaustive as well, it's just slow and often doesn't contribute much to the result so why do it. > In that process, richness is lost. What do you exactly mean by that?

ajuc 7y ago

Markets are the opposite of top-down linear design. Markets are full of feed-back loops and chaotic behavior. Markets are the way for people to cease top-down planning and still get things done. If we understood markets like we understand a chair there would be no economic crises. As for suburbs - give them 500 years and then we can talk. You need time to accumulate all the changing pressures into something that looks organic - visit any old city in Europe :) All trees of particular species look the same when they start - after 100 years they usually look different because of the interplay between environment and them. Same with snowflakes and other traditional examples of fractals - including mountains and coast. Suburbs are just starting, in a few centuries they will be as organic as old cities are. Oh and regarding "linearity" of human inventions - it's much easier to make a mess than to make a good orthogonal design. If you don't limit yourself and write a code adding features as you need them you will end up with something that is very much organic, and that's not a positive - we call it "spaghetti-code" because when you try to change anything - it changes stuff in 100 different places. Orthogonality in design isn't a byproduct of human limitations, it's a thing we constantly fight for, and we do that because it has advantages. You can easily optimize it and modify it for various purposes.

oeuviz 7y ago
If we understood markets like we understand a chair there would be no economic crises. Well, maybe there would be no unwanted economic crises.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Try unexpected, because one man's economic crisis can very well be another man's creative disruption of a very large market.
Barrin92 7y ago
some utopian idea of 'the market' resembles bottom-up processes yes. But the modern market (and given that the author chose to use chips as an example) does not. The modern economy is to a very high degree planned, mind you not only by the state, but by corporations. The corporation itself is a top-down designed entity, internally displacing markets. Everything that enables modern productivity gains occured in the context of streamlining, designing, and ordering production. The shift-worker at the conveyor belt at a 400k population company isn't exactly comparable to the medieval merchant on the local bazaar. And I suspect that the author is implicitly critizing this, but there's a reason why this development took place. Even if the rigidly designed chair doesn't appear to be innovative, top-down design actually is. Even ardent capitalists like Schumpeter recognised that there is more inherent dynamism in large monopolies than there is in some natural, unordered market. You can't go to the moon by climing up trees as the saying goes, and that's why nature without design never made it there. The nation state, the modern company and all those institutions won because the incrementalism found in bottom-up design is inherently limited.

koliber 7y ago

This was a fantastically straightforward explanation of something that is very elusive to explain. It reminds me of Christopher Alexander's "The Timeless Way of Building", but 500 pages shorter and less meandering.

m12k 7y ago

'Markets' was a poor choice for the right hand side, as they are in fact bottom up. 'Naturally occurring structures are fractal, but human abstractions about them are square' would be much closer to the point, though not as catchy.

keymone 7y ago

our emotional response to seeing two wolves is probably about twice that of seeing one wolf. but response to seeing 100 wolves and 200 wolves is probably about the same. point being - there's plenty of logarithmic thinking in our brains, so we're not that linear. i fail to come up with similar example for exponential thinking, we probably really can't comprehend that. Edit: typo

anoncake 7y ago
> our emotional response to seeing two wolves is probably about twice that of seeing one wolf. I think it's closer to equal. One wolf is a danger, two wolves is a danger. Especially when one wolf causes maximal fear, two wolves can't appear any more dangerous.

antoniorosado 7y ago

I really liked this post :)

Nursie 7y ago

This is littered with bland assertions "4/ Because our mind can only accommodate thinking in one dimension (time) or at best two dimensions (map)," Really? And a chair, a 3D object, is your illustration of this?

ForHackernews 7y ago

I think "Reality has a surprising amount of detail" [0] is a better restatement of this same basic idea. Also, I don't think it's true that humans are "incapable of grasping non-linear, complex interactions" -- it's just that hard things are hard. If you can save yourself a huge amount of effort by using a first-order approximation, you should absolutely do that if you can get away with it. There's a reason civil engineers don't typically concern themselves with relativistic effects. [0] http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

paraschopra 7y ago
Yes, I love the essay you mention. Well, not understanding complex systems is ok when you are designing bridges. But first order approximation fails horribly while designing policies. As a simple example, Indian subcontinent where people aggregated in clusters over many thousand years got divided into India and Pakistan via a simple almost linear boundary. Result: hundreds of thousands of people displaced and died during ensuing mass migrations.

watt 7y ago

The essay does not support the summary (or conclusion). Markets are just as bottom-up as anything.

protez 7y ago

The significance between top-down vs. bottom-up has been compiled and showcased by Matt Ridley, in his book, "The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge." It says most of human beings are incapable of comprehending evolutionary design like free market. It's true. OP labeled markets as an example of top-down phenomenon.

mapcars 7y ago

Nice article, a few comments I would like to add >If philosophers can’t answer what makes the life meaningful Philosophers fail here because it is beyond thinking and experience based, so one can not file a paper saying I found it - even if it is correct, it will not have any impact on others. >how can governments maximize it? Governments need not maximize it, they just need to create fair conditions for everyone, people inevitably will get there themselves, exactly as it's stated later: >A revolutionary idea is that governments should leave people alone so they could pursue their well-being >because the human mind is incapable of grasping non-linear, complex interactions The word "mind" is not specific enough, what mentioned here is intellect. There are other dimensions to mind which are capable of much more than we can imagine.

dmos62 7y ago
> >If philosophers can’t answer what makes the life meaningful I think the question is answered, in that it's shown that the question is misguided. It's the problem-solving aspect of our minds that earns to find meaning, even in things that don't inherently have it, which is most things. What is the meaning of this geopolitical event? What is the meaning of the big bang? If that little problem-solver inside us can't distinguish the validity of these questions, then you experience compulsive meaning seeking. So I agree with you, it's beyond "thinking".
- Retra 7y ago
  The question has been answered over and over again. People asking this question don't want answers, they want a mystery to be in awe of.

lordnacho 7y ago

I'm afraid this article is faux-profound gibberish. What is linear, one-dimensional thinking? Doesn't say, and it's not a common term, either. What is the difference between top-down and bottom-up? Or rather, what is top and bottom? I wonder if this is AI generated. Lots of interesting buzzwords, glued together in sentences that don't create a whole. Like that picture that looks familiar but you can't recognise any object in it. Nature and markets are almost the same thing when you look closely. Evolution is a kind of algorithm that operates in many ways. You need just imperfect memory and selection to generate all sorts of patterns, in biological life, as in the economy.

dalbasal 7y ago
The author of the referenced post, Venkatesh Rao is a unique cat. The terms/concepts are from him and he's been building up a lexicon for years. He deals in abstract concepts, and it's semi-humourous by intention. The most widely read but is a long series on a "nature of the firm" concept developed by analysing "The Office." Top down, in this context, means something like Canberra. A city that was built from comprehensive designs created a priori and a formalized (legible, in Venkat's terms) decision making processes. Bottom-up means something like language, which is created by people using an illegible (more or less meaning impossible to describe mechanically) and distributed decision making processes. Personally, I think bits of it are quite brilliant.
IAmGraydon 7y ago
“I'm afraid this article is faux-profound gibberish.” Precisely.
KirinDave 7y ago
> What is linear, one-dimensional thinking? Doesn't say, and it's not a common term, either. I think this is poorly worded, but it reminds me of the sentiments expressed in the widely acclaimed "Seeing Like a State" by Scott and "Predictably Irrational" by Arielly that talk about how human cognition is wired on rather straightforward reward systems that tend to lead to local optimization and are bad at recognizing confounding. > What is the difference between top-down and bottom-up? Or rather, what is top and bottom? These terms have much better history in political philosophy and economics, referring to the direction in which authority flows. In the economics context, this is often presented as the polarizing views of Marx (a strictly work-generates-the-value-bottom-up approach) vs Burke (who implied the desire of the wealth is the sole determining factor of value). In a political context this is a conflict between authoritarian strategies (e.g., statism, monarchism, etc) and anarchistic ones (see 1920's Spain or the Free Territories of the Ukraine on a similar time for well-documented and more modern examples). These are a different axis than a lot of modern political discourse follows, but were quite important at the beginnings of the 1900s. > Nature and markets are almost the same thing when you look closely. An interesting theory, but I suspect a lot of economists and a lot of biologists would require clarification. > Evolution is a kind of algorithm that operates in many ways. You need just imperfect memory and selection to generate all sorts of patterns, in biological life, as in the economy. This isn't a particularly useful or predictive insight. You're saying, "Algorithms exist to express both these systems."

VMG 7y ago

The author confuses government with markets multiple times

soVeryTired 7y ago

I do wish the author had gone with 'complex' and 'simple' instead of 'fractal' and 'linear'. I don't see anything particularly 'linear' about a chair, for example. Regarding the 'top-down' vs 'bottom-up' dichotomy - I don't really see why one is better than the other. I agree that humans tend to begin with a concrete idea and iterate on their designs from there (a 'top-down' approach). The article seems to be driving at the notion that nature's emergent, bottom-up approach is somehow better. But beyond the observation that the amazon rainforest is more diverse than a monocultural man-made forest, I don't think they really substantiate why that is so.

paraschopra 7y ago
Yes, I used the words in the title somewhat liberally. I don’t think there’s anything universally good or bad about top-down planning. It boils down to context. Recognition of contexts where top down planning might fail is a desirable thing.
- soVeryTired 7y ago
  So is recognition of the limitations of bottom-up 'planning'. For all its impressive biochemistry, nature never managed to invent the wheel :)
  - paraschopra 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Rolling_animals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Rolling_animals
    - soVeryTired 7y ago
      There's a difference between a wheel and a ball. A wheel has an axle.
  - clairity 7y ago
    nature didn’t evolve a wheel (at least it didn’t stick around, there were probably plenty of attempts) because environments aren’t uniform enough to use it as a primary mode of movement (which facilitates finding food, escaping danger, finding mates, etc).

kulu2002 7y ago

Nice article. But I don't understand from where the 'markets' came in picture. Probably 'Life is fractal, but human understanding about it is square' btw Markets can also be bottom up...

paraschopra 7y ago

Hi everyone. Author here. There are multiple comments criticising the choice of word ‘markets’ so I’ll explain my motivation here. Yes, both biology and free-market economy are unplanned. However, just because life had a billion years of headstart, biology is much more complex with several levels of emergent structure (ATP, mitochondria, cell, organ, organism, family, tribe). All such systems interact and influence each other in ways that we don’t fully understand (or perhaps can even hope to understand). This richness came about by a blind process of natural selection. Markets, relative to biology, are much simpler because products and services are designed not by a blind process but motivated individuals. Perhaps, as someone else pointed out, I could have called it 'abstractions'. But the point is that what we produce in markets (like a chair) is limited by the human mind’s ability to understand and design for the complex system that’s a human. In that sense, I call markets square. Because they only address the richness of nature bluntly, the subtlety of nature is necessarily lost in market transactions because it is human mind that’s doing transactions. If we give markets millions of years, yes, perhaps the “invisible hand” will create the same richness and subtlety in offerings and transactions that we see in nature. But I’m not so sure about this. Maybe our mind will prove to be a limitation in our ability to design solutions for complex systems. The overall point of the essay is to do with our inability to comprehend complex systems, but our tendency to act as if we do. Hope this clarifies.

dalbasal 7y ago
In some senses, I think it might be worth avoiding "markets" as a canonical example.. for two reasons. One is that the ground is not just well covered, it's been a major ideological battleground for at least the last 150 years. The invisible hand of the market has had countless brain cycles, books, and political sermons dedicated to exposing it. We're hyper-aware (and paranoid) of it. We've basically been inventing invisible hand detection devices, and everyone is sure that their device is the accurate one. The second reason is that it's inevitably unclean as an example. Governments are usually taken as non-participants in markets, alternatives to markets and such. Reality is much messier. Governments are simultaneously participants, regulators and alternatives. More importantly, there's a tendency to think of markets as being made of people, where in fact they're largely made of companies. Companies are institutions made of people, like (sometimes very like) governments... but they aren't people. They're another thing, another(aside from markets) way of organising economic activity.. Ronald Coase started his nobel-winning line of enquiry with the question "if markets are so great, why are companies run like totalitarian regimes?" As you say, markets are both top down and bottom up.. in a mesh of ways. Most importantly... fresh examples help with fresh thinking. How about "languages" instead of markets. They're made by people, evolve in organic-like ways, are undirected.... The invisible hand is far less visible here. Most people have barely noticed its existence.

anoncake 7y ago

> 1/ When humans wield their power in the world, they are limited by the linear nature of their thinking. The best example of this linearization is the top-down planning of modern suburbs. You can't demonstrate that humans cannot think linearly by showing an example where they didn't. > Contrast this with how nations and states emerged in a bottom-up fashion. Except in the Americas, Africa, the Middle East (European colonization) and Europe (Congress of Vienna, changes after the world wars). Australia is a special case (with only one souvereign state), I don't know enough about Asia. > 2/ This transformation of what looks like random, irregular structure into more orderly structure is because the human mind is incapable of grasping non-linear, complex interactions. We comprehend information linearly and hence our planning of the world around us is linear too. Would you please stop insulting my species? > 3/ This tendency of making sense of the world dooms apparently well-intentioned projects. When we plant a new forest to “save” our earth, we transform an earthly, fractal landscape into a two dimensional monoculture. Foresters are perfectly capable of planting a mixed forest. When they didn't, it's either because the forest was planted a long time ago when monocultures appeared to be a good idea or for economic reasons. > 4/ Because our mind can only accommodate thinking in one dimension (time) or at best two dimensions (map), I'm pretty sure my mind manages 3 dimensions. We also can deal with problems that have more dimensions, just not using spatial thinking. > our designed objects ignore the messy intricacies of the real world. Our designed objects ignore some messy intriaces because there are a lot of them. > It’s apparent in all objects designed by humans, including the humble chair. That humble chair is not excatly state of the ergonomic art. > 7/ [...] Governments optimize what they understand and wellbeing, being a product of evolution, is a mix of factors is that cannot be intervened into in a top-down manner. Doctors optimize what they understand and health, being a product of evolution, is a mix of factors that cannot be intervened into in a top-down manner. > 8/ A revolutionary idea is that governments should leave people alone so they could pursue their well-being in a bottom-up fashion via social interactions in their local area. In fact, that’s how the world was before the advent of nation-state. The modern concept of a "nation" is relatively recent, it has only been invented in the 19th century. Governments that do things other than leaving people alone have existed for millenia. In fact, "not leaving people (completely) alone" is kind of what governments do. The idea that governments should leave people alone is called "liberty" which is derived from a latin word with the same meaning. So if it's a revolutionary idea, that revolution must have a long time ago. Organizing the state in a bottom-up manner, giving the lower levels of government more power than the upper ones, isn't a new idea either. The Holy Roman Emperors didn't really rule their empire, at least in modern history. Also, the absence of a state is perfectly compatible with top-down government. The chief of your tribe won't leave you alone. Chance are you cannot even elect them, making the tribe more top-down than a democratic state. > 9/ Nation-state was inevitable because humans reasoned they could efficiently defend against enemies if they pooled their resources. Maybe the state was, this is not really specific to nation states in particular. However defense from enemies is far from the only role of the state. Even hardcore classical liberals agree that it should keep the peace, major infrastructure projects require a major organization and sometimes eminent domain, Robin Hoods and charities cannot replace a welfare state. > Notice what got lost in this optimization of defense: the complex, local web of interactions that everybody was a part of, and yet nobody understood. If you don't have any social life beyond interacting with the state, you probably should get help. > 12/ [...] Perhaps nature is able to do it because it has no foresight. No one forces you to use your foresight. Forsight isn't incompatible with bottom-up design/emergence either.

dghf 7y ago

> 8/ A revolutionary idea is that governments should leave people alone so they could pursue their well-being in a bottom-up fashion via social interactions in their local area. In fact, that’s how the world was before the advent of nation-state. That depends on how you define "people". In much of mediaeval Europe, for example, it was the heavily armed aristocracy who were left alone "so they could pursue their well-being": the lightly armed or unarmed peasantry that they ruled over, not so much. (And when the latter did attempt to pursue it in an unapproved manner, they were put down with violence: see Wat Tyler's Revolt, for example.) > 9/ Nation-state was inevitable because humans reasoned they could efficiently defend against enemies if they pooled their resources. Notice what got lost in this optimization of defense: the complex, local web of interactions that everybody was a part of, and yet nobody understood. That suggests that a nation-state was a collaborative exercise of its people as a whole, rather than the result of the consolidation of power by its monarchs over time. That sounds more like a "Just So" story than history.

looeee 7y ago
> In fact, that’s how the world was before the advent of nation-state AKA the Golden Age fallacy
- arthev 7y ago
  Sounds like you might have a case of the fallacy fallacy :)
  - LeonB 7y ago
    Or this could be the fallacy fallacy fallacy, an infinite regress of fallacy? :-)
- KirinDave 7y ago
  Large-scale organized governments are a technology enabled by (at a minimum) writing and mathematics. It's not so much a golden age as a tautology to say that before those things existed these structures had less authority.

aloer 7y ago

Two months ago I wrote this comment in a thread about the healing power of gardens/nature: I've had a theory for some time now based on my own observations: A big part of why nature is so calming is the absence of repeating patterns. In our artificial life everything follows standardized forms and patterns. It's a sterile world. The most obvious example being rectangles and perfect 90 degree angles everywhere. But I would also count things like uniform colors, evenly spread (artificial) light, predictable sounds etc. That makes me think that somehow something like this absence of patterns - and the knowledge/assumption for our brain that they are not to be expected in nature - helps us. The beauty in this is that nature _is_ full of patterns. But on a different level, no two patterns are ever the same. When you look at a green tree you simply won't assume to find two leaves with the same color and shape -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19693343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19693343 A comment by patcon linked the following article: http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/is-consciousness-fractal http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/is-consciousness-fra... A fascinating read about fractal patterns in nature and how they feel “just right” to us

paraschopra 7y ago
Thanks for linking the article and the comment. Both were fantastic reads.

mikorym 7y ago

Whereas this may be useful for a social science class, I don't think it is useful for a more precise discussion. PS: Why call this bottom up vs. top down? That terminology sounds imprecise and confusing to me.

jonnycomputer 7y ago
it wouldn't be useful for a social science class because it is not precise enough.

magpi3 7y ago

> 1/ When humans wield their power in the world, they are limited by the linear nature of their thinking. The best example of this linearization is the top-down planning of modern suburbs. Contrast this with how nations and states emerged in a bottom-up fashion. Gardens and gardeners are one challenge to this assertion. A gardener can plan things and yet also be aware that much of what will happen is beyond their control and even sometimes their understanding.

macawfish 7y ago

Maybe markets were once a useful way of communicating supply and demand for the greater good, but nowadays the way they're often used perverts that communication via exploitative usary.

macawfish 7y ago
Downvote me all you want but it's said that vacant homes outnumber homeless people by 6 to 1. That's a complete and utter failure of "the market" to communicate actual supply and demand. (https://www.mintpressnews.com/empty-homes-outnumber-the-homeless-6-to-1-so-why-not-give-them-homes/207194/ https://www.mintpressnews.com/empty-homes-outnumber-the-home...)

kitten_smuggler 7y ago

This was neat, good job!

jonnycomputer 7y ago

Is "our inability to think fractally and nonlinearly" a linear or a nonlinear idea?

jnordwick 7y ago

This this a lot of r/iam14andthisisdeep buzzword bingo.

synlatexc 7y ago

"And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery" - Whitman

__MatrixMan__ 7y ago

I think about squares often, well rectangles really. Practically everything I see is a rectangle. I go to a rectangular building and poke little rectangles to fill my rectangular screen with glyphs bounded by rectangles and tesselating on the screen like rectangles would--and I see it all through my rectangular glasses. Why? Well, recycles tesselate--so that's one property that rules out pentagons, say, as our shape of choice, but why not triangles? Or hexagons? This question, I think, is similar to another one: why was euclidean geometry developed more than a thousand years earlier than the non-euclidean ones? Is there something more human about right angles than some other one? (look up the playfair's axiom, you'll see the angles I'm taking about) It's everywhere. Prime numbers are those special ones that can't be expressed as a rectangle of dots on the page. Why do we define multiplication this way? Is there something perhaps arbitrary and anthropocentric in our preference for right angles? If so it would explain why the distribution of the primes is so unpredictable. I think it is because we live at the bottom of a gravity well and have an adaptation (building things) which makes that matter. I also think that if we could rid our mathematics of that bias, it would sort of trickle up into other domains and allow our constructs to take on more richness, like you see in the fractal side of the fractal vs rectangle images presented in the article.

rtkwe 7y ago
> why was euclidean geometry developed more than a thousand years earlier than the non-euclidean ones? Because euclidean geometry is the geometry we experience at a human scale. > Why do we define multiplication this way? It's not actually multiplication though, it's just a convenient representation of the repetitive addition that is actually multiplication. It's a clear way to show to children that we've taking 9 dots 3 times to get 27. It's a tool to teach and interface to a mathematical concept. Much the same as why we use rectangular screens instead of hexagons or anything else. It's the most convenient to manufacture and address because of how repetitive and similar each row is when you think about the arrays of pixels that make up the screen. Desks are mostly rectangles because it's easy to cut straight lines and they match well. Then when you have a lot of rectangular items it makes sense for the containers of those items (ie buildings) to be rectangular too so they fit and pack well without any weird gaps and wasted space. Also I'm not sure where you're coming from with the "bias in our mathematics" most higher level math (as early as Calc3 when you start dealing with multivariate integrals one of the most important skills is converting from cartesian coordinates to spherical or cylindrical because it often drastically simplifies the problem) includes a lot of different coordinate switching to simplify representations to simplify the math of solving a particular equation or reasoning about a system.

RocketSyntax 7y ago

Where exactly are markets mentioned? Look up the definition of laissez faire in relation to free markets.

ralusek 7y ago

Markets are as complicated as nature itself, and that complexity comes from scarcity. If you open a floodgate, there is a market for which water molecules will make it through first. Those nearest, those not in a grid lock, those in a solid vs liquid vs gaseous state, etc. If you add conscious decision making to processes bounded by scarcity, you get immeasurable complexity. The markets of the natural world brought the animal kingdom from amino acids. Natural selection is a market for gene participants to access scarce resources and propagate, and look what's come of it. Human language and slang is a shifting market for utility and signaling. Who you associate yourself with is a market bounded by extreme scarcity. Who makes you laugh, who listens, who you've known longest, who is physically nearest. Freedom is markets and markets are complicated.

bkohlmann 7y ago

I really enjoyed this. That said, The Godfather of fractal theory, Benoit Mandelbrot, wrote a book entitled “the Misbehavior of Markets” which is a deep dive into why markets exhibit fractal behavior (he even goes so far as to do the coastline zoom for stock market data).

Proven 7y ago

> Nation-state was inevitable because humans reasoned they could efficiently defend against enemies if they pooled their resources. Until one day I realized State is my only natural enemy.

xtiansimon 7y ago

This reads like a design manifesto. Reminds me of texts from the early 20th century (post-WWI, pre-WWII). The logic seems cohesive up to about #7 philosophy and government. Maybe the digression to the authors other works is better made in a footnote? I can take the conceit of ‘markets are square’, but only to the point where you show us something new that solves the problems described. Othesrwise, I feel the same as another commenter, the article descends into ‘faux-profound gibberish‘. I don’t believe the narrative thrust gets past it’s shortcomings, - the author’s facile contradiction ‘governments should leave people alone’ AND ‘nation-state was inevitable‘ - the author’s assumptions about fractals as complex and sophisticated. It’s been demonstrated that surprisingly few rules can lead to great diversity. Fractals are exactly this phenomena, but at a conceptually large scale. Makes the fractal argument seem like a McGuffin - I don’t believe the Amazon org-chart is the best we can do (‘the map is not the territory ‘).

pier25 7y ago

No, the length of the coastline doesn't change depending on scale. The map is not the territory. Also, you can have forests growing thanks to a conservationist top to bottom approach that do not look like a grid.

vannevar 7y ago

The author has the right idea, but the wrong target. The problem is not that we have top-down planning; as he notes, that goes back as far as the beginnings of civilization itself. The problem is that, due to technology and the increasing concentration of wealth, top-down can now encompass vast scales that it could not in the past. A human-planted forest isn't a big deal when it's a handful of people planting a few acres. The tree mono-culture in the small patch gets absorbed over time in to the greater, more heterogeneous whole. But now one corporate entity can transform millions of acres in a short time. Corporations can blanket thousands of cities with scooters, release a new food product that instantly appears in millions of stores, or pepper the landscape with identical franchises virtually overnight. It this kind of massive centralization of power that should be drawing the author's criticism, not the mere notion of top-down planning.

corporateVeal27 7y ago

This reminds me a lot of the book The Evolution of Everything by Matt Ridley (author of the Red Queen). It's effectively an anthropological study that goes over how bottom-up self organizing systems occur even in human sub-cultures