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Nature and Biology gives us a very strong counterexample to this. If centralization was the stable form you would expect to see an overwhelming preponderance of

Nature and Biology gives us a very strong counterexample to this. If centralization was the stable form you would expect to see an overwhelming preponderance of it. Instead you will almost always see a blend of centralized and decentralized forms, with a bias towards decentralization wherever it's a good fit. The vascular system is centralized; the nervous system is mostly federated; most of the rest is highly decentralized. A counter argument is that intelligent design changes the relative value of these different forms but I'm not sure whether there's enough evidence to support this. My theory on the matter is that the trend towards centralized forms in our current society has a lot to do with Conway's Law (organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.) We live in a society that currently has a very hierarchal, centralized and structured systems of power. This means that the subsystems (eg Corporations) and the artifacts of those systems are subtly pushed towards a similar form.

F00bart 7y ago
This. The influence of Conway’s law is underappreciated. We are all trained to see hierarchies as the only principle for building structure, it’s a dominant normative ideology. Once we see how to build decentralized systems, we can discover they are often more resilient and more effective. But we have to overcome the current centralization of power and our own tendency to structure the world in hierarchies.
didericis 7y ago
Completely agree. I think the efficiencies and benefits to centralization OP pointed out are real, but that there are practical benefits to decentralization as well. Decentralized solutions are not saddled with the same need to appease everyone at once. You can have local solutions extremely well adapted for local situations that know more details about the context than a large company trying to deal with everyone ever could. I’d argue centralized solutions are only as stable as the problem is uniform. If the problem differs even slightly between actors looking for solutions, those actors are either settling for a less than perfect fit when adopting a centralized solution, or the centralized solution is complex enough to handle those differences. As differences increase, the tradeoffs become unacceptable and/or the complexity becomes too much to handle, and the centralized solution falls apart. I don’t think a lot of centralized solutions are currently centralized because they’re efficient solutions to uniform problems; I don’t think most everyday, practical problems are all that uniform when you take everything into account (ex: supply availability for physical goods, UI expectations/preferences for digital stuff) although again, there can be/often is at least some gains in efficiency. I think it has more to do with the organizational forces you describe.
- Infinitesimus 7y ago
  > I’d argue centralized solutions are only as stable as the problem is uniform. If the problem differs even slightly between actors looking for solutions, those actors are either settling for a less than perfect fit when adopting a centralized solution, or the centralized solution is complex enough to handle those differences. As differences increase, the tradeoffs become unacceptable and/or the complexity becomes too much to handle, and the centralized solution falls apart. 100% I've been thinking of how this applies to our world today. For example, it is in Google's interest to train us to only use a subset of queries and words so their centralized solution can work (same with YouTube and any recommendation engine probably). Predicting or prodding you towards certain items (ads), pages, suggestions and the like - intentionally or not - only serve to reinforce a society of increased uniformity and thus, increased desirability of the centralized system. Newsfeeds suffer the same problem as does even autocomplete I think. It scares me about our future sometimes because products will slowly become more hostile to you the less you fit into a centralized model of their ideal consumer
jasode 7y ago
>Nature and Biology gives us a very strong counterexample to this. If centralization was the stable form The context of my claim was about computer information systems becoming centralized. Yes, I understand we do have decentralized washer & dryer machines at home instead of everyone going to centralized laundromat. And building residential houses is still a very local business that resists a hypothetical giant national corporation that builds every house in America. Even Jeff Bezos' Amazon can't conquer 1000 different local building codes and construction techniques to build homes. However, the realm of information technology seems to behave differently. I like to use the decentralized-Git-to-centralized-Github example because: - programmers are the ubergeeks that would conceivably be the vanguard of decentralization because they are already predisposed to understand its benefits - programmers (unlike mass consumers) have the technical know-how to implement their own git server if they wanted to and overcome any challenges of ISP NAT router. And yet, the vast majority just think: "Hmmm... there's a free service that can host my repo which means I don't have to spend _time_ or _money_ to mess with any of that home setup?!? Sign me up!!!" There is no "evil capitalist monopoly" that forced Git centralization on to resistant programmers. Instead, the programmers willingly put their code on Github because of the benefits. The economic forces overwhelm the ideals of the decentralized protocol. As mentioned before, a git distributed protocol can't stop an actor from spending more money on that protocol than others. Github Inc spent extra money on Ruby programmers to create extra features such as issues tracking, web landing page, hosting disk space, reliable backups, DDOS protection, etc. Unequal spending by actors makes one node with better features more desirable than other nodes (such as a personal home node) and this starts a feedback loop of centralization. To restate the claim earlier: decentralized computer information systems that need to share data is an unstable equilibrium because it depends on having free-will actors not spend extra money on a protocol to gain an advantage which is also an unstable equilibrium. Even if this thread's article's vision of IPv6 improving direct connectivity were to happen, I still claim the overwhelming majority of programmers would continue to choose something like Github rather than host their repositories on personal home servers. Personally, I wouldn't want my repo to be traced back to my home's ip address. I don't want China DDOS'ing my home ISP connection if they don't like my iPhone app that monitors Hong Kong. If I was a female, I wouldn't want my home git repo to give away my ip address and invite digital stalkers. I'd use Github just for the ability to shield my IPv6 address. If the programmers -- which we can think of as technical thought leaders -- aren't leading by example (with git) for decentralization, why would we realistically expect other mainstream consumers to adopt decentralized setups? Yes, there will always be decentralized communities but it will always remain niche.
carapace 7y ago
Yes, exactly. Is the human body centralized or decentralized? The ego could be said to be the central "pivot" of the system, but then you have the phenomenon of "multiple personalities", and so on. Once you start to think of biology as the study of billion-year-old self-optimizing nanotechnology it makes sense to look to life for models for designing the structure of our own artificial systems. There's the question of what do we want to be like? A starfish? A meta-human? A decentralized system that depends on each or most of its elements to function is a single "point" of failure for the whole. (E.g., a relatively small wound can cause death by exsanguination.) On the other hand, consider the radical indignities that the lowly planarian will endure only to placidly regrow a tail or a head or whatever. (See "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 Which, incidentally, adds a whole layer of complexity and nuance to the concept of intelligent design, since the whole of Nature has now been scientifically shown to think...) It remains to be seen whether Humans + Internet = Self-Organization or along what lines. (What's the news out of Hong Kong this week? Are the distributed, self-organizing people of HK prevailing against the centralized imperialistic communist state?) Governments everywhere are waking up and smelling the data coffee. The major players already have databases on the bulk of world population and are collecting (exponentially) more every day. What kind of cyborg-state shall we make?
- mistermann 7y ago
  > Are the distributed, self-organizing people of HK prevailing against the centralized imperialistic communist state? I think you make a good (and very underappreciated) point about the relevance of the ideas in this article to geopolitics, or how humanity ~chooses (or so we think) to organize itself. [didericis] also makes some good points that are relevant to this perspective: > Decentralized solutions are not saddled with the same need to appease everyone at once. You can have local solutions extremely well adapted for local situations that know more details about the context than a large company trying to deal with everyone ever could. > I’d argue centralized solutions are only as stable as the problem is uniform. If the problem differs even slightly between actors looking for solutions, those actors are either settling for a less than perfect fit when adopting a centralized solution, or the centralized solution is complex enough to handle those differences. As differences increase, the tradeoffs become unacceptable and/or the complexity becomes too much to handle, and the centralized solution falls apart. The dangerous part imho when it comes to a geopolitical application is, while most of us can recognize the complexities and tradeoffs in a computer system, at least when they're pointed out to us, very few seem to be able to see similar complexities in geopolitics (a massively more complex system), even when it's pointed out. It's as if we've developed an intuition that passionately rejects the very suggestion, a behavior which in itself highlights the complexity involved.
aalleavitch 7y ago
I would argue that there's an incredibly powerful force that drives the consolidation and centralization of systems in modern society: the wholly artificial legal concept of property. We are given a legal right to accumulate control over as large a swathe of material goods and organizational structures as we can within the confines of the law, and this ownership is backed by the promise of state violence should it be violated. The concept of property, and the fact that our laws and government are built around protecting it, is the sole mechanism through which massive disparities in power are achieved and maintained in society. It centralizes wealth through avarice, making our stomachs unlimited in size. It also creates the dilemma of externalities, as we differentiate the value to us of the things we "own" versus the things we hold in common with others or that are "owned" by the state. Property is also a entirely artificial concept. It takes the practical concept of use and possession and extends upon it to completely absurd extremes. It ties our society up in knots wasting a massive amount of human energy in the activity of determining and enforcing property ownership, and leads to incredibly convoluted structures in laws and markets, often leading to huge structural failures. For instance, intellectual property law is completely absurd, on every level. It is an effort to force something that is fundamentally free and infinitely available to everyone to become scarce exclusively so that we can properly ensure it fits into a property-based system. The amount we lose as a society from the fact that all software is not simply open source is incalculable.
- javajosh 7y ago
  >wholly artificial legal concept of property Property is an informational concept more than a legal one. The concept of "mine" is present at a very young age, and clearly present in various animal groups. The data-structure is a simple association of objects with an owner, and for the substrate animals use only their brains, but humans use paper and, increasingly, bits. Banks and local government agencies keep the most official of these records, but informal records count too. (My son may think my daughter's blanket is his, but she will protest loudly and vehemently, and there is not really a formal reason for her claim). concept of property...is the sole mechanism through which massive disparities in power are achieved and maintained Property is a necessary, but insufficient condition for inequality. Property is how you keep score; the reason some players win far more than others is not entirely known, but I'm pretty sure it has more to do with personality, talent, and luck than the jurisprudence of property rights. It's not clear what a society without property would be like, BTW.
jerf 7y ago
Arguably, the combination of centralized and decentralized parts ace much closer description to what the internet is today than the idea that it's solely centralized. Same is true of society; while the 20th and 21st century are replete with efforts to completely centralize society under one organization (there is the Party, only the Party, and nothing outside of the Party), such structures have consistently failed and collapsed. (Which does not stop people from continuing to propose them seriously, unfortunately.) Society is a mixture of centralized and decentralized elements. The problem is that in biology, you don't have intelligent entities exploiting the centralization, which is I think where the metaphor breaks down. Interestingly, the metaphor isn't completely broken; I have seen serious discussion of thing like cancer, and even more interestingly, what can convince a cell to not be cancer, in terms of self-interest and exploitation and such. One of the mysteries of how multi-cellular life ever got started was how one cell convinces another to not seek its own survival at all costs. Being rather complicated multicellular entities ourselves, we take this for granted, but it's a legit research topic. Still, the cancer abusing the system is not doing it with human-level intelligence, whereas arguably Facebook is a super-human level intelligence, so the metaphor is not great.

F00bart 7y ago

This. The influence of Conway’s law is underappreciated. We are all trained to see hierarchies as the only principle for building structure, it’s a dominant normative ideology. Once we see how to build decentralized systems, we can discover they are often more resilient and more effective. But we have to overcome the current centralization of power and our own tendency to structure the world in hierarchies.

didericis 7y ago

Completely agree. I think the efficiencies and benefits to centralization OP pointed out are real, but that there are practical benefits to decentralization as well. Decentralized solutions are not saddled with the same need to appease everyone at once. You can have local solutions extremely well adapted for local situations that know more details about the context than a large company trying to deal with everyone ever could. I’d argue centralized solutions are only as stable as the problem is uniform. If the problem differs even slightly between actors looking for solutions, those actors are either settling for a less than perfect fit when adopting a centralized solution, or the centralized solution is complex enough to handle those differences. As differences increase, the tradeoffs become unacceptable and/or the complexity becomes too much to handle, and the centralized solution falls apart. I don’t think a lot of centralized solutions are currently centralized because they’re efficient solutions to uniform problems; I don’t think most everyday, practical problems are all that uniform when you take everything into account (ex: supply availability for physical goods, UI expectations/preferences for digital stuff) although again, there can be/often is at least some gains in efficiency. I think it has more to do with the organizational forces you describe.

Infinitesimus 7y ago
> I’d argue centralized solutions are only as stable as the problem is uniform. If the problem differs even slightly between actors looking for solutions, those actors are either settling for a less than perfect fit when adopting a centralized solution, or the centralized solution is complex enough to handle those differences. As differences increase, the tradeoffs become unacceptable and/or the complexity becomes too much to handle, and the centralized solution falls apart. 100% I've been thinking of how this applies to our world today. For example, it is in Google's interest to train us to only use a subset of queries and words so their centralized solution can work (same with YouTube and any recommendation engine probably). Predicting or prodding you towards certain items (ads), pages, suggestions and the like - intentionally or not - only serve to reinforce a society of increased uniformity and thus, increased desirability of the centralized system. Newsfeeds suffer the same problem as does even autocomplete I think. It scares me about our future sometimes because products will slowly become more hostile to you the less you fit into a centralized model of their ideal consumer

jasode 7y ago

>Nature and Biology gives us a very strong counterexample to this. If centralization was the stable form The context of my claim was about computer information systems becoming centralized. Yes, I understand we do have decentralized washer & dryer machines at home instead of everyone going to centralized laundromat. And building residential houses is still a very local business that resists a hypothetical giant national corporation that builds every house in America. Even Jeff Bezos' Amazon can't conquer 1000 different local building codes and construction techniques to build homes. However, the realm of information technology seems to behave differently. I like to use the decentralized-Git-to-centralized-Github example because: - programmers are the ubergeeks that would conceivably be the vanguard of decentralization because they are already predisposed to understand its benefits - programmers (unlike mass consumers) have the technical know-how to implement their own git server if they wanted to and overcome any challenges of ISP NAT router. And yet, the vast majority just think: "Hmmm... there's a free service that can host my repo which means I don't have to spend _time_ or _money_ to mess with any of that home setup?!? Sign me up!!!" There is no "evil capitalist monopoly" that forced Git centralization on to resistant programmers. Instead, the programmers willingly put their code on Github because of the benefits. The economic forces overwhelm the ideals of the decentralized protocol. As mentioned before, a git distributed protocol can't stop an actor from spending more money on that protocol than others. Github Inc spent extra money on Ruby programmers to create extra features such as issues tracking, web landing page, hosting disk space, reliable backups, DDOS protection, etc. Unequal spending by actors makes one node with better features more desirable than other nodes (such as a personal home node) and this starts a feedback loop of centralization. To restate the claim earlier: decentralized computer information systems that need to share data is an unstable equilibrium because it depends on having free-will actors not spend extra money on a protocol to gain an advantage which is also an unstable equilibrium. Even if this thread's article's vision of IPv6 improving direct connectivity were to happen, I still claim the overwhelming majority of programmers would continue to choose something like Github rather than host their repositories on personal home servers. Personally, I wouldn't want my repo to be traced back to my home's ip address. I don't want China DDOS'ing my home ISP connection if they don't like my iPhone app that monitors Hong Kong. If I was a female, I wouldn't want my home git repo to give away my ip address and invite digital stalkers. I'd use Github just for the ability to shield my IPv6 address. If the programmers -- which we can think of as technical thought leaders -- aren't leading by example (with git) for decentralization, why would we realistically expect other mainstream consumers to adopt decentralized setups? Yes, there will always be decentralized communities but it will always remain niche.

carapace 7y ago

Yes, exactly. Is the human body centralized or decentralized? The ego could be said to be the central "pivot" of the system, but then you have the phenomenon of "multiple personalities", and so on. Once you start to think of biology as the study of billion-year-old self-optimizing nanotechnology it makes sense to look to life for models for designing the structure of our own artificial systems. There's the question of what do we want to be like? A starfish? A meta-human? A decentralized system that depends on each or most of its elements to function is a single "point" of failure for the whole. (E.g., a relatively small wound can cause death by exsanguination.) On the other hand, consider the radical indignities that the lowly planarian will endure only to placidly regrow a tail or a head or whatever. (See "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698 Which, incidentally, adds a whole layer of complexity and nuance to the concept of intelligent design, since the whole of Nature has now been scientifically shown to think...) It remains to be seen whether Humans + Internet = Self-Organization or along what lines. (What's the news out of Hong Kong this week? Are the distributed, self-organizing people of HK prevailing against the centralized imperialistic communist state?) Governments everywhere are waking up and smelling the data coffee. The major players already have databases on the bulk of world population and are collecting (exponentially) more every day. What kind of cyborg-state shall we make?

mistermann 7y ago
> Are the distributed, self-organizing people of HK prevailing against the centralized imperialistic communist state? I think you make a good (and very underappreciated) point about the relevance of the ideas in this article to geopolitics, or how humanity ~chooses (or so we think) to organize itself. [didericis] also makes some good points that are relevant to this perspective: > Decentralized solutions are not saddled with the same need to appease everyone at once. You can have local solutions extremely well adapted for local situations that know more details about the context than a large company trying to deal with everyone ever could. > I’d argue centralized solutions are only as stable as the problem is uniform. If the problem differs even slightly between actors looking for solutions, those actors are either settling for a less than perfect fit when adopting a centralized solution, or the centralized solution is complex enough to handle those differences. As differences increase, the tradeoffs become unacceptable and/or the complexity becomes too much to handle, and the centralized solution falls apart. The dangerous part imho when it comes to a geopolitical application is, while most of us can recognize the complexities and tradeoffs in a computer system, at least when they're pointed out to us, very few seem to be able to see similar complexities in geopolitics (a massively more complex system), even when it's pointed out. It's as if we've developed an intuition that passionately rejects the very suggestion, a behavior which in itself highlights the complexity involved.

aalleavitch 7y ago

I would argue that there's an incredibly powerful force that drives the consolidation and centralization of systems in modern society: the wholly artificial legal concept of property. We are given a legal right to accumulate control over as large a swathe of material goods and organizational structures as we can within the confines of the law, and this ownership is backed by the promise of state violence should it be violated. The concept of property, and the fact that our laws and government are built around protecting it, is the sole mechanism through which massive disparities in power are achieved and maintained in society. It centralizes wealth through avarice, making our stomachs unlimited in size. It also creates the dilemma of externalities, as we differentiate the value to us of the things we "own" versus the things we hold in common with others or that are "owned" by the state. Property is also a entirely artificial concept. It takes the practical concept of use and possession and extends upon it to completely absurd extremes. It ties our society up in knots wasting a massive amount of human energy in the activity of determining and enforcing property ownership, and leads to incredibly convoluted structures in laws and markets, often leading to huge structural failures. For instance, intellectual property law is completely absurd, on every level. It is an effort to force something that is fundamentally free and infinitely available to everyone to become scarce exclusively so that we can properly ensure it fits into a property-based system. The amount we lose as a society from the fact that all software is not simply open source is incalculable.

javajosh 7y ago
>wholly artificial legal concept of property Property is an informational concept more than a legal one. The concept of "mine" is present at a very young age, and clearly present in various animal groups. The data-structure is a simple association of objects with an owner, and for the substrate animals use only their brains, but humans use paper and, increasingly, bits. Banks and local government agencies keep the most official of these records, but informal records count too. (My son may think my daughter's blanket is his, but she will protest loudly and vehemently, and there is not really a formal reason for her claim). concept of property...is the sole mechanism through which massive disparities in power are achieved and maintained Property is a necessary, but insufficient condition for inequality. Property is how you keep score; the reason some players win far more than others is not entirely known, but I'm pretty sure it has more to do with personality, talent, and luck than the jurisprudence of property rights. It's not clear what a society without property would be like, BTW.

jerf 7y ago

Arguably, the combination of centralized and decentralized parts ace much closer description to what the internet is today than the idea that it's solely centralized. Same is true of society; while the 20th and 21st century are replete with efforts to completely centralize society under one organization (there is the Party, only the Party, and nothing outside of the Party), such structures have consistently failed and collapsed. (Which does not stop people from continuing to propose them seriously, unfortunately.) Society is a mixture of centralized and decentralized elements. The problem is that in biology, you don't have intelligent entities exploiting the centralization, which is I think where the metaphor breaks down. Interestingly, the metaphor isn't completely broken; I have seen serious discussion of thing like cancer, and even more interestingly, what can convince a cell to not be cancer, in terms of self-interest and exploitation and such. One of the mysteries of how multi-cellular life ever got started was how one cell convinces another to not seek its own survival at all costs. Being rather complicated multicellular entities ourselves, we take this for granted, but it's a legit research topic. Still, the cancer abusing the system is not doing it with human-level intelligence, whereas arguably Facebook is a super-human level intelligence, so the metaphor is not great.