5 ms·

Self-Organizations

66 points by shoniko 6y ago

_hao 6y ago
Natural phenomena amazing as they are aside... The "free market" doesn't exist because the economy is governed by rules established by governments and rules between governments in extension. Cryptocurrencies right now are a speculative trading tool and store of value for others (very volatile at that), but I think that the cryptocurrencies that will really take off and seep into the mainstream are the government digital currencies currently being worked on (China is set to start testing the digital Yuan soon if not already). My point is that nothing is ever truly free because nothing is ever by itself in a vacuum. You have to interact with outside forces and follow certain rules - natural or otherwise.
- spking 6y ago
  The cryptocurrencies that will really take off (in the long run) will be the ones that are most programmable and win the most developer hearts and minds. Digital nation-state sponsored fiat won't be able to compete with the complexity that is made possible by "finance legos". I think Ethereum and maybe what's coming together at https://www.avalabs.org/ https://www.avalabs.org/ are good examples.
- synctext 6y ago
  See "Central Bank Digital Currency" report and details by an actual central bank in the Eurozone[1]. "Cash is no longer king" and this indeed could go mainstream. But it is far far away from self-organisations. Finance (like aviation) is quite a regulated industry. [1] https://www.dnb.nl/en/news/news-and-archive/dnbulletin-2020/dnb388309.jsp https://www.dnb.nl/en/news/news-and-archive/dnbulletin-2020/...
- madhadron 6y ago
  More fundamentally, a free market doesn't exist because markets are brought into being by governments. They don't emerge naturally among humans.
eternalban 6y ago
I’ll be that guy to point out that bees have a queen. But more seriously, imo, it is an error to conflate permanent organizational perches of top-down systems (“leader”) with command and control networks and ‘critical nodes’. In context of considering bottom-up, self-organizing system, it is important to note that order increases, and ‘organization’ is a neutral term. Critical nodes may (temporarily) emerge. There is also nothing fundamental in the bottom-up organization process that inherently precludes the emergence of a hierarchy.
- carapace 6y ago
  > bees have a queen. The "queens" are gonad not brain.
  - tlarkworthy 6y ago
    Not really she has a number of major decisions to make (kill her sisters, decide to leave hive, regulate bonding) https://www.perfectbee.com/learn-about-bees/the-life-of-bees/role-queen-bee https://www.perfectbee.com/learn-about-bees/the-life-of-bees...
    - carapace 6y ago
      > The queen is very directed and regimented in everything she does, from her mating flight to her regular, consistent egg-laying prowess. Given her central role and even her name, it is understandable that the layman assumes the queen to be a decision-maker, of sorts. This is not the case at all. > She is the star of the hive, because of her egg-laying abilities, but is controlled by an overall puppet master – the collection of worker bees. Right at the start of the article my friend...
      - tlarkworthy 6y ago
        I am arguing against her being a gonad. Read the rest of the article
sjoe 6y ago
>> Swarms need managers. Let's call them agents :) The invisible hand is quite visible nowadays and it's Protegé the shareholder doesn't help much with anything right now. And don't make me start with the Soviet union :) Regarding linux.. I'd love to read some pro and contra arguments. I've yet to see any human group larger than ~10ppl to self organize. We usually organize by leader picking/detection and delegation, coz we have trust issues.
greggyb 6y ago
Picking a nit, the article claims that a free market works only in equilibrium. This is a spherical cow in a vacuum view of economics. Markets, in general, can be seen as moving toward an incalculable equilibrium (at least not calculable in less time than it takes to reach). There is not a single equilibrium, though. As time goes on, people are born and die, trends and preferences change. If you could calculate some optimal state as of the end of 2019 and name it as "equilibrium", that would be different than the optimal state as of the end of 2020 (and different (and likely without some continuous transition function) in the full duration between these points).
- Kinrany 6y ago
  You could say that the market is itself the mechanism that calculates the equilibrium. (But it could be a pretty falsehood: not an economist.)
  - greggyb 6y ago
    This is a good way to think about it. Certainly more helpful than many other short explanations I've seen attempted. Am not economist, but do have econ degree. Edit for slight clarification: The phrasing suffers from anthropomorphizing a thing. The market is a collection of human interactions. Humans are the agents. The market is an amalgamation of many individuals acting as they best see fit, utilizing their local knowledge. The sum of these actions and interactions performs the calculation. Same idea, just clarifying where agency exists.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Agreed. Equilibrium is defined in terms of the market, not the other way around. The system does what it does. I think a better way of phrasing the article's point is that markets are metastable; pushed hard enough, they'll stop falling back to the current equilibrium and instead find a new one. That transition process often involves massive amounts of death and suffering, so that's why we care about not disturbing the market.
  - greggyb 6y ago
rgbrgb 6y ago
In addition to bitcoion, mentioned in the OP, several crypto projects in the DAO space come to mind. What if you don't need managers, but strong contracts between individuals? I think that's one of the theses floating around in that space. https://colony.io/ https://colony.io/ https://medium.com/@simondlr/the-moloch-dao-collapsing-the-firm-2a800b3aa2e7 https://medium.com/@simondlr/the-moloch-dao-collapsing-the-f...
jonmc12 6y ago
Bees, ants and termites are considered super organisms. As discussed, they don't really act as a great example of emergent behavior of organisms - more analogous to the organization of, say, cells within a mammalian body. Drawing the lines around species properly is helpful to understand the implications of natural selection, and the fitness functions surrounding emergent behavior. Without doubt, eusocial insects represent some of the most successful species on the planet from a biomass perspective. At the same time, if you study the evolution of these species, you won't be motivated to "be a bee". One way to describe the very complex multi-adaptation evolution in brief: wasp egg dumpers, over generations had the tables turned; host wasps started charging rent, then enslaving younger generations; some of the wasps started cloning their slaves, even breeding these clones for specialized roles. Its a really interesting topic to dive into. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_eusociality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_eusociality
GistNoesis 6y ago
Even nails can self-organize with a little help : https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/fc7mmh/how_to_organise_nails_the_right_way/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/fc7mmh/ho...
ismail 6y ago
Ashby’s work on self-organisation [0] is a must read. I think it was he that defined the concept. http://csis.pace.edu/~marchese/CS396x/Computing/Ashby.pdf http://csis.pace.edu/~marchese/CS396x/Computing/Ashby.pdf

66 points by shoniko 6y ago

_hao 6y ago

Natural phenomena amazing as they are aside... The "free market" doesn't exist because the economy is governed by rules established by governments and rules between governments in extension. Cryptocurrencies right now are a speculative trading tool and store of value for others (very volatile at that), but I think that the cryptocurrencies that will really take off and seep into the mainstream are the government digital currencies currently being worked on (China is set to start testing the digital Yuan soon if not already). My point is that nothing is ever truly free because nothing is ever by itself in a vacuum. You have to interact with outside forces and follow certain rules - natural or otherwise.

spking 6y ago
The cryptocurrencies that will really take off (in the long run) will be the ones that are most programmable and win the most developer hearts and minds. Digital nation-state sponsored fiat won't be able to compete with the complexity that is made possible by "finance legos". I think Ethereum and maybe what's coming together at https://www.avalabs.org/ https://www.avalabs.org/ are good examples.
synctext 6y ago
See "Central Bank Digital Currency" report and details by an actual central bank in the Eurozone[1]. "Cash is no longer king" and this indeed could go mainstream. But it is far far away from self-organisations. Finance (like aviation) is quite a regulated industry. [1] https://www.dnb.nl/en/news/news-and-archive/dnbulletin-2020/dnb388309.jsp https://www.dnb.nl/en/news/news-and-archive/dnbulletin-2020/...
madhadron 6y ago
More fundamentally, a free market doesn't exist because markets are brought into being by governments. They don't emerge naturally among humans.

eternalban 6y ago

I’ll be that guy to point out that bees have a queen. But more seriously, imo, it is an error to conflate permanent organizational perches of top-down systems (“leader”) with command and control networks and ‘critical nodes’. In context of considering bottom-up, self-organizing system, it is important to note that order increases, and ‘organization’ is a neutral term. Critical nodes may (temporarily) emerge. There is also nothing fundamental in the bottom-up organization process that inherently precludes the emergence of a hierarchy.

carapace 6y ago
> bees have a queen. The "queens" are gonad not brain.
- tlarkworthy 6y ago
  Not really she has a number of major decisions to make (kill her sisters, decide to leave hive, regulate bonding) https://www.perfectbee.com/learn-about-bees/the-life-of-bees/role-queen-bee https://www.perfectbee.com/learn-about-bees/the-life-of-bees...
  - carapace 6y ago
    > The queen is very directed and regimented in everything she does, from her mating flight to her regular, consistent egg-laying prowess. Given her central role and even her name, it is understandable that the layman assumes the queen to be a decision-maker, of sorts. This is not the case at all. > She is the star of the hive, because of her egg-laying abilities, but is controlled by an overall puppet master – the collection of worker bees. Right at the start of the article my friend...
    - tlarkworthy 6y ago
      I am arguing against her being a gonad. Read the rest of the article

sjoe 6y ago

>> Swarms need managers. Let's call them agents :) The invisible hand is quite visible nowadays and it's Protegé the shareholder doesn't help much with anything right now. And don't make me start with the Soviet union :) Regarding linux.. I'd love to read some pro and contra arguments. I've yet to see any human group larger than ~10ppl to self organize. We usually organize by leader picking/detection and delegation, coz we have trust issues.

greggyb 6y ago

Picking a nit, the article claims that a free market works only in equilibrium. This is a spherical cow in a vacuum view of economics. Markets, in general, can be seen as moving toward an incalculable equilibrium (at least not calculable in less time than it takes to reach). There is not a single equilibrium, though. As time goes on, people are born and die, trends and preferences change. If you could calculate some optimal state as of the end of 2019 and name it as "equilibrium", that would be different than the optimal state as of the end of 2020 (and different (and likely without some continuous transition function) in the full duration between these points).

Kinrany 6y ago
You could say that the market is itself the mechanism that calculates the equilibrium. (But it could be a pretty falsehood: not an economist.)
- greggyb 6y ago
  This is a good way to think about it. Certainly more helpful than many other short explanations I've seen attempted. Am not economist, but do have econ degree. Edit for slight clarification: The phrasing suffers from anthropomorphizing a thing. The market is a collection of human interactions. Humans are the agents. The market is an amalgamation of many individuals acting as they best see fit, utilizing their local knowledge. The sum of these actions and interactions performs the calculation. Same idea, just clarifying where agency exists.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
Agreed. Equilibrium is defined in terms of the market, not the other way around. The system does what it does. I think a better way of phrasing the article's point is that markets are metastable; pushed hard enough, they'll stop falling back to the current equilibrium and instead find a new one. That transition process often involves massive amounts of death and suffering, so that's why we care about not disturbing the market.
- greggyb 6y ago

rgbrgb 6y ago

In addition to bitcoion, mentioned in the OP, several crypto projects in the DAO space come to mind. What if you don't need managers, but strong contracts between individuals? I think that's one of the theses floating around in that space. https://colony.io/ https://colony.io/ https://medium.com/@simondlr/the-moloch-dao-collapsing-the-firm-2a800b3aa2e7 https://medium.com/@simondlr/the-moloch-dao-collapsing-the-f...

jonmc12 6y ago

Bees, ants and termites are considered super organisms. As discussed, they don't really act as a great example of emergent behavior of organisms - more analogous to the organization of, say, cells within a mammalian body. Drawing the lines around species properly is helpful to understand the implications of natural selection, and the fitness functions surrounding emergent behavior. Without doubt, eusocial insects represent some of the most successful species on the planet from a biomass perspective. At the same time, if you study the evolution of these species, you won't be motivated to "be a bee". One way to describe the very complex multi-adaptation evolution in brief: wasp egg dumpers, over generations had the tables turned; host wasps started charging rent, then enslaving younger generations; some of the wasps started cloning their slaves, even breeding these clones for specialized roles. Its a really interesting topic to dive into. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_eusociality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_eusociality

GistNoesis 6y ago

Even nails can self-organize with a little help : https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/fc7mmh/how_to_organise_nails_the_right_way/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/fc7mmh/ho...

ismail 6y ago

Ashby’s work on self-organisation [0] is a must read. I think it was he that defined the concept. http://csis.pace.edu/~marchese/CS396x/Computing/Ashby.pdf http://csis.pace.edu/~marchese/CS396x/Computing/Ashby.pdf