[FRIAM] "self-organization"
glen
gepropella at gmail.com
Fri Jan 19 16:04:11 EST 2018
This post successfully describes my thoughts ... and in a criticism of my favorite "economist" von Hayek to boot!
http://evonomics.com/cognitive-economics-intelligence-mulgan/
> It’s an appealing view. But self-organization is not an altogether-coherent concept and has often turned out to be misleading as a guide to collective intelligence. It obscures the work involved in organization and in particular the hard work involved in high-dimensional choices. If you look in detail at any real example—from the family camping trip to the operation of the Internet, open-source software to everyday markets, these are only self-organizing if you look from far away. Look more closely and different patterns emerge. You quickly find some key shapers—like the designers of underlying protocols, or the people setting the rules for trading. There are certainly some patterns of emergence. Many ideas may be tried and tested before only a few successful ones survive and spread. To put it in the terms of network science, the most useful links survive and are reinforced; the less useful ones wither. The community decides collectively which ones are useful. Yet on closer inspection, there turn out to be concentrations of power and influence even in the most decentralized communities, and when there’s a crisis, networks tend to create temporary hierarchies—or at least the successful ones do—to speed up decision making. As I will show, almost all lasting examples of social coordination combine some elements of hierarchy, solidarity, and individual.
On January 13, 2018 8:46:24 AM PST, Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net> wrote:
> I am hoping that the responses of
>others will display exactly the diversity you describe.
--
glen
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