John Williams wrote: > It is obvious that no system is perfect. No matter whether it is a > centrally controlled system, or a completely decentralized system, > there will be decisions made by people, and people do make mistakes. > I'd rather have a fault-tolerant system that tends to evolve toward > greater efficiency. With central control, the mistakes tend to be > coordinated and are capable of destabilizing the entire system. With > a diverse, decentralized system, there will be plenty of mistakes, > but they will tend to be uncorrelated and while you may see some > local failures, most of the system will continue unabated. And as a > bonus, the decentralized system is effectively a massively parallel > set of experiments that, through trial and error, can result in > evolution towards a more efficient system.
I've been following this discussion and something about this argument was nagging at me, but I wasn't sure what. Now I think I've figured it out: You are assuming everyone is a rational actor. You argue that diverse decentralized systems work better because mistakes are uncorrelated and failures are localized. In a perfect world, I think you may be correct, but we don't live in a perfect world. Instead, we are faced with actors who will collude with each other to manipulate markets, subvert systems, and for the short term gain without regard to long-term consequences. Some social contract is necessary to curb these activities and some level of government regulation can provide that contract. --[Lance] -- GPG Fingerprint: 409B A409 A38D 92BF 15D9 6EEE 9A82 F2AC 69AC 07B9 CACert.org Assurer _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
