Top down and bottom-up organization processes tend to interleave.

· Bits and Bobs 5/12/25
  • Top down and bottom-up organization processes tend to interleave.
    • Communism doesn't work because it requires a top down, omniscient administrator, which obviously doesn't work.
    • Capitalism is all about "that's impossible to coordinate at the society level so just have a swarm, and make sure the natural incentive is to provide value for others."
    • But then within capitalism companies are often run like communism: command and control with an implicit administrator.
    • Why doesn't that obviously not fit?
    • Perhaps it's about the Conservation of Centralization.
    • On one side of the boundary it's bottom up so that means on the other side it gets net more top down to compensate.
    • If everything were bottom up, everything would be chaos
      • Nothing would cohere. It would just be noise.
    • If everything were top down, it would be extremely fragile.
      • If even a single thing were different than the administrator's mental model, the system wouldn't work.

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