42 chunks · 32 episodes
...further away from the solution Complex problems are convex.[oo] Anything with a coordination cost, or interdependencies between decisions, have this characteristic. Any situation that involves humans making decisions with any degree of autonomy is...
The faster people move, the more coordination cost there is. You have to chase your peers to coordinate to get them to do something that coheres. People are chasing you as you chase others. … ad infin...
...use they have no downside, only upside. Fast because they have practically zero coordination costs. Sometimes crazy is how you break through to the next thing. The vast majority of crazy, fast companies are like sparks flying through the wind, snu...
...ur beliefs and wants, and verifying the quality of the output, is a non-trivial coordination cost, even if you assume human-level common sense.
...head than in the world. If you have a nuanced idea in your head, either pay the coordination cost to write and communicate concretely enough, or do it yourself. A superposition takes exponential complexity to write down, and then it's no longer a ...
...al. Command and control: effective at achieving the ends, quickly. Cuts through coordination costs: "simply do the thing the boss says". But can never rise higher than what the boss planned. If the boss is wrong, or didn't communicate properly, th...
...Coasian theory of the app. That is, the app size is determined partially by the coordination cost of integrating your app with another party's system. Code is unforgiving; when two systems need to interact it's like finely machined gears that have...
...tion, creating less and less value. When a big monopoly doesn't innovate due to coordination costs, if they capture regulators, it makes it so the whole market also doesn't innovate. Society does better when organizations need to compete to stay h...
...t and email history. But also, the aggregators are large companies with massive coordination costs. This means it's very very hard for aggregators to coordinate around anything but massive use cases. The PM would have to corral dozens of overworke...
...e you more likely to die: More sclerotic. Harder to coordinate and adapt, since coordination costs rise superlinearly with size. Trapped by a Lilliputian web. More leverage. Leverage allows efficiency… but also more risk. If the underlying source ...
.... A swarm doesn't have a coherent vision of itself to coordinate to. All of the coordination cost evaporates away. For large systems the coordination cost is the vast majority of the cost to build something.
...s to coordinate to do the tasks at the right time. In a large organization, the coordination cost will be many orders of magnitude more than the actual focused implementation work. So even if the individual tasks are all easy, the likelihood of pr...
...ources can smother a thing. They create eddy currents of possibility. Swirls of coordination costs. Instead of focused, laminar flow, you get turbulent flow. It's much harder for anything to cohere and then be built on top of.
...he problem is the people being lazy or incompetent. The problem is the inherent coordination cost scaling super-linearly., a law of physics. There are ideas that are so big that they can't be done inside a company, where everyone can veto. Large o...
...yers are centralized. Decentralization is expensive; it massively increases the coordination cost of adding coherent improvements to the system. Even if the underlying components are decentralized, if the top layer (the way that all users access t...
... isn't one. There's a swarm of small issues, each of which requires independent coordination costs to chase down, convincing tons of different teams to do a thing that isn't a priority for them." "Hmm, have you tried simply being more bold?" You c...
...f employees significantly more leverage, you increase output without increasing coordination costs.
...sible environment to do platform design. Maximal decentralization means maximal coordination costs. The fact everything is directly financialized means any zero-day could drain billions of dollars in the blink of an eye. It all adds up to massive ...
...t step (coordination) has super-linear costs. So sometimes it's best to pay the coordination cost once for a big boulder, but at the cost of adaptability / resilience. This "small number of pivots" logic is the "big rig" style of organizations.
... allow building trust and non-transactional relationships. They also have lower coordination cost; everyone can know everyone else as an individual, not a transaction. Humans were not naturally equipped to be parts of large complex social systems,...