Nick Arnett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> The trouble with trusting a self-organizing system is that we don't have
> very good mathematics to analyze and predict what they'll do. We certainly
> know that complex systems of the kind you describe tend to be chaotic, with
> unpredictable attractor states.
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 certainly wouldn't want trust our health
> care system to avoid extrema and attractors that would be unfair to the
> vulnerable among us.
Yes, I think people become emotional and irrational when it comes to health
care, and can often end up making bad decisions. But I'd rather have a few
thousand small, uncorrelated bad decisions than a small number of gigantic
bad decisions.
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