Sublime

Decentralization reduces large structural asymmetries.

Google changed the world with the realization that even though the crowd’s online content was uncontrolled, it wasn’t disorganized. It, in fact, had an extremely elaborate and fine-grained structure, but not one that was consciously decided on by any core group of humans. Instead, it was a structure that emerged from

A closer look shows that the hierarchies are constructed on a “building block” principle: subsystems at each level of the hierarchy are constructed by combinations of small numbers of subsystems from the next lower level.

Perhaps the greatest “phase transition” in our thinking that such an approach could engender is the maturation in our willingness to live with relatively high levels of uncertainty in the domains of complex phenomena—and thus give up on ideas like complete “cures,” the elimination of “risk,” the design of perfect “stability,” and achieving total “s

at a deeper level, there is a connection, one that transcends the details of any particular mechanism. That connection is mathematics. All the examples are variations on the same mathematical theme: self-organization, the spontaneous emergence of order out of chaos.