driftwood

Friday, May 16, 2014

order from chaos

KLEIN: Okay, if you try to imagine never having seen skating, never having been to a roller rink, maybe back in time before it was invented and you heard someone propose the idea, like a friend came up and proposed the idea, I have a great idea of a business I’m going to build this huge arena with a hard wooden floor, and around the perimeter a naked iron handrail, and invite people of all ages and all abilities to come down and strap wheels on their feet and skate around and try to enjoy themselves. We’re not going to like make sure they qualify in their abilities, we’re not going to put helmets on them or shoulder pads. And we’re not going to give them really any instruction.

DUBNER: Now, you might think that’d be pure chaos, wouldn’t you? Sure, that’s what you might think…

KLEIN: You’d expect it to result in catastrophe and collision. How are a hundred people making their moment-by-moment decisions make their own pattern of skating such that all hundred patterns do not collide and intersect. It’s a very complex problem but as it turns out it goes quite, you know, swimmingly as we know. And so if you had to sort of pitch this idea to someone investing in it, you’d have to explain how you think this is going to work. And it’s in that explanation that I think we can enhance our understanding of how things work in society generally. I think the main thing to understand is that people are, you know, looking out for themselves. I’m not saying they’re selfish, but they’re basically looking out for themselves, and most importantly they don’t want to get hurt by colliding with anybody. Now one of the important things about collision is that it’s very mutual. So if I collide with you, you collide with me, and in promoting my interest to avoid collision with you, I simultaneously promote your interest in avoiding collision with me. And so there’s this basic coincidence of interest there, which really is at the micro-structure of how this whole thing works out.

An interesting but long Freakonomics podcast about "spontaneous orders," how in some situations you don't need formal rules/referees/police but rather order can emerge spontaneously. Also, Ultimate Frisbee.