
Life is fractal, but markets are square - paraschopra
https://invertedpassion.com/life-is-fractal-markets-are-square/
======
ajuc
Markets are the opposite of top-down linear design. Markets are full of feed-
back loops and chaotic behavior.

Markets are the way for people to cease top-down planning and still get things
done.

If we understood markets like we understand a chair there would be no economic
crises.

As for suburbs - give them 500 years and then we can talk. You need time to
accumulate all the changing pressures into something that looks organic -
visit any old city in Europe :) All trees of particular species look the same
when they start - after 100 years they usually look different because of the
interplay between environment and them. Same with snowflakes and other
traditional examples of fractals - including mountains and coast.

Suburbs are just starting, in a few centuries they will be as organic as old
cities are.

Oh and regarding "linearity" of human inventions - it's much easier to make a
mess than to make a good orthogonal design. If you don't limit yourself and
write a code adding features as you need them you will end up with something
that is very much organic, and that's not a positive - we call it "spaghetti-
code" because when you try to change anything - it changes stuff in 100
different places.

Orthogonality in design isn't a byproduct of human limitations, it's a thing
we constantly fight for, and we do that because it has advantages. You can
easily optimize it and modify it for various purposes.

~~~
dalbasal
Markets are _a_ way of getting things done without planning. Or rather, it
depends on how widely you like to use the term "market." Languages aren't
planned, but they still constantly evolve and develop to suit our needs... You
can _call_ that a market (some do) but I think that's a bad choice of words. A
literal market is a _very_ abstract metaphor for the process that creates
language and calling it a "market" creates a tendency to think that quid-quo-
pro relations between buyers and sellers are the canonical building blocks of
emergent systems. That's dangerously limiting.

Suburbs though, and built environments generally are an example of how
"markets" are the extremely different from eachother depending on what they're
made of.

Suburbs are generally an example (imo) of markets grafting on economic
branches (the houses, mostly) onto a (mostly) centrally planned trunk, roads,
infrastructures, schools, parks, etc. Suburbs take a lot of infrastructure,
and at least historically it's had been a push mechanism. Planners plan/build
the services required to create demand for housing rather than pre-existing
residents creating demand for services.

Big city real estate markets are very often characterized by (a) land scarcity
making them attractive long term investment markets and (b) a basically
stationary supply side. Supply reacts so slowly/weakly to price changes that
the only thing way to equilibrium is prices... usually upward. The price of
housing becomes the maximum people can pay, often the maximum a bank is
willing to loan.

This is completely different to the market for services, the market for
manufactured goods and such.

We do a lot of planning, whether deliberately or not. Even under the most
ardent anti-matket systems (eg Maoist China in the 50s-60s) we do a lot of
"market." It's basically unavoidable.

However, we are absolutely terrible at intentionally planning for emergence.
Creating the planned infrastructure onto which unplanned emergence can occur.
We don't even have the right terms to discuss it.

Whether we like that ideologically/politically or not, or whether we're good
at it... it's a big part of how society and economy evolve.

The fairly arbitrary and made up^ corporate laws, IP laws and such are a very
good example. Change them and we totally change the shape of the economy. They
weren't planned though, they're designed by historical arbitrariness.

Philosophically, imo, a whole lot boils down to our inability to grapple with
"not sure." Hard science can. We don't know if string theory is true. This is
one of the great cultural achievements of science _because_ it isn't part of
human nature.

^In the sense that if we re-ran history, we'd expect totally different
outcomes.

~~~
bobthepanda
Intentionally planning for emergence is sort of a lost art these days. The
most famous example is the Manhattan grid, where at its conception there were
no zoning limits and it was lines on a map with no infrastructure built, it
just kind of filled in by itself and constantly changed over the years
(Midtown, for example, was originally a low-slung wealthy neighborhood for
people escaping the crowded downtown area)

Part of the “problem” is that we demand so much in modern services which need
to be placed ahead of time; this is not the 1800s where you could hoist up a
tenement with no plumbing and electricity, no fire, police, hospital or
schools to be seen.

------
dghf
> 8/ A revolutionary idea is that governments should leave people alone so
> they could pursue their well-being in a bottom-up fashion via social
> interactions in their local area. In fact, that’s how the world was before
> the advent of nation-state.

That depends on how you define "people". In much of mediaeval Europe, for
example, it was the heavily armed aristocracy who were left alone "so they
could pursue their well-being": the lightly armed or unarmed peasantry that
they ruled over, not so much. (And when the latter did attempt to pursue it in
an unapproved manner, they were put down with violence: see Wat Tyler's
Revolt, for example.)

> 9/ Nation-state was inevitable because humans reasoned they could
> efficiently defend against enemies if they pooled their resources. Notice
> what got lost in this optimization of defense: the complex, local web of
> interactions that everybody was a part of, and yet nobody understood.

That suggests that a nation-state was a collaborative exercise of its people
as a whole, rather than the result of the consolidation of power by its
monarchs over time. That sounds more like a "Just So" story than history.

~~~
paraschopra
I agree that interpretations about history are subjective. I was indicating
that the legitimacy of monarchs in the general populace came from their
protection against aggressors. In fact, one of the main functions of a nation-
state is to put up defence against other nation-states.

This book is full of examples of people coming together:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonzero:_The_Logic_of_Human_De...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonzero:_The_Logic_of_Human_Destiny)

~~~
dghf
> I was indicating that the legitimacy of monarchs in the general populace
> came from their protection against aggressors.

To a point. But as jacobush points out in a sibling comment to yours, those
aggressors could be local as well as foreign: the myth of the benevolent king
protecting the poor from rapacious nobles. Think of Richard II rallying the
revolting peasants in the wake of Wat Tyler's death (ultimately to those
peasants' detriment, alas). And arguably the main source of a monarch's
legitimacy was religious: he (or she) was seen as ordained by God.

> In fact, one of the main functions of a nation-state is to put up defence
> against other nation-states.

Well, yes. But providing a social safety-net for its most vulnerable people is
also one of the main functions of a nation-state: it doesn't thus follow that
nation-states formed for that reason.

A nation-state will likely be more able to defend itself than a looser, more
heterogeneous polity, but it will also provide a better vehicle for
aggression, and that aggression will typically be employed in pursuit of the
interests of the powerful. When the Tudors laid the foundations of a nation-
state in 16th century England, was it as a defensive measure, or to pursue
dynastic interests in France and Scotland?

With a few exceptions (Switzerland comes to mind), the idea that a nation-
state represents the conscious union of a people as a whole for defence
against outsiders seems more like propaganda and national myth-making than an
accurate recounting.

------
lordnacho
I'm afraid this article is faux-profound gibberish.

What is linear, one-dimensional thinking? Doesn't say, and it's not a common
term, either.

What is the difference between top-down and bottom-up? Or rather, what is top
and bottom?

I wonder if this is AI generated. Lots of interesting buzzwords, glued
together in sentences that don't create a whole. Like that picture that looks
familiar but you can't recognise any object in it.

Nature and markets are almost the same thing when you look closely. Evolution
is a kind of algorithm that operates in many ways. You need just imperfect
memory and selection to generate all sorts of patterns, in biological life, as
in the economy.

~~~
dalbasal
The author of the referenced post, Venkatesh Rao is a unique cat. The
terms/concepts are from him and he's been building up a lexicon for years.

He deals in abstract concepts, and it's semi-humourous by intention. The most
widely read but is a long series on a "nature of the firm" concept developed
by analysing "The Office."

Top down, in this context, means something like Canberra. A city that was
built from comprehensive designs created a priori and a formalized (legible,
in Venkat's terms) decision making processes.

Bottom-up means something like language, which is created by people using an
illegible (more or less meaning impossible to describe mechanically) and
distributed decision making processes.

Personally, I think bits of it are quite brilliant.

------
cjfd
Markets are very much fractal too. One should notice that there are companies
of every size presumably distributed according to a power law. Pretty much the
definition of a fractal. Seems like an ideologically motivated piece to
badmouth markets which is popular. And if one is from the other side of the
spectrum one would say that in many instances these big companies get
incentivized by government regulation. On both sides there is too much of a
knee-jerk reaction and too less appreciation that things vary greatly per
sector and per case and in some cases one side of the opinion spectrum is
correct and in other cases the other side.

~~~
paraschopra
My point is that the transactions in a market are always on a few dimensions
(price, packaging, utility, etc.) while our daily experience isn't like that.

I agree with you that on a higher-level there's an emergent richness within
the markets too (as captured by power laws) but it's less rich than the lived
experience.

~~~
ajuc
> price, packaging, utility

these are abstractions, you can invent similar abstractions for "our living
experience" and reduce it to a few variables as well.

I don't get what's your point other than "markets bad, life good".

~~~
paraschopra
The point is that even reducing our lives experience to few abstractions like
happiness makes them a limited view of what’s going on (via millions of years
of our evolution)

If abstractions were successful at addressing issues, the self-help industry
would have eliminated unhappiness.

Our thinking is linear, we abstract rich phenomena into few categories that we
can verbalise our understand. In that process, richness is lost.

~~~
ajuc
Abstractions are leaky, both these about markets and these about lives. It's
ok, we know they leak details, we use them to get results faster.

Markets are part of living, so it's not surprising that life as a whole is
more complex than small part of it. But I don't see any qualitative
differences, just a difference in degree.

And millions of years of evolution isn't a very good argument - because rate
of evolution is much quicker for culture than for biology. Nature was stuck on
unicellular life and in oceans for billions of years. We got from walking to
driving, flying and interplanetary travel in a few thousand years.

What's going on behind all that richness in the universe might be very simple.
We think it is actually very simple - a bunch of numeric fields and a few
simple rules of how they interact.

> Our thinking is linear, we abstract rich phenomena into few categories that
> we can verbalise our understand.

I'm not sure what you mean by linear. People are certainly capable of thinking
nonlinearly - for example people can understand recurrence.

Abstraction also isn't the only kind of thinking we can do. We can be
exhaustive as well, it's just slow and often doesn't contribute much to the
result so why do it.

> In that process, richness is lost.

What do you exactly mean by that?

------
aloer
Two months ago I wrote this comment in a thread about the healing power of
gardens/nature:

I've had a theory for some time now based on my own observations: A big part
of why nature is so calming is the absence of repeating patterns. In our
artificial life everything follows standardized forms and patterns. It's a
sterile world. The most obvious example being rectangles and perfect 90 degree
angles everywhere. But I would also count things like uniform colors, evenly
spread (artificial) light, predictable sounds etc. That makes me think that
somehow something like this absence of patterns - and the knowledge/assumption
for our brain that they are not to be expected in nature - helps us. The
beauty in this is that nature _is_ full of patterns. But on a different level,
no two patterns are ever the same. When you look at a green tree you simply
won't assume to find two leaves with the same color and shape

-> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19693343](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19693343)

A comment by patcon linked the following article:

[http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/is-consciousness-
fra...](http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/is-consciousness-fractal)

A fascinating read about fractal patterns in nature and how they feel “just
right” to us

~~~
paraschopra
Thanks for linking the article and the comment. Both were fantastic reads.

------
paraschopra
Hi everyone.

Author here. There are multiple comments criticising the choice of word
‘markets’ so I’ll explain my motivation here.

Yes, both biology and free-market economy are unplanned. However, just because
life had a billion years of headstart, biology is much more complex with
several levels of emergent structure (ATP, mitochondria, cell, organ,
organism, family, tribe). All such systems interact and influence each other
in ways that we don’t fully understand (or perhaps can even hope to
understand). This richness came about by a blind process of natural selection.

Markets, relative to biology, are much simpler because products and services
are designed not by a blind process but motivated individuals. Perhaps, as
someone else pointed out, I could have called it 'abstractions'. But the point
is that what we produce in markets (like a chair) is limited by the human
mind’s ability to understand and design for the complex system that’s a human.
In that sense, I call markets square. Because they only address the richness
of nature bluntly, the subtlety of nature is necessarily lost in market
transactions because it is human mind that’s doing transactions.

If we give markets millions of years, yes, perhaps the “invisible hand” will
create the same richness and subtlety in offerings and transactions that we
see in nature. But I’m not so sure about this. Maybe our mind will prove to be
a limitation in our ability to design solutions for complex systems.

The overall point of the essay is to do with our inability to comprehend
complex systems, but our tendency to act as if we do.

Hope this clarifies.

~~~
dalbasal
In some senses, I think it might be worth avoiding "markets" as a canonical
example.. for two reasons.

One is that the ground is not just well covered, it's been a major ideological
battleground for at least the last 150 years. The invisible hand of the market
has had countless brain cycles, books, and political sermons dedicated to
exposing it. We're hyper-aware (and paranoid) of it. We've basically been
inventing invisible hand detection devices, and everyone is sure that _their_
device is the accurate one.

The second reason is that it's inevitably unclean as an example. Governments
are usually taken as non-participants in markets, alternatives to markets and
such. Reality is much messier. Governments are simultaneously participants,
regulators and alternatives.

More importantly, there's a tendency to think of markets as being made of
people, where in fact they're largely made of companies. Companies are
institutions made of people, like (sometimes very like) governments... but
they aren't people. They're another thing, another(aside from markets) way of
organising economic activity.. Ronald Coase started his nobel-winning line of
enquiry with the question "if markets are so great, why are companies run like
totalitarian regimes?" As you say, markets are both top down and bottom up..
in a mesh of ways.

Most importantly... fresh examples help with fresh thinking. How about
"languages" instead of markets. They're made by people, evolve in organic-like
ways, are undirected.... The invisible hand is far less visible here. Most
people have barely noticed its existence.

~~~
ajuc
Some languages have institutions overseeing their development and doing top-
down reforms.

For example Polish has
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Language_Council](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Language_Council)
and it had 2 reforms in last 100 years.

------
m12k
'Markets' was a poor choice for the right hand side, as they are in fact
bottom up. 'Naturally occurring structures are fractal, but human abstractions
about them are square' would be much closer to the point, though not as
catchy.

------
soVeryTired
I do wish the author had gone with 'complex' and 'simple' instead of 'fractal'
and 'linear'. I don't see anything particularly 'linear' about a chair, for
example.

Regarding the 'top-down' vs 'bottom-up' dichotomy - I don't really see why one
is better than the other. I agree that humans tend to begin with a concrete
idea and iterate on their designs from there (a 'top-down' approach). The
article seems to be driving at the notion that nature's emergent, bottom-up
approach is somehow better. But beyond the observation that the amazon
rainforest is more diverse than a monocultural man-made forest, I don't think
they really substantiate why that is so.

~~~
paraschopra
Yes, I used the words in the title somewhat liberally.

I don’t think there’s anything universally good or bad about top-down
planning. It boils down to context. Recognition of contexts where top down
planning might fail is a desirable thing.

~~~
soVeryTired
So is recognition of the limitations of bottom-up 'planning'. For all its
impressive biochemistry, nature never managed to invent the wheel :)

~~~
paraschopra
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Rolling_animals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Rolling_animals)

~~~
soVeryTired
There's a difference between a wheel and a ball. A wheel has an axle.

------
xtiansimon
This reads like a design manifesto. Reminds me of texts from the early 20th
century (post-WWI, pre-WWII).

The logic seems cohesive up to about #7 philosophy and government. Maybe the
digression to the authors other works is better made in a footnote?

I can take the conceit of ‘markets are square’, but only to the point where
you show us something new that solves the problems described. Othesrwise, I
feel the same as another commenter, the article descends into ‘faux-profound
gibberish‘.

I don’t believe the narrative thrust gets past it’s shortcomings,

\- the author’s facile contradiction ‘governments should leave people alone’
AND ‘nation-state was inevitable‘

\- the author’s assumptions about fractals as complex and sophisticated. It’s
been demonstrated that surprisingly few rules can lead to great diversity.
Fractals are exactly this phenomena, but at a conceptually large scale. Makes
the fractal argument seem like a McGuffin

\- I don’t believe the Amazon org-chart is the best we can do (‘the map is not
the territory ‘).

------
bkohlmann
I really enjoyed this.

That said, The Godfather of fractal theory, Benoit Mandelbrot, wrote a book
entitled “the Misbehavior of Markets” which is a deep dive into why markets
exhibit fractal behavior (he even goes so far as to do the coastline zoom for
stock market data).

------
ralusek
Markets are as complicated as nature itself, and that complexity comes from
scarcity. If you open a floodgate, there is a market for which water molecules
will make it through first. Those nearest, those not in a grid lock, those in
a solid vs liquid vs gaseous state, etc. If you add conscious decision making
to processes bounded by scarcity, you get immeasurable complexity. The markets
of the natural world brought the animal kingdom from amino acids. Natural
selection is a market for gene participants to access scarce resources and
propagate, and look what's come of it. Human language and slang is a shifting
market for utility and signaling. Who you associate yourself with is a market
bounded by extreme scarcity. Who makes you laugh, who listens, who you've
known longest, who is physically nearest.

Freedom is markets and markets are complicated.

------
ForHackernews
I think "Reality has a surprising amount of detail" [0] is a better
restatement of this same basic idea.

Also, I don't think it's true that humans are "incapable of grasping non-
linear, complex interactions" \-- it's just that hard things are hard. If you
can save yourself a huge amount of effort by using a first-order
approximation, you should absolutely do that if you can get away with it.
There's a reason civil engineers don't typically concern themselves with
relativistic effects.

[0] [http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-
surprising-...](http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-
amount-of-detail)

~~~
paraschopra
Yes, I love the essay you mention.

Well, not understanding complex systems is ok when you are designing bridges.
But first order approximation fails horribly while designing policies.

As a simple example, Indian subcontinent where people aggregated in clusters
over many thousand years got divided into India and Pakistan via a simple
almost linear boundary. Result: hundreds of thousands of people displaced and
died during ensuing mass migrations.

------
__MatrixMan__
I think about squares often, well rectangles really. Practically everything I
see is a rectangle. I go to a rectangular building and poke little rectangles
to fill my rectangular screen with glyphs bounded by rectangles and
tesselating on the screen like rectangles would--and I see it all through my
rectangular glasses. Why?

Well, recycles tesselate--so that's one property that rules out pentagons,
say, as our shape of choice, but why not triangles? Or hexagons?

This question, I think, is similar to another one: why was euclidean geometry
developed more than a thousand years earlier than the non-euclidean ones? Is
there something more human about right angles than some other one? (look up
the playfair's axiom, you'll see the angles I'm taking about)

It's everywhere. Prime numbers are those special ones that can't be expressed
as a rectangle of dots on the page. Why do we define multiplication this way?

Is there something perhaps arbitrary and anthropocentric in our preference for
right angles? If so it would explain why the distribution of the primes is so
unpredictable.

I think it is because we live at the bottom of a gravity well and have an
adaptation (building things) which makes that matter.

I also think that if we could rid our mathematics of that bias, it would sort
of trickle up into other domains and allow our constructs to take on more
richness, like you see in the fractal side of the fractal vs rectangle images
presented in the article.

~~~
rtkwe
> why was euclidean geometry developed more than a thousand years earlier than
> the non-euclidean ones?

Because euclidean geometry is the geometry we experience at a human scale.

> Why do we define multiplication this way?

It's not actually multiplication though, it's just a convenient representation
of the repetitive addition that is actually multiplication. It's a clear way
to show to children that we've taking 9 dots 3 times to get 27. It's a tool to
teach and interface to a mathematical concept.

Much the same as why we use rectangular screens instead of hexagons or
anything else. It's the most convenient to manufacture and address because of
how repetitive and similar each row is when you think about the arrays of
pixels that make up the screen. Desks are mostly rectangles because it's easy
to cut straight lines and they match well. Then when you have a lot of
rectangular items it makes sense for the containers of those items (ie
buildings) to be rectangular too so they fit and pack well without any weird
gaps and wasted space.

Also I'm not sure where you're coming from with the "bias in our mathematics"
most higher level math (as early as Calc3 when you start dealing with
multivariate integrals one of the most important skills is converting from
cartesian coordinates to spherical or cylindrical because it often drastically
simplifies the problem) includes a lot of different coordinate switching to
simplify representations to simplify the math of solving a particular equation
or reasoning about a system.

~~~
__MatrixMan__
I'm not convinced that it's solely our scale that makes euclidean geometry the
preferred one. I think it also has to do with the fact the the ancient Greeks
did their math with pointy sticks in beds of sand--beds that took on a certain
shape due to environmental factors beyond just scale.

This caused us to associate the concept of orthogonality with a 90 degree
angle, which is (in most cases) a property of the representations we use--not
a property of the underlying mathematical objects. It's not a bias of the
coordinate systems, it's a bias of how we conceive of the space, uh,
coordinated by those systems.

And it's a convenient one--it evolved in our environment for a reason--it
works well here. But so did the idea that the Earth was in the center of the
universe.

I realize that it's a kooky theory, but it takes time to turn a kooky theory
into a serious one, and so far I think it has some merits so I'm going to keep
working on it.

Particularly, it would explain the seemingly arbitrary values of certain
mathematical constants. If our concept of "straight line" or "flat surface"
were to be not special at all, but just some weird quirk of how humans do
things, then constants like pi would tell us less about circles and more about
our own habits of perception, and I think that would be a much more satisfying
way of framing things.

Or think about how the derivative of e^x is e^x. That's a cool property, but
if you look at how the difference quotient is constructed you'll see that it
implies axes on a flat surface set at 90 degrees to each other. So maybe
what's special about e says more about the spaces implied by the coordinate
system.

I realize that e is not _defined_ this way. That's where the theory needs
work. Somehow our concept of the natural numbers is bound up with our
perspective on flatness, and of how independent things ought to be represented
and compared. I've yet to be able to construct something number-like that I
can map to alternative values of e and pi for different geometries, but I
think it can be done.

------
0n34n7
And now we are using these top-down developed computers to try and simulate
bottom-up phenomena (like pattern recognition) and call it AI (well Neural
Networks to be specific)

~~~
dmos62
What would a bottom-up developed computer be like? Can you elaborate on top-
down/bottom-up in this context?

~~~
partomniscient
I don't think the question you posed makes sense.

If it was bottom up developed, it would be adaptive, and therefore not a
computer as such. Adaptive systems manage to handle new input (or fail). The
computer is only going to do what it's been programmed (however poorly) to do.

One of the things required for computation is predictable repetition - same
inputs, same outputs. This is why error recognition/correction is so important
for things like physical ram and ethernet packets - it's effectively trying to
filter out any bottom up behaviour that could affect the environment of the
computation/information transmission.

An ever so slightly different environment would affect the same inputs in a
bottom up system - think along the lines of butterflies affecting weather
systems by flapping their wings.

You could claim everything that happens is a result of 'some computation' but
then you end up in semantic arguments how to define 'life' (or how to define
what's 'computable', which is it's own entire problem). A couple of books from
back in the day in my life relevant to this were these two, and they're still
probably a good place to consider things from even today.

[https://www.stevenlevy.com/index.php/books/artificial-
life](https://www.stevenlevy.com/index.php/books/artificial-life)

[https://kk.org/outofcontrol/](https://kk.org/outofcontrol/)

~~~
rtkwe
The Ur example of a bottom up computer would be the brain. It works on
disparate unformatted inputs and can translate to a context appropriate output
and while there's no programming language for the mind (unless you want to
stretch a bit and say speech) you can instruct one in the particular ways you
want input manipulated into outputs.

------
watt
The essay does not support the summary (or conclusion). Markets are just as
bottom-up as anything.

------
keymone
our emotional response to seeing two wolves is probably about twice that of
seeing one wolf. but response to seeing 100 wolves and 200 wolves is probably
about the same. point being - there's plenty of logarithmic thinking in our
brains, so we're not that linear.

i fail to come up with similar example for exponential thinking, we probably
really can't comprehend that.

Edit: typo

~~~
anoncake
> our emotional response to seeing two wolves is probably about twice that of
> seeing one wolf.

I think it's closer to equal. One wolf is a danger, two wolves is a danger.

Especially when one wolf causes maximal fear, two wolves can't appear any more
dangerous.

------
magpi3
> 1/ When humans wield their power in the world, they are limited by the
> linear nature of their thinking. The best example of this linearization is
> the top-down planning of modern suburbs. Contrast this with how nations and
> states emerged in a bottom-up fashion.

Gardens and gardeners are one challenge to this assertion. A gardener can plan
things and yet also be aware that much of what will happen is beyond their
control and even sometimes their understanding.

------
vannevar
The author has the right idea, but the wrong target. The problem is not that
we have top-down planning; as he notes, that goes back as far as the
beginnings of civilization itself. The problem is that, due to technology and
the increasing concentration of wealth, top-down can now encompass vast scales
that it could not in the past. A human-planted forest isn't a big deal when
it's a handful of people planting a few acres. The tree mono-culture in the
small patch gets absorbed over time in to the greater, more heterogeneous
whole. But now one corporate entity can transform _millions_ of acres in a
short time. Corporations can blanket thousands of cities with scooters,
release a new food product that instantly appears in millions of stores, or
pepper the landscape with identical franchises virtually overnight. It this
kind of massive centralization of power that should be drawing the author's
criticism, not the mere notion of top-down planning.

------
RocketSyntax
Where exactly are markets mentioned? Look up the definition of laissez faire
in relation to free markets.

------
VMG
The author confuses government with markets multiple times

------
mapcars
Nice article, a few comments I would like to add

>If philosophers can’t answer what makes the life meaningful

Philosophers fail here because it is beyond thinking and experience based, so
one can not file a paper saying I found it - even if it is correct, it will
not have any impact on others.

>how can governments maximize it?

Governments need not maximize it, they just need to create fair conditions for
everyone, people inevitably will get there themselves, exactly as it's stated
later:

>A revolutionary idea is that governments should leave people alone so they
could pursue their well-being

>because the human mind is incapable of grasping non-linear, complex
interactions

The word "mind" is not specific enough, what mentioned here is intellect.
There are other dimensions to mind which are capable of much more than we can
imagine.

~~~
dmos62
> >If philosophers can’t answer what makes the life meaningful

I think the question is answered, in that it's shown that the question is
misguided. It's the problem-solving aspect of our minds that earns to find
meaning, even in things that don't inherently have it, which is most things.
What is the meaning of this geopolitical event? What is the meaning of the big
bang? If that little problem-solver inside us can't distinguish the validity
of these questions, then you experience compulsive meaning seeking. So I agree
with you, it's beyond "thinking".

~~~
Retra
The question has been answered over and over again. People asking this
question don't want answers, they want a mystery to be in awe of.

------
jnordwick
This this a lot of r/iam14andthisisdeep buzzword bingo.

------
protez
The significance between top-down vs. bottom-up has been compiled and
showcased by Matt Ridley, in his book, "The Evolution of Everything: How New
Ideas Emerge." It says most of human beings are incapable of comprehending
evolutionary design like free market. It's true. OP labeled markets as an
example of top-down phenomenon.

------
corporateVeal27
This reminds me a lot of the book The Evolution of Everything by Matt Ridley
(author of the Red Queen). It's effectively an anthropological study that goes
over how bottom-up self organizing systems occur even in human sub-cultures

------
koliber
This was a fantastically straightforward explanation of something that is very
elusive to explain. It reminds me of Christopher Alexander's "The Timeless Way
of Building", but 500 pages shorter and less meandering.

------
kulu2002
Nice article. But I don't understand from where the 'markets' came in picture.
Probably 'Life is fractal, but human understanding about it is square' btw
Markets can also be bottom up...

------
pier25
No, the length of the coastline doesn't change depending on scale. The map is
not the territory.

Also, you can have forests growing thanks to a conservationist top to bottom
approach that do not look like a grid.

------
mikorym
Whereas this may be useful for a social science class, I don't think it is
useful for a more precise discussion.

PS: Why call this bottom up vs. top down? That terminology sounds imprecise
and confusing to me.

~~~
jonnycomputer
it wouldn't be useful for a social science class because it is not precise
enough.

------
jonnycomputer
Is "our inability to think fractally and nonlinearly" a linear or a nonlinear
idea?

------
synlatexc
"And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery" \- Whitman

------
Nursie
This is littered with bland assertions

"4/ Because our mind can only accommodate thinking in one dimension (time) or
at best two dimensions (map),"

Really? And a chair, a 3D object, is your illustration of this?

------
anoncake
> 1/ When humans wield their power in the world, they are limited by the
> linear nature of their thinking. The best example of this linearization is
> the top-down planning of modern suburbs.

You can't demonstrate that humans cannot think linearly by showing an example
where they didn't.

> Contrast this with how nations and states emerged in a bottom-up fashion.

Except in the Americas, Africa, the Middle East (European colonization) and
Europe (Congress of Vienna, changes after the world wars). Australia is a
special case (with only one souvereign state), I don't know enough about Asia.

> 2/ This transformation of what looks like random, irregular structure into
> more orderly structure is because the human mind is incapable of grasping
> non-linear, complex interactions. We comprehend information linearly and
> hence our planning of the world around us is linear too.

Would you please stop insulting my species?

> 3/ This tendency of making sense of the world dooms apparently well-
> intentioned projects. When we plant a new forest to “save” our earth, we
> transform an earthly, fractal landscape into a two dimensional monoculture.

Foresters are perfectly capable of planting a mixed forest. When they didn't,
it's either because the forest was planted a long time ago when monocultures
appeared to be a good idea or for economic reasons.

> 4/ Because our mind can only accommodate thinking in one dimension (time) or
> at best two dimensions (map),

I'm pretty sure my mind manages 3 dimensions. We also can deal with problems
that have more dimensions, just not using spatial thinking.

> our designed objects ignore the messy intricacies of the real world.

Our designed objects ignore _some_ messy intriaces because there are a lot of
them.

> It’s apparent in all objects designed by humans, including the humble chair.

That humble chair is not excatly state of the ergonomic art.

> 7/ [...] Governments optimize what they understand and wellbeing, being a
> product of evolution, is a mix of factors is that cannot be intervened into
> in a top-down manner.

Doctors optimize what they understand and health, being a product of
evolution, is a mix of factors that cannot be intervened into in a top-down
manner.

> 8/ A revolutionary idea is that governments should leave people alone so
> they could pursue their well-being in a bottom-up fashion via social
> interactions in their local area. In fact, that’s how the world was before
> the advent of nation-state.

The modern concept of a "nation" is relatively recent, it has only been
invented in the 19th century. Governments that do things other than leaving
people alone have existed for millenia. In fact, "not leaving people
(completely) alone" is kind of what governments do.

The idea that governments should leave people alone is called "liberty" which
is derived from a latin word with the same meaning. So if it's a revolutionary
idea, that revolution must have a long time ago.

Organizing the state in a bottom-up manner, giving the lower levels of
government more power than the upper ones, isn't a new idea either. The Holy
Roman Emperors didn't really rule their empire, at least in modern history.

Also, the absence of a state is perfectly compatible with top-down government.
The chief of your tribe won't leave you alone. Chance are you cannot even
elect them, making the tribe _more_ top-down than a democratic state.

> 9/ Nation-state was inevitable because humans reasoned they could
> efficiently defend against enemies if they pooled their resources.

Maybe the state was, this is not really specific to nation states in
particular. However defense from enemies is far from the only role of the
state. Even hardcore classical liberals agree that it should keep the peace,
major infrastructure projects require a major organization and sometimes
eminent domain, Robin Hoods and charities cannot replace a welfare state.

> Notice what got lost in this optimization of defense: the complex, local web
> of interactions that everybody was a part of, and yet nobody understood.

If you don't have any social life beyond interacting with the state, you
probably should get help.

> 12/ [...] Perhaps nature is able to do it because it has no foresight.

No one forces you to use your foresight. Forsight isn't incompatible with
bottom-up design/emergence either.

------
antoniorosado
I really liked this post :)

------
kitten_smuggler
This was neat, good job!

------
macawfish
Maybe markets were once a useful way of communicating supply and demand for
the greater good, but nowadays the way they're often used perverts that
communication via exploitative usary.

~~~
macawfish
Downvote me all you want but it's said that vacant homes outnumber homeless
people by 6 to 1. That's a complete and utter failure of "the market" to
communicate actual supply and demand.

([https://www.mintpressnews.com/empty-homes-outnumber-the-
home...](https://www.mintpressnews.com/empty-homes-outnumber-the-
homeless-6-to-1-so-why-not-give-them-homes/207194/))

