root@Mesh Archive: Economics [hr]

Guru wrote:

Same's true of any cooperative group that works well together. You don't need to go with a Banyan to accomplish this: any large economic group is already doing it. You're assuming that it'll be a stronger cooperative network because they're all forks, which is reasonable, but I think your assumption that that economic cooperation will lead them to be a more powerful economic force than an org composed of a similarly sized population of non-fork members is faulty. First, those orgs already exist and, as you've said, whoever has a big tree first can block the sunlight of growing orgs and gain a significant advantage. The corps have already done that, though there's more room for such a banyan to grow in the outer system. I think the diversity you get from a multiple-member system is likely to outweigh the advantages of increased cooperation you'd get from repeated forking, though, particularly in the economic sector. New ideas and adaptability are more vital for success as cohesion.

"You make good points, hypercorporations do already try and take over all available space, and diversity is far superior do monoculture when coming up with innovations. Here's why a banyan doesn't have the limitations you think they do: First, one of the limiting factors for a hypercorp, one might even say the limiting factor for a hypercorp, is communication. Hypercorps have a hierarchy to concentrate decision making, and to allow swift dissemination of managerial decisions to the leaves of the corporate tree (to use a computer science analogy). Hypercorps can have all the diversity they want, they still have bottlenecks to communicating new and powerful ideas. Banyans do not suffer from this problem at all. "Since most people are not familiar with how banyans work as an economic entity, let me give a quick story about one. The Entelechy Network (e[sup]n[/sup]) is a criminal banyan based off the Carnival of the Goat, to which I am the Muse. e[sup]1[/sup] was a selfish brute who had access to a menton morph and far too much time on his hands. He was also insanely grumpy about every little thing in his environment, and had to have it all just so. The story would end here if he hadn't also been a hard-working tinkerer, but as it was he was good at modifying his environment to suit his needs. It didn't take him very long to realize that if he forked himself into another menton, e[sup]2[/sup], he could make much more rapid progress on customizing his surroundings, and did so. He found that he got along well enough with himself, as he enjoyed his own thoughts, and now finally had someone to play chess with. They forked a few dozen more times, e[sup]3[/sup] through e[sup]37[/sup], got quite a bit more built, and began focusing down different research paths. After some time, I, as their Muse, began to notice that they were drifting apart in personality. It wasn't much, but my different forks were finding a statistically significant difference in a few personality indicators, and we could easily extrapolate this drift as the population approached e[sup]n[/sup]. "We considered panicking, but there didn't seem much point. We just started keeping track of the drift and making sure that updates were rolled out with respect to individual differences. It actually started to come in very useful, and we were able to make much better estimates of the thinking and desires of e[sup]n[/sup]. At the same time, we began to see other emergent effects of the banyan. There were enough customizations being applied for the sake of the banyan that an increasingly large number of these inventions were also very useful to entities outside of the banyan. e[sup]n[/sup] discovered that it is legally very difficult to prosecute any member of a banyan without there being some doubt as to the identity of that member (was it e[sup]77[/sup] or was it e[sup]0x771993AA[/sup]?). Their compressed selfishness inverted itself and began to produce members that are extroverted and interested in trade and exchange with the outside world. They formed an active community of risk takers, entirely unconcerned with the morality of any of their self-experiments, as they were of one mind as to the efficacy of this use. While self-experimentation is usually not generalizable, with a banyan, it is the only generalizable experimentation. "The point of my story is that while you are correct that the diversity of multi-member groups increases the overall creativity and output with respect to the general population, a banyan's creativity and output with respect to themselves is orders of magnitude beyond what the first group is capable of."