April 2024 (6 months ago)

Small-Large-Small (SLS): A common pattern

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2 min read (236 words)
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Small-scale vegetable growers sell to aggregators who sell to bigger aggregators to sell to shops that sell to individuals.

Multiple examples create one general rule, which then gets applied to individual instances.

A small tweet gets picked up by a bigger account which then distributes it to smaller accounts.

But sometimes it is too big for just one center, so you have multiple such as in the case of DOI or DNS, where there are region-specific centers that talk to each other rather than one large center.

The Distribution of Ideas

Large groups can pick up new ideas from the individual input of random people. The channels must exist: email, texting, a comments section. These ideas are then applied.

Degeneration often occurs into Large-Small authoritarianism, where ideas emanate from those in the center, detached from reality. Ideas flowing into the center unused is bureaucratic failure.

The ideal is bottom-up organization and top-down diffusion. Ideas come from the bottom and reach the top; good ideas then diffuse. The issue now is that bad ideas come from the top, working solutions from the bottom are ignored. Another issue is that social media networks take ideas from the bottom and enhance them, but many of these ideas are bad, but people like it because they don’t have the background to know otherwise.

An Example of Failure

There is mold inside the safety label of my Costco orange juice. Costco has no reporting mechanism. The health of people suffer.