[dsfsdfd]

Hierarchical systems do NOT scale well. If you want to scale something it needs to be distributed and in human terms that means equality, action by consensus, local decision making. The properties of the system must emerge from the global rules.

It's in the Zeitgeist because people are coming to understand how monumentally stupid it is to continue operating in this horrific way - both in terms of overall efficiency and in terms of human suffering.

[sergiosgc]

Hierarchical systems absolutely DO scale well. They are just not efficient in the task of adapting to a changing environment.

The proof that hierarchical systems do scale is in the military. They operate in absolute hierarchical fashion. In the past they did so with very limited communication, with headcounts unimaginable in today's organizations.

[dsfsdfd]

No they don't.

Pointing in the vague direction of an exemplar system and describing it a positive argument does not constitute an argument.

[obstacle1]

>Pointing in the vague direction of an exemplar system and describing it a positive argument does not constitute an argument.

Neither does saying "hierarchies do not scale well", or "no they don't", without providing any evidence. So at least you are both "arguing" on the same level: unsubstantiated opinion.

[jccooper]

Pretty much every large business and government is also explicitly hierarchical. For a particular firm it's such a common choice one has to imagine it's a good one. For organizations or broader scope than a single firm (industries and economies, cities and nations) independent competition and cooperation seems to work quite well.

[TeMPOraL]

Er... what? Hierarchical is the very definition of "scales well". That's what you want to do when you have many instances that all need to talk to each other. Distributed means combinatorial explosion. It's... like secondary-school-level graph theory/probability.

Distributed is what you want to have for a) robustness (because redundancy means the work can be redirected to agents that are still alive) and b) adaptability (because system can restructure itself locally without the need to coordinate with the entirety of it).

Of course you want to apply those two recursively, e.g. hierarchies that encompass many peers at each level, etc., but that doesn't change the point. Frankly, the whole field of distributed computing is one big proof that hierarchies are good and desirable.

[rewqfdsa]

> Hierarchical systems do NOT scale well.

Ahem. Ever hear of DNS?