[TeMPOraL]

Central control is efficient, if you can get the right signals to the controller, and do it fast enough to have a tight feedback loop. Humans alone can do none of this at scale, but modern computing can do the "feedback" part easily. It's now the "signals" and "controller" parts that need to be figured out.

[ekianjo]

Central control is efficient? Despite every government that tried to control the economy utterly failed? You will need to provide some solid source to claim this kind of things. The problem lies with the concept, not with how fast the loop happens.

[TeMPOraL]

Evidence is in mathematics. Central control is always more efficient, because control overhead is constant everywhere but the central node, where it grows linearly, whereas in fully distributed system overhead grows exponentially at each node. That's why anywhere you have more than a dozen of humans or even computer systems talking together, a hierarchy develops. Note that even companies fiercely competing on the market are internally run top down. And "vertical integration", so hot a topic in business nowadays, is essentially a code word for "centrally planned economy".

Distributed systems have many interesting properties, like resilience / fault-tolerance and flexibility. But efficiency is not one of those properties, as evidenced by ridiculous amount of waste generated by the process of competition.

Note that I'm not arguing the soviets were right and the world should be run from Moscow. I do however believe that spectacular failure modes of centrally planned economies were caused mostly by slow, incomplete and unreliable feedback loops, and not because the idea is inherently bad (it works for businesses pretty well). Moreover, I hate this clueless criticizing I frequently see that "centralized = bad", "distributed = good". Truth is, "distributed = wasteful", "centralized = efficient", but sometimes it's worth to be inefficient to get the benefits distribution brings.

[ben_w]

Are corporations generally run as central control, or does it vary wildly?

Genuine question as my knowledge of org charts is roughly as simplistic as this cartoon: https://www.businessinsider.com/big-tech-org-charts-2011-6?o...

[TeMPOraL]

Generally, yes. If you are told what to do by your manager, who is told what to do by their managers, etc. this is central control. The alternative would be to have companies run as markets internally: that is, multiple teams doing the same stuff, competing against each other for internal resources. I've heard there were companies trying that out, but I've never heard of it actually working for anyone.

[ekianjo]

> Are corporations generally run as central control, or does it vary wildly?

Corporations want to be centrally controlled, but the control is so poorly organized in most cases it's chaotic at best. And then there are multiple forms of organizations, not every of them works top-down, there are organizations that leave a lot of opportunities for working level employees to propose new ideas and initiatives.

[TeMPOraL]

> there are organizations that leave a lot of opportunities for working level employees to propose new ideas and initiatives.

Note that's still central control, just with fatter signalling pipe which can send ideas upstairs, and not just results. Directions and evaluations still come from the top.

[ekianjo]

> Directions and evaluations still come from the top.

Precisely not as I have pointed out. It's like saying a democracy is a centrally controlled system as well, since you only have one government. But in practice the government listens to the people in order to decide what to do next. It goes both ways.

[TeMPOraL]

Democracy does not mean "government listens to people". Every sane government, democratic or not, does listen to people to some extent. Democracy involves particular set procedures - like voting in candidates, referendums - through which the people do get to express their opinion, and which make that opinion binding. The government can't refuse to follow it, lest it loses legitimacy. There's nothing like that in a typical company or corporation.