Society · Coordination
ChimericalComputation
Natural work overlaps: doing more of one task always means doing a little less of another, and imperfect alignment between them packs more function into the same agents
Definition
Mechanism
In natural systems, computations are not cleanly divided among dedicated components; the same pathway serves several tasks at once, which partly trade off. The apoptosis signalling channel has a ChannelCapacity of only about 0.92 bits, so it does not reliably carry the self-destruct signal. That looks like a fault for the cell, but it also damps over-reaction to unreliable signals and stops a dense area of cells dying at once, which would harm the organism. Two levels, the cell and the cell population, are optimised together by one compromise. In human organisations this looks like instructions sent but not obeyed. Rather than the clean division of labour of MultiModularity, the result is overlapping work, in line with MetaModularity, and lack of perfect alignment becomes a feature rather than only a defect.
Invariants
- Each pathway serves more than one task, and the tasks partly trade off
- Several levels (e.g. individual and population) are optimised at once
- A shortfall in one task's reliability can be the price of another task's function
Risks
Failure modes
Treating each unreliable pathway as a broken single-purpose component and fixing it, losing the other function
Assuming misalignment between parts is always selfishness or waste
Mapping the system part by part like an engine and mispredicting interventions
Relationships
Builds on
References
Infrastructure
The maximum rate at which information can be reliably transmitted through a channel, given its noise
Mind
A body plan that holds many overlapping but non-identical models of the same problem, ready to instantiate whichever fits
Mind
A body plan of standardised, separate parts that can be swapped like for like
Used by
References
A pure coordination game in which the best joint strategy keeps changing, so the key is how cheaply players can move to the next game