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Comment by LatteLazy | Hacker News Reader

And yet our economic and social systems have never been more decentralised...

Yea, not really. The wild west was wild. People used to make up their own banknotes, there were fraud and schemes everywhere. We take for granted that our bank won't steal our deposits, that's a new concept. Most of that is derived from some degree of 'centralization' - that said - it's definitely not this 1-to-many scheme that the language implies. The Fed has immense power, but is not really in your business. You can exchange money with whomever you want (almost) and it's none of the Feds' business.

Much like 'AI' I think this word 'decentralization' triggers something within.

It's worth considering that impulse (i.e. freedom is really important, and we should think about it), but also needs constant contextualizing.

But also, the wild west was founded upon the US wars with the native americans (centralized) and railroad monopolies (centralized).

Good point, except neither of those were as centralized as you're implying.

What your describing is just a different, more local form of centralisation. If your bank manager gets to refuse to give you your money, he has all the power. That's very very centralised, even if it's centralised in him, not in a CEO or a president.

I have 4 accounts at 4 different banks. If one of them refused to hand the cash over, even without any redress, I have 3 other accounts to fall back on. So my life is much less centralised than Wild West Bill.

The same applies to almost all elements of life. Back in the wild west, no one would date you if you didn't go to church. The priest literally had centralised power to refuse you a partner (and God help you if you were gay or the wrong colour or from a "bad" family). Today no one knows or cares. Very very decentralized. Ditto employment or housing or crime and punishment.

The bank manager will go to jail if he doesn't give you your money. And then the bank will give you your money. There is a 'system' of laws and regulations.

This is unlike true decentralization i.e. 'trustless', which, paradoxically has to be based entirely on trust.

Meta and Visa suddenly go permanently offline. What does the social and economic landscape look like now?

I go to the bank and get cash. Businesses accept that cash for goods and services. I observe no difference in my social media habits because I do not use Meta products.

Good for you, Mr. Exception-to-the-rule. (Btw, the same is true for me too).

And me. So your "exception" hypothesis is getting weaker :)

You've really got me thinking.

Is there a word for that thing when "everyone knows" what they think "everyone is doing", but once they start to dig deeper it turns out nobody really is? Everyone is pretending to, because they think that's what everybody should say and do?

Mass delusion? Group fallacy? Fashion? Groupthink? None quite capture it.

Sample bias. HN crowd != people I know in real life.

I think what's happening here is selection bias. The people who proudly have no Meta accounts are replying to each other saying "me too". The hundreds of others who were reading did not reply.

Sample bias is a thing, sure.

I'm alluding to something a bit more interesting, I hope.

We don't have a way to test those hundreds of voices comprising the supposed silent majority. I'm saying that when/(BIG if) one does - via some hitherto undevised ingenious experiment which always yields truth - we find that no... in fact everyone is at best ambivalent, but mostly going along with what they think the majority view is.

I'm sure there's a name/concept for this in group dynamics.

Consensus mythology? (I'm just making that up)

A hallmark is that interrogating the group yields one answer, but each individual considered privately will give you a very different answer.

But it's not "group-think" I'm talking about, because that implies a more overt pressure. Rather it emerges in the absence of coordination amongst an implied majority when there exists a loud propaganda message designating some other group a minority.

I think this effect has important implications in the kind of 50:50 + swing elections we've seen over the past few years. For example, in Brexit, a mass of lethargic voters assumed "everyone will vote against" and didn't verify the reality by asking lots of diverse friends. It's not that people are trapped in actual bubbles so much as bubbles of their own mind based on assumptions about those around them.

Sorry, that's probably a long and clumsy way of saying something obvious.

"Consensus mythology"

in philosophy it is known as heterophenomenolgy hetero = same, phenomenology = experience

Thanks gg, that's an interesting lead.

I see what you're getting at. I do know that many people, when asked about Whatsapp (especially parents complaining about the "obligatory" school Whatsapp groups), wish they didn't have to use it. I'm not sure how serious that sentiment is, or if they really would wish that if they understood the consequences, but as an experiment I have been attempting various community organisation projects that explicitly do not use Whatsapp. They've been quite successful, so far! We have just started co-ordinating a monthly kid's play session in our street, and I have a regular biking group.

Just go and get cash during a bank run. How hard can that be?

That wasn't provided as a condition. In a bank run, Visa's existence or non-existence is irrelevant. Credit is frozen.

Do you really think Visa and Meta could go under without causing a bank run?

By "Visa" do you mean "all payment clearing houses" and by Meta do you mean "all social media"?

Because if Visa shits itself (it has) I use Amex, Mastercard, cash, debit, or even checks.

And if Meta shits itself I don't even notice except to make fun of it.

Think about the situation for a second. You'll be switching to other methods, and so will everyone else, all at once. Do Amex and Mastercard even have the capacity to take up the slack with no notice? Do you really think that every critical component of a cost-optimised system will have been over-provisioned to be able to take on hundreds of millions of additional customers in a single day? And if one fails, the demand switches to the remainder and crashes them too. It's a classic cascade failure.

I suspect it would take up the slack - depending on how the failure happened and when it happened.

I don't believe payment processors have the same number of payments every second, so Amex and MC have to be sized for the largest spike (+ some) that they can endure, and so unless Visa fell right when they were already maxed out, they'd likely continue.

And Visa has fallen before; if it was anything like a long-term failure, you know all the other processors would be spinning up as much extra capacity as they could. And many stores still have the paper machines for credit slips.

https://www.wired.com/story/visa-outage-shows-the-fragility-...

It's a little rough for about a week and by a month out everything's basically completely fine.

India has its own payment processing stack, UPI so I expect Visa going down shouldn’t lead to a major disruption. It’s yet to be tested however so we won’t know until Visa actually goes down.

WhatsApp going down on the other hand will be a big pain as lots of businesses and people rely on it. Though I expect them to figure out alternatives within a few weeks.

Meta goes offline, nothing of any importance changes.

Visa goes offline, people switch to mastercard or use cash.

Now compare that to living in the wild west, and the only town in 100miles bans you because you're slight different to them.

That seems about as far from true as a statement can be.

Can you give an example?

Can you elaborate?

In my modern, urban, life I have 1000 different options for my food supply or friendships or housing or employment. Aside from a very unengaged, far away, government there is no centralised entity in my life. And even that I can replace by moving country.

100 years ago, there was one major employer in my area (east London), a few grocers and bakers, people's activities were tightly controlled and linked to family status. Participation in all elements of economic and social life was tightly controlled by a small clique of economic, clerical and political elites.

People think about centralisation as a corporate or government thing and a unitary national authority. But it's not. It's part of every later of society. When we lived in tribes, the chief had totally centralised power over almost everything. Villages were the same with an overlord somewhere you'd never see. Towns were lighter but still quite centralised. Modern cities and urban life is about as decentralized as it is possible to be.

That's my understanding of centralisation. Sorry it's not better explained.

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