A good analysis of the Ask the Audience lifeline from Who Wants to be a Millionaire is available here, while on the other hand we have a slight sceptic here.
Ask the Audience
A good analysis of the Ask the Audience lifeline from Who Wants to be a Millionaire is available here, while on the other hand we have a slight sceptic here.
Chapter Four, Part I
In April 1946, at a forum organized by the New York Herald- Tribune, General Wild Bill Donovan gave a speech entitled ‘Our Foreign Policy Needs a Central Intelligence Agency.” During World War II, Donovan had been the head of the Office of Strategic Services, the United States’ chief wartime intelligence organization, and once the war ended he became a loud public advocate for the creation of a more powerful peacetime version of the OSS. Before the war, the United States had divided intelligence-gathering responsibilities among the different military services. But the failure of any of those services to anticipate the attack on Pearl Harbor— despite what seemed, in retrospect, to be ample evidence that a major Japanese strike was in the works—had pointed up the system’s limitations and suggested the need for a more comprehensive approach to intelligence gathering. So, too, did the prospect of conflict with the Soviet Union, which even in 1946 loomed as a real possibility, and the advent of new technologies—Donovan cited “the rocket, the atomic bomb, bacteriological warfare—that made America’s borders seem far from impregnable. In his April speech, Donovan hit on all of these themes, arguing that what the United States needed was “a centralized, impartial, independent agency” to take charge of all of the country’s intelligence operations.
Donovan’s public speaking didn’t do much for his own career, since his sharp criticisms alienated the intelligence community and probably doomed his chances of returning to government service. Nonetheless, in 1947, Congress passed the National Security Act and created the Central Intelligence Agency. As historian Michael Warner has put it, the goal of the law was to “implement the principles of unity of command and unity of intelligence.” Fragmentation and division had left the United States vulnerable to surprise attack. Centralization and unity would keep it safe in the future.
In fact, though, the centralization of intelligence never happened. Although the CIA was initially the key player in the postwar period, as time passed the intelligence community became more fragmented than ever, divided into a kind of alphabet soup of agencies with overlapping responsibilities and missions, including not just the CIA but also the National Security Agency, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the intelligence arms of each of the three major military services. In theory, the director of the CIA was in charge of the U.S. intelligence community as a whole, but in practice he exercised very little supervision over these agencies, and most of the money for intelligence operations came from the Department of Defense. In addition, the FBI—which was responsible for domestic law enforcement—operated almost completely outside the orbit of this intelligence community, even though information about foreign terrorists operating inside the United States would obviously be of interest to the CIA. In place of the centralized repository of information and analysis that Donovan had envisioned, the U.S. intelligence community evolved into a collection of virtually autonomous, decentralized groups, all working toward the same broad goal—keeping the United States safe from attack—but in very different ways.
Until September 11, 2001, the flaws of this system were overlooked. The intelligence community had failed to anticipate the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassy in Kenya and the USS Cole in Yemen. But not until September 11 did the failure of U.S. intelligence gathering come to seem undeniable. The Congressional Joint Inquiry into the attacks found that the U.S. intelligence community had “failed to capitalize on both the individual and collective significance of available information that appears relevant to the events of September 1 1.” Intelligence agencies “missed opportunities to disrupt the September 11th plot,” and allowed information to pass by unnoticed that, if appreciated, would have “greatly enhanced its chances of uncovering and preventing” the attacks. It was, in other words, Pearl Harbor all over again.
The congressional inquiry was unquestionably a classic example of Monday-morning quarterbacking. Given the sheer volume of information that intelligence agencies process, it’s hardly surprising that a retrospective look at the data they had on hand at the time of the attack would uncover material that seemed relevant to what happened on September 11. That doesn’t necessarily mean the agencies could have been realistically expected to recognize the relevance of the material beforehand. In her classic account of the intelligence failures at Pearl Harbor; Warning and Decision, Roberta Wohistetter shows how many signals there were of an impending Japanese attack, hut suggests that it was still unreasonable to expect human beings to have picked the right signals out from “the buzzing and blooming confusion” that accompanied them. Strategic surprise, Wohlstetter suggests, is an intractable problem to solve. And if a massive Japanese naval attack comprising hundreds of planes and ships and thousands of men was difficult to foresee, how much harder would it have been to predict a terrorist attack involving just nineteen men?
And yet one has to wonder. Given the almost complete failure of the intelligence community to anticipate any of four major terrorist attacks from 1993 through 2001, is it not possible that organizing the intelligence community differently would have, at the very least, improved its chances of recognizing what the Joint Inquiry called “the collective significance” of the data it had on hand? Predicting the actual attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon may have been impossible. But coming up with a reasonable, concrete estimate of the likelihood of such an attack nay not have been.
That, at least, was the conclusion that Congress reached: better processes would have produced a better result. In particular, they stressed the lack of “information sharing” between the various agencies. Instead of producing a coherent picture of the threats the United States faced, the various agencies produced a lot of localized snapshots. The sharpest critic of the agencies’ work, Senator Richard Shelby, argued that the FBI in particular was crippled by its “decentralized organizational structure,” which “left information-holdings fragmented into largely independent fiefdoms.” And the intelligence community as a whole was hurt by a failure to put the right information in the hands of the right people. What needed to be done, Shelby suggested, was to abolish the fiefdoms and return to the idea for which Bill Donovan had argued half a century ago. One agency, which could stand “above and independent from the disputatious bureaucracies,” needed to be put in charge of U.S. intelligence. Decentralization had led the United States astray. Centralization would put things right.
Donovan’s public speaking didn’t do much for his own career, since his sharp criticisms alienated the intelligence community and probably doomed his chances of returning to government service. Nonetheless, in 1947, Congress passed the National Security Act and created the Central Intelligence Agency. As historian Michael Warner has put it, the goal of the law was to “implement the principles of unity of command and unity of intelligence.” Fragmentation and division had left the United States vulnerable to surprise attack. Centralization and unity would keep it safe in the future.
In fact, though, the centralization of intelligence never happened. Although the CIA was initially the key player in the postwar period, as time passed the intelligence community became more fragmented than ever, divided into a kind of alphabet soup of agencies with overlapping responsibilities and missions, including not just the CIA but also the National Security Agency, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the intelligence arms of each of the three major military services. In theory, the director of the CIA was in charge of the U.S. intelligence community as a whole, but in practice he exercised very little supervision over these agencies, and most of the money for intelligence operations came from the Department of Defense. In addition, the FBI—which was responsible for domestic law enforcement—operated almost completely outside the orbit of this intelligence community, even though information about foreign terrorists operating inside the United States would obviously be of interest to the CIA. In place of the centralized repository of information and analysis that Donovan had envisioned, the U.S. intelligence community evolved into a collection of virtually autonomous, decentralized groups, all working toward the same broad goal—keeping the United States safe from attack—but in very different ways.
Until September 11, 2001, the flaws of this system were overlooked. The intelligence community had failed to anticipate the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassy in Kenya and the USS Cole in Yemen. But not until September 11 did the failure of U.S. intelligence gathering come to seem undeniable. The Congressional Joint Inquiry into the attacks found that the U.S. intelligence community had “failed to capitalize on both the individual and collective significance of available information that appears relevant to the events of September 1 1.” Intelligence agencies “missed opportunities to disrupt the September 11th plot,” and allowed information to pass by unnoticed that, if appreciated, would have “greatly enhanced its chances of uncovering and preventing” the attacks. It was, in other words, Pearl Harbor all over again.
The congressional inquiry was unquestionably a classic example of Monday-morning quarterbacking. Given the sheer volume of information that intelligence agencies process, it’s hardly surprising that a retrospective look at the data they had on hand at the time of the attack would uncover material that seemed relevant to what happened on September 11. That doesn’t necessarily mean the agencies could have been realistically expected to recognize the relevance of the material beforehand. In her classic account of the intelligence failures at Pearl Harbor; Warning and Decision, Roberta Wohistetter shows how many signals there were of an impending Japanese attack, hut suggests that it was still unreasonable to expect human beings to have picked the right signals out from “the buzzing and blooming confusion” that accompanied them. Strategic surprise, Wohlstetter suggests, is an intractable problem to solve. And if a massive Japanese naval attack comprising hundreds of planes and ships and thousands of men was difficult to foresee, how much harder would it have been to predict a terrorist attack involving just nineteen men?
And yet one has to wonder. Given the almost complete failure of the intelligence community to anticipate any of four major terrorist attacks from 1993 through 2001, is it not possible that organizing the intelligence community differently would have, at the very least, improved its chances of recognizing what the Joint Inquiry called “the collective significance” of the data it had on hand? Predicting the actual attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon may have been impossible. But coming up with a reasonable, concrete estimate of the likelihood of such an attack nay not have been.
That, at least, was the conclusion that Congress reached: better processes would have produced a better result. In particular, they stressed the lack of “information sharing” between the various agencies. Instead of producing a coherent picture of the threats the United States faced, the various agencies produced a lot of localized snapshots. The sharpest critic of the agencies’ work, Senator Richard Shelby, argued that the FBI in particular was crippled by its “decentralized organizational structure,” which “left information-holdings fragmented into largely independent fiefdoms.” And the intelligence community as a whole was hurt by a failure to put the right information in the hands of the right people. What needed to be done, Shelby suggested, was to abolish the fiefdoms and return to the idea for which Bill Donovan had argued half a century ago. One agency, which could stand “above and independent from the disputatious bureaucracies,” needed to be put in charge of U.S. intelligence. Decentralization had led the United States astray. Centralization would put things right.
Chapter Four, Part II
In challenging the virtues of decentralization, Shelby was challenging an idea that in the past fifteen years has seized the imagination of businessmen, academics, scientists, and technologists everywhere. In business, management theories like reengineering advocated replacing supervisors and managers with self-managed teams that were responsible for solving most problems on their own, while more utopian thinkers deemed the corporation itself outmoded. In physics and biology scientists paid increasing attention to self-organizing, decentralized systems—like ant colonies or beehives—which, even without a center, proved robust and adaptable. And social scientists placed renewed emphasis on the importance of social networks, which allow people to connect and coordinate with each other without a single person being in charge. Most important, of course, was the rise of the Internet—in some respects, the most visible decentralized system in the world—and of corollary technologies like peer-to-peer file sharing (exemplified by Napster), which offered a clear demonstration of the possibilities (economic, organizational, and more) that decentralization had to offer.
The idea of the wisdom of crowds also takes decentralization as a given and a good, since it implies that if you set a crowd of self- interested, independent people to work in a decentralized way on the same problem, instead of trying to direct their efforts from the top down, their collective solution is likely to be better than any other solution you could come up with. American intelligence agents and analysts were self-interested, independent people working in a decentralized way on roughly the same problem (keeping the country safe). So what went wrong? Why did those agents not produce a better forecast? Was decentralization really the problem?
BEFORE WE ANSWER THAT question, we need to answer a simpler one first: What do we mean by “decentralization,” anyway? It’s a capacious term, and in the past few years it’s been tossed around more freely than ever. Flocks of birds, free-market economies, cities, peer-to-peer computer networks: these are all considered examples of decentralization. Yet so, too, in other contexts, are the American public-school system and the modern corporation. These systems are dramatically different from each other, but they do have this in common: in each, power does not fully reside in one central location, and many of the important decisions are made by individuals based on their own local and specific knowledge rather than by an omniscient or farseeing planner.
In terms of decision making and problem solving, there are a couple of things about decentralization that really matter. It fosters, and in turn is fed by, specialization—of labor, interest, attention, or what have you. Specialization, as we’ve known since Adam Smith, tends to make people more productive and efficient. And it increases the scope and the diversity of the opinions and information in the system (even if each individual person’s interests become more narrow).
Decentralization is also crucial to what the economist Friedrich Hayek described as tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is knowledge that can’t be easily summarized or conveyed to others, because it is specific to a particular place or job or experience, but it is nonetheless tremendously valuable. (In fact, figuring out how to take advantage of individuals’ tacit knowledge is a central challenge for any.group or organization.) Connected with this is the assumption that is at the heart of decentralization, namely that the closer a person is to a problem, the more likely he or she is to have a good solution to it. This practice dates hack to ancient Athens, where decisions about local festivals were left up to the demes, as opposed to the Athenian assembly, and regional magistrates handled most nonserious crimes, It can also be seen in Exodus, where Moses’ father-in-law counseled him to judge only in ‘great matter[s]” and to leave all other decisions to local rulers.
Decentralization’s great strength is that it encourages independence and specialization on the one hand while still allowing people to coordinate their activities and solve difficult problems on the other. Decentralization’s great weakness is that there’s no guarantee that valuable information which is uncovered in one part of the system will find its way through the rest of the system. Sometimes valuable information never gets disseminated, making it less useful than it otherwise would be. What you’d like is a way for individuals to specialize and to acquire local knowledge—which increases the total amount of information available in the system— while also being able to aggregate that local knowledge and private information into a collective whole, much as Google relies on the local knowledge of millions of Web-page operators to make Google searches ever-smarter and ever-quicker. To accomplish this, any “crowd”—whether it be a market, a corporation, or an intelligence agency—needs to find the right balance between the two imperatives: making individual knowledge globally and collectively useful (as we know it can be), while still allowing it to remain resolutely specific and local.
The idea of the wisdom of crowds also takes decentralization as a given and a good, since it implies that if you set a crowd of self- interested, independent people to work in a decentralized way on the same problem, instead of trying to direct their efforts from the top down, their collective solution is likely to be better than any other solution you could come up with. American intelligence agents and analysts were self-interested, independent people working in a decentralized way on roughly the same problem (keeping the country safe). So what went wrong? Why did those agents not produce a better forecast? Was decentralization really the problem?
BEFORE WE ANSWER THAT question, we need to answer a simpler one first: What do we mean by “decentralization,” anyway? It’s a capacious term, and in the past few years it’s been tossed around more freely than ever. Flocks of birds, free-market economies, cities, peer-to-peer computer networks: these are all considered examples of decentralization. Yet so, too, in other contexts, are the American public-school system and the modern corporation. These systems are dramatically different from each other, but they do have this in common: in each, power does not fully reside in one central location, and many of the important decisions are made by individuals based on their own local and specific knowledge rather than by an omniscient or farseeing planner.
In terms of decision making and problem solving, there are a couple of things about decentralization that really matter. It fosters, and in turn is fed by, specialization—of labor, interest, attention, or what have you. Specialization, as we’ve known since Adam Smith, tends to make people more productive and efficient. And it increases the scope and the diversity of the opinions and information in the system (even if each individual person’s interests become more narrow).
Decentralization is also crucial to what the economist Friedrich Hayek described as tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is knowledge that can’t be easily summarized or conveyed to others, because it is specific to a particular place or job or experience, but it is nonetheless tremendously valuable. (In fact, figuring out how to take advantage of individuals’ tacit knowledge is a central challenge for any.group or organization.) Connected with this is the assumption that is at the heart of decentralization, namely that the closer a person is to a problem, the more likely he or she is to have a good solution to it. This practice dates hack to ancient Athens, where decisions about local festivals were left up to the demes, as opposed to the Athenian assembly, and regional magistrates handled most nonserious crimes, It can also be seen in Exodus, where Moses’ father-in-law counseled him to judge only in ‘great matter[s]” and to leave all other decisions to local rulers.
Decentralization’s great strength is that it encourages independence and specialization on the one hand while still allowing people to coordinate their activities and solve difficult problems on the other. Decentralization’s great weakness is that there’s no guarantee that valuable information which is uncovered in one part of the system will find its way through the rest of the system. Sometimes valuable information never gets disseminated, making it less useful than it otherwise would be. What you’d like is a way for individuals to specialize and to acquire local knowledge—which increases the total amount of information available in the system— while also being able to aggregate that local knowledge and private information into a collective whole, much as Google relies on the local knowledge of millions of Web-page operators to make Google searches ever-smarter and ever-quicker. To accomplish this, any “crowd”—whether it be a market, a corporation, or an intelligence agency—needs to find the right balance between the two imperatives: making individual knowledge globally and collectively useful (as we know it can be), while still allowing it to remain resolutely specific and local.
Chapter Four, Part III
In 1991, Norwegian.hacker Linus Torvalds created his own version of the Unix operating system, dubbing it Linux. He then released the source code he had written to the public, so everyone out there—well, everyone who understood computer code—could see what he had done. More important, he attached a note that read, “If your efforts are freely distributable, I’d like to hear from you, so I can add them to the system.” It was a propitious decision. As one history of Linux points out: “Of the first ten people to download Linux, five sent back bug fixes, code improvements, and new features.” Over time, this improvement process became institutionalized, as thousands of programmers, working for free, contributed thousands of minor and major fixes to the operating system, making Linux ever-more reliable and robust.
Unlike Windows, which is owned by Microsoft and worked on only by Microsoft employees, Linux is owned by no one, When a problem arises with the way Linux works, it only gets fixed if someone, on his own, offers a good solution. There are no bosses ordering people around, no organizational charts dictating people’s responsibilities. Instead, people work on what they’re interested in
and ignore the rest. This seems like—in fact, it is—a rather haphazard way to solve problems. But so far at least, it has been remarkably effective, making Linux the single most important challenger to Microsoft.
Linux is clearly a decentralized system, since it has no formal organization and its contributors come from all over the world. What decentralization offers Linux is diversity In the traditional corporate model, top management hires the best employees it can, pays them to work full-time, generally gives them some direction about what problems to work on, and hopes for the best. That is not a bad model. It has the great virtue of making it easy to mobilize people to work on a particular problem, and it also allows companies to get very good at doing the things they know how to do. But it also necessarily limits the number of possible solutions that a corporation can come up with, both because of mathematical reality (a company has only so many workers, and they have only so much time) and because of the reality of organizational and bureaucratic politics. Linux, practically speaking, doesn’t worry much about either. Surprisingly, there seems to be a huge supply of programmers willing to contribute their efforts to make the system better. That guarantees that the field of possible solutions will he immense. There’s enough variety among programmers, and there are enough programmers, that no matter what the bug is, someone is going to come up with a fix for it. And there’s enough diversity that someone will recognize bugs when they appear. In the words of open-source guru Eric Raymond, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”
In the way it operates, in fact, Linux is not all that different from a market, as we saw in Chapter 2 on diversity. Like a bee colony, it sends out lots of foragers and assumes that one of them will find the best route to the flower fields. This is, without a doubt, less efficient than simply trying to define the best route to the field or even picking the smartest forager and letting him go. After all, if hundreds or thousands of programmers are spending their time trying to come up with a solution that only a few of them are going to find, that’s many hours wasted that could he spent doing something else. And yet, just as the free market’s ability to generate lots of alternatives and then winnow them down is central to its continued growth, Linux’s seeming wastefulness is a kind of strength (a kind of strength that for-profit companies cannot, fortunately or unfortunately, rely on). You can let a thousand flowers bloom and then pick the one that smells the sweetest.
Unlike Windows, which is owned by Microsoft and worked on only by Microsoft employees, Linux is owned by no one, When a problem arises with the way Linux works, it only gets fixed if someone, on his own, offers a good solution. There are no bosses ordering people around, no organizational charts dictating people’s responsibilities. Instead, people work on what they’re interested in
and ignore the rest. This seems like—in fact, it is—a rather haphazard way to solve problems. But so far at least, it has been remarkably effective, making Linux the single most important challenger to Microsoft.
Linux is clearly a decentralized system, since it has no formal organization and its contributors come from all over the world. What decentralization offers Linux is diversity In the traditional corporate model, top management hires the best employees it can, pays them to work full-time, generally gives them some direction about what problems to work on, and hopes for the best. That is not a bad model. It has the great virtue of making it easy to mobilize people to work on a particular problem, and it also allows companies to get very good at doing the things they know how to do. But it also necessarily limits the number of possible solutions that a corporation can come up with, both because of mathematical reality (a company has only so many workers, and they have only so much time) and because of the reality of organizational and bureaucratic politics. Linux, practically speaking, doesn’t worry much about either. Surprisingly, there seems to be a huge supply of programmers willing to contribute their efforts to make the system better. That guarantees that the field of possible solutions will he immense. There’s enough variety among programmers, and there are enough programmers, that no matter what the bug is, someone is going to come up with a fix for it. And there’s enough diversity that someone will recognize bugs when they appear. In the words of open-source guru Eric Raymond, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”
In the way it operates, in fact, Linux is not all that different from a market, as we saw in Chapter 2 on diversity. Like a bee colony, it sends out lots of foragers and assumes that one of them will find the best route to the flower fields. This is, without a doubt, less efficient than simply trying to define the best route to the field or even picking the smartest forager and letting him go. After all, if hundreds or thousands of programmers are spending their time trying to come up with a solution that only a few of them are going to find, that’s many hours wasted that could he spent doing something else. And yet, just as the free market’s ability to generate lots of alternatives and then winnow them down is central to its continued growth, Linux’s seeming wastefulness is a kind of strength (a kind of strength that for-profit companies cannot, fortunately or unfortunately, rely on). You can let a thousand flowers bloom and then pick the one that smells the sweetest.
Chapter Four, Part IV
So who picks the sweetest-smelling one? Ideally, the crowd would. But here’ where striking a balance between the local and the global is essential: a decentralized system can only produce genuinely intelligent results if there’s a means of aggregating the information of everyone in the system. Without such a means, there’s no reason to think that decentralization will produce a smart result. In the case of the experiment with which this book opened, that aggregating mechanism was just Frances Galton counting the votes. In the case of the free market, that aggregating mechanism is obviously price. The price of a good reflects, imperfectly but effectively, the actions of buyers and sellers everywhere, and provides the necessary incentive to push the economy where the buyers and sellers want it to go. The price of a stock reflects, imperfectly but effectively, investors’ judgment of how much a company is worth. In the case of Linux, it is the small number of oders, including Torvalds himself, who vet every potential change to the operating-system source code. There are would-be Linux programmers all over the world, but eventually all roads lead to Linus.
Now, it’s not clear that the decision about what goes into Linux’s code needs to be or should be in the hands of such a small group of people. If my argument in this book is right, a large group of programmers, even if they weren’t as skilled as Torvalds and his
lieutenants, would do an excellent job of evaluating which code was worth keeping. But set that aside. The important point here is that if the decision were not being made by someone, Linux itself would not be as successful as it is. If a group of autonomous individuals tries to solve a problem without any means of putting their judgments together, then the best solution they can hope for is the solution that the smartest person in the goiip produces, and there’s no guarantee they’ll get that. If that same group, though, has a means of aggregating all those different opinions, the group’s collective solution may well be smarter than even the smartest person’s solution. Aggregation—which could be seen as a curious form of centralization—is therefore paradoxically important to the success of decentralization. If this seems dubious, it may be because when we hear centralization we think “central planners,” as in the old Soviet Union, and imagine a small group of men—or perhaps just a single man—deciding how many shoes will be made today. But in fact there’s no reason to confuse the two. It’s possible, and desirable, to have collective decisions made by deéentralized agents.
Understanding when decentralization is a recipe for collec.tive wisdom matters because in recent years the fetish for decentralization has sometimes made it seem like the ideal solution for every problem. Obviously, given the premise of this book, I think decentralized ways of organizing human effort are, more often than not, likely to produce better results than centralized ways. But decentralization works well under some conditions and not very well under others, In the past decade, it’s been easy to believe that if a system is decentralized, then it must work well. But all you need to do is look at a traffic jam—or, for that matter, at the U.S. intelligence community—to recognize that getting rid of a central authority is not a panacea. Similarly, people have become enamored of the idea that decentralization is somehow natural or automatic, perhaps because so many of our pictures of what decentralization looks like come from biology. Ants, after all, don’t need to do anything special to form an ant colony. Forming ant colonies -is inherent in their biology. The same is not, however, true of human beings. It’s hard to make real decentralization work, and hard to keep it going, and easy for decentralization to become disorganization.
A good example of this was the performance of the Iraqi military during the U.S—Iraq war in 2003. In the early days of the war, when Iraqi fedayeen paramilitaries had surprised U.S. and British troops with the intensity of their resistance, the fedayeen were held up as an example of a successful decentralized group, which was able to flourish in the absence of any top-down control. In fact, one newspaper columnist compared the fedayeen to ants in an ant colony, finding their way to a “good” solution while communicating only with the soldiers right next to them. But after a few days, the idea that the fedayeen were mounting a meaningful, organized resistance vanished, as it becare clear that their attacks were little more than random, uncoordinated assaults that had no connection to what was happening elsewhere in the country. As one British commander remarked, it was all tactics and no strategy. To put it differently, the individual actions of the fedayeen fighters never added up to anything bigger, precisely because there was no method of aggregating their local wisdom. The fedayeen were much like nts—following local rules. But where ants who follow their local rules actually end up fostering the well-being of the colony, soldiers who followed their local rules ended up dead. (It may be, though, that once the actual war was over, and the conflict shifted to a clash between the occupying U.S. military and guerrillas using hit-and-run terrorist tactics, the absence of aggregation became less important, since the goal was not to defeat the United States in battle, but simply to inflict enough damage to make staying seem no longer worth it. In that context, tactics may have been enough.)
The irony is that the true decentralized military in the U.S.—Irac1 war was the U.S. Army. American troops have always been given significantly more initiative in the field than other armies, as the military has run itself on the “local knowledge is good” theory. But in recent years, the army has dramatically reinvented itself. Today, local commanders have considerably greater latitude to act, and sophisticated communications systems mean that collectively wise strategies can emerge from local tactics. Commanders at the top are not isolated from what’s happening in the field, and their decisions will inevitably reflect, in a deep sense, the local knowledge that field commanders are acquiring. In the case of the invasion of Baghdad for instance, the U.S. strategy adapted quickly to the reality of Iraq’s lack of strength, once local commanders reported little or no resistance. This is not to say, as some have suggested, that the military has become a true bottom- up organization. The chain of command remains essential to the way the military works, and all battlefield action takes place within a framework defined by what’s known as the Commander’s Intent, which essentially lays out a campaigil’s objectives. But increasingly, successful campaigns may depend as much on the fast aggregation of information from the field as on preexisting, top-down strategies.
Now, it’s not clear that the decision about what goes into Linux’s code needs to be or should be in the hands of such a small group of people. If my argument in this book is right, a large group of programmers, even if they weren’t as skilled as Torvalds and his
lieutenants, would do an excellent job of evaluating which code was worth keeping. But set that aside. The important point here is that if the decision were not being made by someone, Linux itself would not be as successful as it is. If a group of autonomous individuals tries to solve a problem without any means of putting their judgments together, then the best solution they can hope for is the solution that the smartest person in the goiip produces, and there’s no guarantee they’ll get that. If that same group, though, has a means of aggregating all those different opinions, the group’s collective solution may well be smarter than even the smartest person’s solution. Aggregation—which could be seen as a curious form of centralization—is therefore paradoxically important to the success of decentralization. If this seems dubious, it may be because when we hear centralization we think “central planners,” as in the old Soviet Union, and imagine a small group of men—or perhaps just a single man—deciding how many shoes will be made today. But in fact there’s no reason to confuse the two. It’s possible, and desirable, to have collective decisions made by deéentralized agents.
Understanding when decentralization is a recipe for collec.tive wisdom matters because in recent years the fetish for decentralization has sometimes made it seem like the ideal solution for every problem. Obviously, given the premise of this book, I think decentralized ways of organizing human effort are, more often than not, likely to produce better results than centralized ways. But decentralization works well under some conditions and not very well under others, In the past decade, it’s been easy to believe that if a system is decentralized, then it must work well. But all you need to do is look at a traffic jam—or, for that matter, at the U.S. intelligence community—to recognize that getting rid of a central authority is not a panacea. Similarly, people have become enamored of the idea that decentralization is somehow natural or automatic, perhaps because so many of our pictures of what decentralization looks like come from biology. Ants, after all, don’t need to do anything special to form an ant colony. Forming ant colonies -is inherent in their biology. The same is not, however, true of human beings. It’s hard to make real decentralization work, and hard to keep it going, and easy for decentralization to become disorganization.
A good example of this was the performance of the Iraqi military during the U.S—Iraq war in 2003. In the early days of the war, when Iraqi fedayeen paramilitaries had surprised U.S. and British troops with the intensity of their resistance, the fedayeen were held up as an example of a successful decentralized group, which was able to flourish in the absence of any top-down control. In fact, one newspaper columnist compared the fedayeen to ants in an ant colony, finding their way to a “good” solution while communicating only with the soldiers right next to them. But after a few days, the idea that the fedayeen were mounting a meaningful, organized resistance vanished, as it becare clear that their attacks were little more than random, uncoordinated assaults that had no connection to what was happening elsewhere in the country. As one British commander remarked, it was all tactics and no strategy. To put it differently, the individual actions of the fedayeen fighters never added up to anything bigger, precisely because there was no method of aggregating their local wisdom. The fedayeen were much like nts—following local rules. But where ants who follow their local rules actually end up fostering the well-being of the colony, soldiers who followed their local rules ended up dead. (It may be, though, that once the actual war was over, and the conflict shifted to a clash between the occupying U.S. military and guerrillas using hit-and-run terrorist tactics, the absence of aggregation became less important, since the goal was not to defeat the United States in battle, but simply to inflict enough damage to make staying seem no longer worth it. In that context, tactics may have been enough.)
The irony is that the true decentralized military in the U.S.—Irac1 war was the U.S. Army. American troops have always been given significantly more initiative in the field than other armies, as the military has run itself on the “local knowledge is good” theory. But in recent years, the army has dramatically reinvented itself. Today, local commanders have considerably greater latitude to act, and sophisticated communications systems mean that collectively wise strategies can emerge from local tactics. Commanders at the top are not isolated from what’s happening in the field, and their decisions will inevitably reflect, in a deep sense, the local knowledge that field commanders are acquiring. In the case of the invasion of Baghdad for instance, the U.S. strategy adapted quickly to the reality of Iraq’s lack of strength, once local commanders reported little or no resistance. This is not to say, as some have suggested, that the military has become a true bottom- up organization. The chain of command remains essential to the way the military works, and all battlefield action takes place within a framework defined by what’s known as the Commander’s Intent, which essentially lays out a campaigil’s objectives. But increasingly, successful campaigns may depend as much on the fast aggregation of information from the field as on preexisting, top-down strategies.
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