Spontaneous Order Is Counter-Intuitive

by on September 24, 2006 · 16 comments

Luis Villa has an interesting post about the evolving understanding of open source software:

I’ve long thought that in open source software we are seeing a trend away from trust in an institution (think: Microsoft) and towards trust in ‘good luck’- i.e., in the statistical likelihood that if you fall, someone will catch you. In open source, this is most manifest in support- instead of calling a 1-800 # (where someone is guaranteed to help you, as long as you’re willing to be on hold for ages and pay sometimes very high charges), one emails a list, where no one is responsible for you, but yet a great percentage of the time, someone will answer anyway. There is no guarantee, but community practices evolve to make it statistically likely that help (or bug fixing, or whatever) will occur. The internet makes this possible- whereas in the past if you wanted free advice, you had to have a close friend with the right skills free time, you can now draw from a much broader pool of people. If that pool is large enough (and in software, it appears to be) then it is a statistical matter that one of them is likely to have both the right skills and the right amount of free time. Clay Shirky today makes an argument that this isn’t just something that is occurring in open source, but is hitting other fields of expertise as well: “My belief is that Wikipedia’s success dramatizes instead a change in the nature of authority, moving from trust inhering in guarantees offered by institutions to probabilities created by processes.” Instead of referring to a known expert to get at knowledge, you can ask Wikipedia- which is the output of a dialectic process which may fail in specific instances but which Clay seems to suggest can be trusted more than any one institution’s processes in the long run.

This is an excellent point, but it’s actually not a new one. Two examples that immediately spring to mind are Darwin’s Origin of the Species and Friederich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (and, more specifically, his subsequent essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society” ). Darwin and Hayek each described decentralized processes in which the correctness of the result is produced by statistical processes, rather than by the good judgment of a trusted authority.

In Darwin’s case, of course, the trusted authority was God, and the statistical process was natural selection. In Hayek’s case, the trusted authority was the state, whom socialist intellectuals believed could plan a nation’s economy better than the chaos of the market. In both cases, the central insight was that the problem at hand was too big for any one intelligence to solve, but they explained how the problem could be solved by impersonal, statistical processes that might fail in many individual cases, but in the long run will find better solutions that centralized planning could.

It seems to me that the critics of peer produced works have arguments that closely mirror the arguments of Darwin and Hayek’s critics. A few quick examples:

  • Denying that the decentralized process can work at all (or claiming that their occasional successes were flukes) despite the fact that it obviously does. There was a great deal of worry in the middle of the 20th Century about the likelihood that the Soviet economy would out-produce the American one. Likewise, to this day, there are people who reject Darwin’s hypothesis, despite the wealth of evidence in the fossil record. Peoples’ claims that open source software is “unsustainable”, despite the fact that it’s been growing rapidly for decades, are in the same vein.

    • SHARE: 16 comments

    Tim Lee / Timothy B. Lee (Contributor, 2004-2009) is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is currently a PhD student and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He contributes regularly to a variety of online publications, including Ars Technica, Techdirt, Cato @ Liberty, and The Angry Blog. He has been a Mac bigot since 1984, a Unix, vi, and Perl bigot since 1998, and a sworn enemy of HTML-formatted email for as long as certain companies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.

    Comments on this entry are closed.

    Previous post:

    Next post: