Society · Coordination
MultiPathReliability#6e7b
Make an outcome reliable through many noisy ways to reach it, not one accountable path
Mechanism
An outcome with many routes to it is more likely than one with a single route, as seven is likelier than double six with two dice, and as balls on a Galton board pile up in the middle. Biological systems get reliable results from many unreliable pathways, such as an apoptosis signal that fires in about 92% of cells. Human organisations prefer one assigned owner with incentives and accountability, which creates a single point of failure. Reliability can instead come from the law of large numbers acting on many partial, overlapping ways of getting the work done.
Invariants
- The probability of an outcome rises with the number of distinct paths that reach it
- Individual pathways may be unreliable while the aggregate is reliable
Failure modes
- Diffusion of responsibility among agents who each expect another path to deliver
- Removing redundant noisy pathways in the name of efficiency and creating a single point of failure
- Mistaking illusion of control through one owner for actual reliability
Where this came from
Used by
Identity
The name is the hash of the definition. Change a word and it becomes a different pattern.
- Sema ID
sema:MultiPathReliability#mh:SHA-256:6e7b128474c2fdd15a1f1a62087eafeb0f49e8406492ed1e4fa9833f31a14360- Reference
MultiPathReliability#6e7b- Ring
- 1
- Tier
- 1