Connect The Dots 08/15/2020

The two ideas of today’s connect the dots are:

Mutually Assured Destruction: Somewhat paradoxically, the stronger two opponents become, the less likely they may be to destroy one another. This process of mutually assured destruction occurs not just in warfare, as with the development of global nuclear warheads, but also in business, as with the avoidance of destructive price wars between competitors. However, in a fat-tailed world, it is also possible that mutually assured destruction scenarios simply make destruction more severe in the event of a mistake (pushing destruction into the “tails” of the distribution).
Bacteria and Servers: There are similarities between natural and human-made systems. One system can be colonies of bacteria, which communicate with each other with molecules to achieve higher resilience and protect themselves. In the technology area, you can have systems formed by clusters of servers, which communicate with each other to reach higher resilience and a healthier state. Understanding patterns and systems in other fields can give you a framework of reference in your domain, and enable innovation if you can spot available similarities.

I found this week’s “connect the dots” quite hard, and it sent me into a search and reading, of published papers on animal fighting behaviours.
Animals do calculate the risk of a fight before starting it, and many times one contender would walk away without fighting. However, it seems that when a contender walks away, it’s because it decided that it would lose. I could not find any example of both animals walking away from the fight without deciding there was a winner.
The lack of findings on Mutually Assured Destruction in the animal kingdom may be explained because I did not search enough, the experiments place the contenders in closed spaces, or the documentaries only show the encounters ending in a fight. It’s possible that in certain conditions when the stakes are not high, both contenders will leave without a fight and without determining which one is stronger.
A better connection of the dots could be if clusters and bigger organised groups can increase your strength if both parties can create big enough defensive and offensive clusters, they could enter in a Mutually Assured Destruction scenario. I believe this is true as there is strength in numbers and even more strength in organised numbers.
Strength can come from many dimensions, like force, money, market share, technology, etc. When facing stronger opponents, you can make up for your lack of strength in a dimension with more significant numbers and better organisation.

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