A lot of Gregory Bateson’s work warned that if the balancing loops in a system are too weak, the system stops being an ecosystem and starts being an arms race. The interesting bit here isn’t that elite tennis players (or guilds, or platforms) dominate but that dominance reprices the entry conditions and eventually kills the replenishment layer that made the whole thing dynamic. These axioms read like something straight out of a Batesonian case study in runaway.

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foster_nyman 7 hours ago | parent [-]

As far as I can tell, you fix it by adding dampeners and renewal mechanisms, forced churn, diminishing returns on accumulated advantage, periodic resets, or constraints (i.e., keep the system in the ferment zone). How you do that is a much trickier issue. Bateson was also pretty wary of tinkering with complex systems in a top-down way, and history is replete with failed attempts to do so.

	▲	foster_nyman 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Years ago, I recall reading about a Muscogee tradition (the Busk), which may have had this effect; basically a cultural dampener, a periodic, communal reset that interrupted accumulation of grievances, status debt, polluted fire, stale obligations, before it became self-reinforcing. A distinctive feature was a kind of amnesty/forgiveness for wrongs short of murder, and a re-establishing of social relationships. It was basically a ritualized negative-feedback loop: clean house, renew the fire, forgive (almost) everything, start the cycle again; like an engineered anti-runaway mechanism that prevents compounding into schism. [edit]: found it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46595199