User:RobLa-WMF/Conversation slow start

I have a lot of thoughts about applying Van Jacobson's slow start algorithm to conversations. It involves asking a group one question, then two, then four, until you hit a pace that matches the cognitive bandwidth of the group you are speaking with. I think bikeshedding is a symptom of congestion collapse, where someone puts forward something big and important, and people trying to engage start with the tiny piece they can actually understand.

A history tangent
"Slow start" is something that is generally well-understood by network engineers, for good reason. The Internet as we know it today nearly died because of it in the mid-1980s. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_congestion#Congestive_collapse: Congestive collapse (or congestion collapse) is the condition in which congestion in a packet-switched computer network prevents or limits useful communication. Congestion collapse generally occurs at "choke points" in the network, where the total incoming traffic to a node exceeds the outgoing bandwidth. Connection points between a local area network and a wide area network are the most likely choke points.

When a network is in such a condition, it has settled (under overload) into a stable state where traffic demand is high but little useful throughput is available, and there are high levels of packet delay and loss (caused by routers discarding packets because their output queues are too full) and general quality of service is extremely poor.

Congestion collapse was identified as a possible problem as far back as 1984, for example in RFC 896, dated January 6, 1984. It was first observed on the early Internet in October 1986, when the NSFnet phase-I backbone dropped three orders of magnitude from its capacity of 32 kbit/s to 40 bit/s, and this continued to occur until end nodes started implementing Van Jacobson's congestion control between 1987 and 1988.

When more packets were sent than could be handled by intermediate routers, the intermediate routers discarded many packets, expecting the end points of the network to retransmit the information. However, early TCP implementations had very bad retransmission behavior. When this packet loss occurred, the end points sent extra packets that repeated the information lost, doubling the data rate sent, exactly the opposite of what should be done during congestion. This pushed the entire network into a 'congestion collapse' where most packets were lost and the resultant throughput was negligible.