7 ms·

The queen does not rule

79 points by Vigier 10y ago

winstonewert 10y ago
The author has an overly narrow view of what constitutes division of labor. Division labor doesn't mean that can't switch tasks or that you can only do a task you were specifically born with the special ability for. Indeed, any system of division of labor has to operate with the sort of adaptability she describes in ants.
- djsumdog 10y ago
  I think what the author is trying to get at here is that there is no control system. There is no central brain coordinating things. Each individual ant brain evolved to do different things based on the signals it receives from others. Useful behaviours that lead to a higher fitness tend to survive and progress to future generations of ants. When you look at the human analogy, the queen doesn't have all the resources and food she could ever need. In human society, we prise those people at the top who convince others to give them resources. Human societies are not equal. They never have been. In fact, equality is a completely human social construct that we must actively and consciously pursue: http://khanism.org/society/created-equal/ http://khanism.org/society/created-equal/
  - winstonewert 10y ago
    Yes, but the author still continually describes it as a rejection of the division of labor.
  - program_whiz 10y ago
    Even our concept that the brain "controls" things is just our own projection of things. Think about it, you get hit hard in the leg, so the leg releases chemicals that trigger a bunch of repsonses, perhaps using the brain as the intermediary point of communication, but to say the brain "controls it", is just one way to look at it. The brain was really told what to do by the leg, or maybe the nerves, or the blood. There is no system in nature that has centralized control, all systems with "central authority" are really just a projection of human conditioning. For example, even in government, how exactly is centralized control maintained? Its a bunch of distributed interactions that cause people to go out and take actions that result in overall changes, but there isn't a "government" per se that is like a giant telepathic mind controlling anyone's actions, its just millions of interactions of people choosing what to do (some soldiers, some merchants, some politicians), flowing in all directions.
    - SixSigma 10y ago
      See also: the only person Hitler ever killed was himself.
- gumby 10y ago
  At the beginning he describes a historical view of human division of labor (which is in fact pretty specialized -- think of Adam Smith or, as he mentions, Henry Ford) and the longstanding belief that hive insects are programmed as pupae to do only one task. The rest of the article shows, including his millet experiment, that our longstanding belief is wrong at least in regards to ants. In fact the only such ant is the queen.
- SixSigma 10y ago
  The Toytoa Production System has division of labour (As Taichi says : "if the plant can operate without you, why are you there?") but also fungible workers - they train to do each other's jobs too.
JumpCrisscross 10y ago
> To envisage how an ant’s task of the moment arises from a pulsing network of brief, meaningless interactions might compel us instead to ponder what really accounts for why each of us has a particular job. It brought to my mind the economic calculation problem [1]. Markets distribute decision making, commanding resources through the transmission of meaningless price-discovery and transactional interactions. This has, so far, outperformed systems which centralize economic planning. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
- witty_username 10y ago
  Why is price discovering meaningless? It only seems like that on the surface.
  - JumpCrisscross 10y ago
    I was recapitulating the quote. The ants' interactions are not meaningless; their meaning is just difficult to observe from a single interaction. Analogously, one finds intelligent people struggling with the concepts of money and prices.
- Retric 10y ago
  There are actually good counter examples where central planning wins. They are often contentious like Medicine, but the advantage markets bring is robustness not effecency. In a famine market economies have some people starve more and others starve less.
  - YokoZar 10y ago
    You can't just assume a famine starts and then look what happens. The whole point of pricing signals is that it changes what gets produced, making shortages less likely to occur in the first place.
    - Retric 10y ago
tossedaway334 10y ago
The author is mischarachterizing how Adam Smith viewed the division of labour. While he viewed it as a gain in economic efficency, he also viewed it as regrettable, limiting, and damaging to people, especially when taken to an extreme. "The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgement concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life... But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it." The moral side of Adam Smith's arguements is often entirely ignored in analysis of his philosophy. He strongly condems many aspects of a free market/capatialist economy. Why this is never focused on isnt very clear to me.
- devoply 10y ago
  > Why this is never focused on isnt very clear to me. Not in the interest of those who rule. Whatever you know is significantly affected by what people with money and power want you to know. Despite all the rhetoric about freedom of thought, etc. Knowledge is socially engineered all the time.
  - rtpg 10y ago
    Another point (accentuated by the article) is that Smith and Ford are both considered archetypes of "free market capitalism" They are being used here as symbols of the idea. We are talking about capitalism, not about Smith or Ford. Unfortunately this turns into its own feedback loop. Simple intros to Smith talk about free markets, so people associate the name to the idea.
whiddershins 10y ago
This makes me think about Carla Scalletti's lecture on emergent systems: https://vimeopro.com/symbolicsound/kiss2016-presentations/video/193469489 https://vimeopro.com/symbolicsound/kiss2016-presentations/vi...
booleandilemma 10y ago
I know the article is about ants and not bees, but it reminds me of that Fight Club quote: Worker bees can leave. Even drones can fly away. The Queen is their slave.
KON_Air 10y ago
Lies, I say! Lies, shameful lies, I say! Queen not only rules, it also rocks! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tJYN-eG1zk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tJYN-eG1zk
lisper 10y ago
An interesting puzzle: how can evolution produce an organism like an ant where the vast majority of its exemplars are sterile? And the answer is: ants are not organisms, ant colonies are organisms. They just happen to be made of parts that are not physically connected to each other. The same thing turns out to be true of humans. A single human in isolation cannot reproduce. Even a single breeding pair in the wild will (almost certainly) not be able to reproduce. The minimal reproductive unit for homo sapiens is a village or a tribe. So you too are not really an orgnism but an organ, a component of a larger reproducing system that, just like an ant colony, is made of parts that are not physically connected to each other.
- IgorPartola 10y ago
  You don't have to look as far as ants to make the analogy you are making. Almost no animal, and even some plants cannot reproduce without some minimal number of "tribe" members. This is true for anything from chimps to probiotics. This all depends on how you define "life" and "individuality": slippery concepts. And it's hard to not confuse those with emergent behavior once you do get millions/billions of individuals together. Sure you could treat NYC as its own autonomous living organism. Or you could treat it as millions of individuals. It certainly doesn't make sense to treat it as gazillions of cells. The idea of having free will has been debated for centuries, but intuitively I think it's obvious that a human has more free will than an ant.
  - lisper 10y ago
    > you could treat NYC as its own autonomous living organism The most accurate description is that NYC is part of the phenotype of the human genome. BTW, this idea is not mine, it's from Richard Dawkins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Extended_Phenotype https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Extended_Phenotype
tbrownaw 10y ago
Well, I suppose it would be kinda hard to rule when your potential subjects don't have the necessary discretion to be capable of being ruled.

79 points by Vigier 10y ago

The author has an overly narrow view of what constitutes division of labor. Division labor doesn't mean that can't switch tasks or that you can only do a task you were specifically born with the special ability for. Indeed, any system of division of labor has to operate with the sort of adaptability she describes in ants.

djsumdog 10y ago
I think what the author is trying to get at here is that there is no control system. There is no central brain coordinating things. Each individual ant brain evolved to do different things based on the signals it receives from others. Useful behaviours that lead to a higher fitness tend to survive and progress to future generations of ants. When you look at the human analogy, the queen doesn't have all the resources and food she could ever need. In human society, we prise those people at the top who convince others to give them resources. Human societies are not equal. They never have been. In fact, equality is a completely human social construct that we must actively and consciously pursue: http://khanism.org/society/created-equal/ http://khanism.org/society/created-equal/
- winstonewert 10y ago
  Yes, but the author still continually describes it as a rejection of the division of labor.
- program_whiz 10y ago
  Even our concept that the brain "controls" things is just our own projection of things. Think about it, you get hit hard in the leg, so the leg releases chemicals that trigger a bunch of repsonses, perhaps using the brain as the intermediary point of communication, but to say the brain "controls it", is just one way to look at it. The brain was really told what to do by the leg, or maybe the nerves, or the blood. There is no system in nature that has centralized control, all systems with "central authority" are really just a projection of human conditioning. For example, even in government, how exactly is centralized control maintained? Its a bunch of distributed interactions that cause people to go out and take actions that result in overall changes, but there isn't a "government" per se that is like a giant telepathic mind controlling anyone's actions, its just millions of interactions of people choosing what to do (some soldiers, some merchants, some politicians), flowing in all directions.
  - SixSigma 10y ago
    See also: the only person Hitler ever killed was himself.
gumby 10y ago
At the beginning he describes a historical view of human division of labor (which is in fact pretty specialized -- think of Adam Smith or, as he mentions, Henry Ford) and the longstanding belief that hive insects are programmed as pupae to do only one task. The rest of the article shows, including his millet experiment, that our longstanding belief is wrong at least in regards to ants. In fact the only such ant is the queen.
SixSigma 10y ago
The Toytoa Production System has division of labour (As Taichi says : "if the plant can operate without you, why are you there?") but also fungible workers - they train to do each other's jobs too.

JumpCrisscross 10y ago

> To envisage how an ant’s task of the moment arises from a pulsing network of brief, meaningless interactions might compel us instead to ponder what really accounts for why each of us has a particular job. It brought to my mind the economic calculation problem [1]. Markets distribute decision making, commanding resources through the transmission of meaningless price-discovery and transactional interactions. This has, so far, outperformed systems which centralize economic planning. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem

witty_username 10y ago
Why is price discovering meaningless? It only seems like that on the surface.
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago
  I was recapitulating the quote. The ants' interactions are not meaningless; their meaning is just difficult to observe from a single interaction. Analogously, one finds intelligent people struggling with the concepts of money and prices.
Retric 10y ago
There are actually good counter examples where central planning wins. They are often contentious like Medicine, but the advantage markets bring is robustness not effecency. In a famine market economies have some people starve more and others starve less.
- YokoZar 10y ago
  You can't just assume a famine starts and then look what happens. The whole point of pricing signals is that it changes what gets produced, making shortages less likely to occur in the first place.
  - Retric 10y ago

tossedaway334 10y ago

The author is mischarachterizing how Adam Smith viewed the division of labour. While he viewed it as a gain in economic efficency, he also viewed it as regrettable, limiting, and damaging to people, especially when taken to an extreme. "The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgement concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life... But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it." The moral side of Adam Smith's arguements is often entirely ignored in analysis of his philosophy. He strongly condems many aspects of a free market/capatialist economy. Why this is never focused on isnt very clear to me.

devoply 10y ago
> Why this is never focused on isnt very clear to me. Not in the interest of those who rule. Whatever you know is significantly affected by what people with money and power want you to know. Despite all the rhetoric about freedom of thought, etc. Knowledge is socially engineered all the time.
- rtpg 10y ago
  Another point (accentuated by the article) is that Smith and Ford are both considered archetypes of "free market capitalism" They are being used here as symbols of the idea. We are talking about capitalism, not about Smith or Ford. Unfortunately this turns into its own feedback loop. Simple intros to Smith talk about free markets, so people associate the name to the idea.

whiddershins 10y ago

This makes me think about Carla Scalletti's lecture on emergent systems: https://vimeopro.com/symbolicsound/kiss2016-presentations/video/193469489 https://vimeopro.com/symbolicsound/kiss2016-presentations/vi...

booleandilemma 10y ago

I know the article is about ants and not bees, but it reminds me of that Fight Club quote: Worker bees can leave. Even drones can fly away. The Queen is their slave.

KON_Air 10y ago

Lies, I say! Lies, shameful lies, I say! Queen not only rules, it also rocks! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tJYN-eG1zk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tJYN-eG1zk

lisper 10y ago

An interesting puzzle: how can evolution produce an organism like an ant where the vast majority of its exemplars are sterile? And the answer is: ants are not organisms, ant colonies are organisms. They just happen to be made of parts that are not physically connected to each other. The same thing turns out to be true of humans. A single human in isolation cannot reproduce. Even a single breeding pair in the wild will (almost certainly) not be able to reproduce. The minimal reproductive unit for homo sapiens is a village or a tribe. So you too are not really an orgnism but an organ, a component of a larger reproducing system that, just like an ant colony, is made of parts that are not physically connected to each other.

IgorPartola 10y ago
You don't have to look as far as ants to make the analogy you are making. Almost no animal, and even some plants cannot reproduce without some minimal number of "tribe" members. This is true for anything from chimps to probiotics. This all depends on how you define "life" and "individuality": slippery concepts. And it's hard to not confuse those with emergent behavior once you do get millions/billions of individuals together. Sure you could treat NYC as its own autonomous living organism. Or you could treat it as millions of individuals. It certainly doesn't make sense to treat it as gazillions of cells. The idea of having free will has been debated for centuries, but intuitively I think it's obvious that a human has more free will than an ant.
- lisper 10y ago
  > you could treat NYC as its own autonomous living organism The most accurate description is that NYC is part of the phenotype of the human genome. BTW, this idea is not mine, it's from Richard Dawkins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Extended_Phenotype https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Extended_Phenotype

tbrownaw 10y ago

Well, I suppose it would be kinda hard to rule when your potential subjects don't have the necessary discretion to be capable of being ruled.