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The advantages of social hierarchies seem straightforward to me: 1) Tree structure minimalizes communication complexity. It minimalizes both latency and total

The advantages of social hierarchies seem straightforward to me: 1) Tree structure minimalizes communication complexity. It minimalizes both latency and total cost of communication/decision process, which has usefulness for both business and military. Efficient decision process allows quick and decisive power control, which often has superlinear advantages. The other side of coin is that longer and more thorough decision process could lead to better decisions, which may have long-term advantages. 2) Social hierarchies are not cause of struggle for power, but they ritualize and tame it. With that, they limit costs associated with struggle for power in a similar way how ritualized animal fights limits wounds, which would happen in real fights. In social hierarchy each actor acknowledges its level of power and allows surrender without destruction. Ideally, the power struggle within rules of social hierarchy also makes it more meritocratic (e.g., people with better business skills get on higher level in bussines hierchies). But your institutional memory makes also sense. I personally struggle with it, as i have strong emotional aversion to both submit or claim power over others, but it is not hard to see advantages (and also disadvantages) of social hierarchies on rational level. BTW, looking on your nick, aren't you by chance JS1 from abclinuxu?

shrimp_emoji 6y ago
>I personally struggle with it, as i have strong emotional aversion to both submit or claim power over others If nature is unjust, change nature![0] So, um. Let's keep doing it until we can do that. 0: https://laboriacuboniks.net/manifesto/xenofeminism-a-politics-for-alienation/ https://laboriacuboniks.net/manifesto/xenofeminism-a-politic...
js8 6y ago
These are good hypotheses, but I personally don't think either of them explains very well why humans value hierarchies. Ad 1, when there is no central "brain", and decisions are more distributed, a single hierarchy often hinders communication. (There are for example studies that show that the biggest communication barrier in SW teams is not a physical distance, but a managerial one.) It seems when people work in a distributed way they tend to communicate in many different ad hoc groups, as needed. Ad 2, there is indeed some evidence that more centralized societies are less violent. But it's not clear whether this is because of the hierarchy, or because of the concentration of power. On the other hand, it seems that the societies with multiple different hierarchies like democracies are in fact often less violent than more authoritarian societies. It seems to me if this hypothesis was true, we would see much more formalized ways how the hierarchies are changed, but I think we don't, rebellions are often a very messy business. Perhaps it can be accepted as an explanation why there are trade wars instead of wars, but as the answer to the original question, it IMHO still leaves something to be desired. In any case, I think there are many good explanations for hierarchies. > aren't you by chance JS1 from abclinuxu Excellent guess! ;-)

shrimp_emoji 6y ago

>I personally struggle with it, as i have strong emotional aversion to both submit or claim power over others If nature is unjust, change nature![0] So, um. Let's keep doing it until we can do that. 0: https://laboriacuboniks.net/manifesto/xenofeminism-a-politics-for-alienation/ https://laboriacuboniks.net/manifesto/xenofeminism-a-politic...

js8 6y ago

These are good hypotheses, but I personally don't think either of them explains very well why humans value hierarchies. Ad 1, when there is no central "brain", and decisions are more distributed, a single hierarchy often hinders communication. (There are for example studies that show that the biggest communication barrier in SW teams is not a physical distance, but a managerial one.) It seems when people work in a distributed way they tend to communicate in many different ad hoc groups, as needed. Ad 2, there is indeed some evidence that more centralized societies are less violent. But it's not clear whether this is because of the hierarchy, or because of the concentration of power. On the other hand, it seems that the societies with multiple different hierarchies like democracies are in fact often less violent than more authoritarian societies. It seems to me if this hypothesis was true, we would see much more formalized ways how the hierarchies are changed, but I think we don't, rebellions are often a very messy business. Perhaps it can be accepted as an explanation why there are trade wars instead of wars, but as the answer to the original question, it IMHO still leaves something to be desired. In any case, I think there are many good explanations for hierarchies. > aren't you by chance JS1 from abclinuxu Excellent guess! ;-)