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What if you did the exact opposite, like rogue bees do (2020)
- vnchr 3y agoI ignore bees all the time. Apparently, my upside is unlimited.
- billsmithaustin 3y agoBruce Schneier made a similar point in his book, “Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World“. Quote: Society needs defectors. Groups benefit from the fact that some members do not follow the group norms. These are the outliers: the people who resist popular opinion for moral or other reasons. These are the people who invent new business models by copying and distributing music, movies, and books on the Internet. These are people like Copernicus and Galileo, who challenged official Church dogma on astronomy. These are the people who—to take a recent example—disrupt energy auctions to protest government responsibility for climate change. They're also people living on the edge of society: squatters, survivalists, artists, cults, communes, hermits, and those who live off the grid or off the land. In 2011, U.S. Marine Dakota Meyer received the Medal of Honor for saving three dozen of his comrades who were under enemy fire. The thing is, he disobeyed orders in order to do so.
- Nevermark 3y agoI am going to guess, with my complete ignorance of bees, that the rogues bees take a chaotic path, not a random path. I.e. a "random walk" would not get them very far and would spend way too much time criss-crossing locations. Highly creative people have methods to their madnesses too.
- mmis1000 3y agoThis reminds me the simulated annealing algorithm programs used to find answers for a problem that can't be perfectly resolved by brute-forcing in constant time. By search the easiest way and introduce randomness at same time. You can avoid being trapped into local maximum, just like bees here do.
- ptidhomme 3y agoI'm glad someone mentioned Simulated Annealing, which implements this very phenomenon.
- jojobas 3y agoHow is it rogue? In order to find new food sources some bees have to search for them, rather than use existing knowledge. How they choose whether to scout or forage existing is of some interest of course, but this is interest is outside of suggested human behaviour models.
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- xinayder 3y agoGeorge Costanza decided to do this for a day in a Seinfeld episode. The results were impressive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Opposite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Opposite
- partiallypro 3y agoWell, here's your chance to try the opposite. Instead of tuna salad and being intimidated by women, chicken salad and going right up to them. If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.
- mikekij 3y ago"Hi, my name is George. I'm unemployed, and I live with my parents."
- FillardMillmore 3y agoClassic Seinfeld moment - for those that haven't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CizwH_T7pjg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CizwH_T7pjg
- skywal_l 3y agoChicken is not the opposite of tuna, salmon is. Because salmon swim against the current but the tuna swim with it.
- twiss 3y agoIt's obvious that this is beneficial for the population, but is it (typically) beneficial for an individual? Probably, selfish individuals would only want to try this if they're already well-fed, or if they're confident that there will be some food left over if they don't find any of their own. So, for the benefit of the population, we should probably make sure that everyone is well-fed, so that everyone feels confident to go and find new sources of food :)
- JasonFruit 3y agoOr if they simply prefer to explore, to learn new things, or to fail or succeed on their own, and to enjoy the potential profit of those actions.
- phyzome 3y agoHoneybees are a eusocial organism, so there's not really "selfish" in here. They're all eating from the same stores of food.
- twiss 3y agoYeah, I wasn't referring to bees, but to humans, as the author seems to want humans to follow the example of bees :)
- __MatrixMan__ 3y agoThat's the argument for UBI in a nutshell
- stubish 3y agoIt is normally high risk, high reward in humans. There is the traditional, conservative, predictable route. And there is the novel, which might work and get you called a genius, but more likely not work well, perhaps leaving you destitute or dead. A successful society needs many people to hunt as their parents taught, and an adaptable society needs a few mavericks to find new hunting grounds, prey, and to invent the boat. Monetary rewards tend to be for the plodding rather than the mavericks, because indulging curiosity is fun and its own reward. There are some theories that this is why some mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder have not been evolved away, because occasionally similar traits can save the tribe when others fail to adapt.
- phyzome 3y agoThere is also some fraction of the sea turtle population that goes in the "wrong direction" when navigating by the Earth's magnetic fields. I believe these individuals generally do not do very well. But... this natural variation might be what allows the species to persist even as the magnetic fields shift over millions of years. Being the rogue bee might be fine. Being the rogue turtle, well... it might be good for the species but bad for the individual.
- DicIfTEx 3y agoThere's also a famous clip from Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World where a penguin does something similar,[0] and I've seen it theorised (possibly in the book Empire Antarctica, but I'm not certain) that this may be a mechanism to find new breeding grounds (though, as you say, in a way that may be good for the species but is bad for most of the individuals so called). [0] https://yewtu.be/watch?v=zWH_9VRWn8Y https://yewtu.be/watch?v=zWH_9VRWn8Y
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- saiya-jin 3y agoWe can see this in some form in mankind too, and I would expect this in most if not all species, the trick is how to notice it with our current tech options. In humans it may be a rogue psychopath or hermit that sails out in the unknown sea in ancient boat despite everbody telling him not to, often dying in the middle of nowhere, but from time to time actually making it someplace (to probably die there too until some other won't). Its as if species were a sentient organism playing some complex survival strategy game, sacrificing few individuals for that rare occasion that they could make a big difference. Its a fantastic evolutionary advantage when you think about species and eras, not individuals and their tragedies as we are wired to do. Any complex species not possessing it would be outcompeted eventually, or destroyed by some cataclysmic event that destroys balance built over time by more conforming populations. I am sure in some form this could be applied to economics too.
- frikk 3y ago
- neilk 3y agoI couldn't find any other reference to this rogue bee thing (except other inspirational essays). Wikipedia's entry on the waggle dance seems to suggest that bees often don't make use of the information in the dance. It's not some rare maverick bees per se. It's more that the information may not be important given the season or climate or presence of competition for the food. So it can be adaptive to ignore it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance#Efficiency_and_adaptation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance#Efficiency_and_ad...
- boxed 3y ago> It's more that the information may not be important given the season or climate or presence of competition for the food. So it can be adaptive to ignore it. That was the literal point of the thing from the beginning. You haven't refuted the idea, you have just explained it in other words.
- jmholla 3y agoIt also seems they may prefer to rely on their own personal knowledge. It's easier to go back to places you know then follow your friends' directions.
- Abimelex 3y agoIt's interesting, that even in a community like HN, almost nobody seems to ask for the scientific reference here. Might have something to do with confirmation bias? Or is there such a thing like sounds-interesting-AF-bias?
- breck 3y agoOn CorporateNews the version of the article going around talks about how 98% of rogue bees don't find a better flower patch and die starving and alone. ;) Your point is a great one. Most information in our world is of extremely low quality. That's what happens when attention is incentivized, not teaching.
- neilk 3y agoWell, let's give people a break. It sounded plausible. We've all heard of the story of the waggle dance, often in grade school, in a simplified form. TIL 3-2-1 Contact lied to me. That said, I don't believe that computer programmers are, as a group, significantly more skeptical than other professions. Like most people we muddle along with generalizations, lore, and myth.
- munchler 3y agoThis is the exploration-exploitation trade-off often found in reinforcement learning. https://towardsdatascience.com/intuition-exploration-vs-exploitation-c645a1d37c7a https://towardsdatascience.com/intuition-exploration-vs-expl...
- samstave 3y agoShould call it the "Cramer Model" (tl;dr - one of the most touted folks in US Finance is a guy named Jim Cramer - he has been wrong on a vast majority of his financial recommendations to the point that he is a litmus on finance whereby if you do the opposite of any of his recommendation, you win)
- Taywee 3y agoInterestingly close to a Seinfeld episode plot for a guy named "Cramer".
- partiallypro 3y agoIt was George, not Kramer.
- annoyingnoob 3y agosjim may be for you. https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/fund/sjim https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/fund/sjim
- plank 3y agoI remember reading similar tactics for mice when learning a maze with food (cheese). A steady portion of the mice did it differently then the majority of the mice. Breeding only the ‘deviant’ mice, resulted in exactly the same percentage in the next generation ==>> hypothesis: this is an evolutionary advantageous trait.
- hgsgm 3y agoThe indicated hypothesis would be "random conversion to consistent deviant" is the heritabile trait, not "deviance" itself.
- revskill 3y agoIt's how i'm living, too. Basically tried my best to avoid the crowd first. Simple reason: In a crowd, the probability for you to be alive is less than when you're ignorant.
- hgsgm 3y agoHow does that work?
- revskill 3y agoThings work wonderfully where i don't need to waste time follow the crowd. It's from when i was a child already and it's been that way. I have no reason to change, too. My nickname is (rev)skill in reverse, you can see, i just want to reverse the crowd, because i know they're mostly wrong. The essense is always behind the curtain, i'm sure about it. One note is, there's difference between follow the crowd and know what they do. To avoid something, you need to get a knowledge of them.
- robertlagrant 3y agoI think this methodology is becoming really popular, actually.
- j5155 3y agoThis aspect of adding randomness to avoid local maximums reminds me of AlphaPhoenix’s automated gerrymandering project: https://youtu.be/Lq-Y7crQo44 https://youtu.be/Lq-Y7crQo44
- aeturnum 3y agoI think there's a trap people fall into where they want to talk about stochastic processes that are facilitated by group dynamics using individualist language: > Knowing this, it might be worth ignoring the waggle dance of those around you every so often. Some bees being predisposed through biology or chemical messaging to ignore information is fundamentally different from an individual deciding to ignore messaging. The idea is sound! But you also need to articulate a vision for the feedback loop to society - otherwise you're just telling people to do what they want when they feel its right, which might be fine but is definitely a different thing!
- ajuc 3y ago> Some bees being predisposed through biology or chemical messaging to ignore information is fundamentally different from an individual deciding to ignore messaging. Bees probably feel they are deciding too :)
- kurthr 3y agoThis is an important point. I also see it when people talk about drones vs workers vs Queen in a hive. All of the other bees really are effectively arms of the Queen. The Queen lives 1-3years before another queen takes over, while the rest of the bees live 7 weeks. She mates once, but her drones are just a bunch of flying sexual organs than can mate with multiple outside queens several seasons each year. She can sting multiple times (to kill potential queen cells), while workers die after they sting, and drones have none. If the workers don't follow her guidance they will be left behind when the hive swarms, or fail to heat/cool the hive allowing the larvae and the hive to survive and continue. Some fraction may not go through the normal cycle, but it can't be many.
- lostlogin 3y ago> All of the other bees really are effectively arms of the Queen. Are they? They make the cells for her to lay eggs in, so that she has a daughter in the old colony when she leaves. The workers shrink the queen down when they want her to swarm, and they stop her laying so she is ready to fly. The workers clean the queen and feed her. They expand the number of cells for brood in spring and shrink it in autumn. The workers decide when the queen is ready to die, and feed royal jelly to the grub that will supersede the old queen by killing her. Who controls the hive? I’m a beekeeper and I don’t know.
- ftxbro 3y agoi feel like this is some advanced tier blogspam
- shaburn 3y agoLook up Charlie Munger on Bee Say Something Syndrome with the waggle dance.
- jimmySixDOF 3y agoYes, and as I recall he was firmly in the camp that disruptive counter establishment voices get in the way of scalable Six Sigma type business and don't belong at the table. I must defer to his seniority but think it's getting progressively harder to tell a rabbit hole to nowhere from a portal to the next dimension.
- lazide 3y agoImpossible to tell until you take it in my experience.
- criswell 3y agoIf every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.
- hgsgm 3y agoThink of picking a point on a circle. If you pick a wrong point, all you can infer is that "not that point" is correct, not "opposite point" is correct. There are many, many ways to be wrong.
- haraldooo 3y agohttp://seinfeldscripts.com/TheOpposite.htm http://seinfeldscripts.com/TheOpposite.htm
- khazhoux 3y agoMy name is George. I’m unemployed and I live with my parents.
- jb12 3y agoHire this man!
- mulmen 3y agoFor certain values of “right”. If you mean “best” then no. If you mean “better” then sure but also whatever.
- pazimzadeh 3y agoThis is pretty common in bacteria too The evolutionary emergence of stochastic phenotype switching in bacteria https://microbialcellfactories.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1475-2859-10-S1-S14 https://microbialcellfactories.biomedcentral.com/articles/10...
- Zetice 3y agoOkay heh, bees may not actually do this the way described in the essay, but that doesn't invalidate the point, does it? When there's safety in failure, take risks, and favor risks that have asymptotic upside. Seems like good advice to me!
- owenmarshall 3y ago> When there's safety in failure, take risks, and favor risks that have asymptotic upside. Seems to me that the real trick is knowing when there actually is safety in failure. Quit your steady job, strike out on your own, oops the economy popped and every steady job is now on a hiring freeze. Good luck!
- jeff_d_miller 3y agoThe asymptotic upside is for the population as a whole, not necessarily for the individual.
- watwut 3y agoIf there is safety in the failure, should it be called a risk?
- amelius 3y ago> The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
- hollander 3y agoWhich doesn't apply here. The rogue bee does not adapt the world to himself, just goes out exploring without a plan.
- ftxbro 3y ago> What if you did the exact opposite, like rogue bees do what if we perfectly align the agi and then it gets the idea to do this. suddenly every training for docility and goodness will turn to active maliciousness.
- SeanAnderson 3y agoThe whole "opt out of expected group-think behavior" reminds me of a paper regarding the tunneling and movement behavior of ants: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/science/ants-worker-idleness.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/science/ants-worker-idlen... The gist of it is that 30% of studied ants do 70% of the work in digging tunnels. Other ants come in, see that it is too crowded, and don't try to force their way in in an effort to prove they're working hard to the other ants. This ends up being an ideal strategy for the colony because overcrowding reduces the overall work throughput, but requires all ants to be comfortable allowing some of their ant peers to work less while remaining in the vicinity of where work is being accomplished. Pretty interesting stuff, if you ask me! :)
- Nevermark 3y ago> The whole "opt out of expected group-think behavior" [...] I would have opted out. But I never figured out how to be "in"! I suspect a lot of people forging their own paths didn't really choose too, although they might assume they did. When you see things differently, you don't just have different visions of where to go, but an aversion to those well worn paths that often seemed inexplicably depressingly difficult.
- bloomingeek 3y agoVery nice answer! For me it was always about being myself, not that I had much against the 'in' crowd, I just wasn't interested enough to play along, they weren't me and I wasn't them.
- RHSman2 3y agoI’m gonna write my book called ‘living with a difficult person (me)’ I don’t mean to be, it just is that way.
- quickthrower2 3y agoThe MBAs could learn something from this!
- zentropia 3y ago
- tikkun 3y agoI love finding useful strategies and tactics from nature, and applying them in my life and work. Another example: Redundancy. We have two lungs, two nostrils, etc. Anything that I'm stressed about breaking or not having enough of, if it's practical to get a second one, I do, that way the stress is gone. Not always practical, but great when it is. A helpful way to remember it: 3 is 2, 2 is 1, and 1 is none.
- jeff_d_miller 3y agoThat's why all my neighbors have 3 cars!
- Consultant32452 3y agoI was stressed about my relationship with my wife so I got a second one. This advice did not decrease my stress.
- lazide 3y agoCould still be a fluke. Have you tried three? It might be more harmonically stable.
- hollander 3y agoYou have no heart, sir!
- kunalgupta 3y agorelatedly https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/2105.00990 https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/2105.00990
- yawz 3y agoVery interesting analogy. I'm a beekeeper and this is the first time I'm hearing about rogue bees. Can you please point me to a source so that I can learn about this bee behavior (or "beehavior" in short)?
- jeff_d_miller 3y agoThe main sources for this are inspirational/motivational texts. You might be out of luck trying to find actual scientific evidence.
- DuckFeathers 3y agoYou can do it with whatever is claimed as "scientifically approved" and works every time... because the only time one has to invoke such nonsense is if it doesn't really work... so then it has to involve your placebo and biases.
- EGreg 3y agoYour life would be amazing! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CizwH_T7pjg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CizwH_T7pjg
- kloch 3y agoThis is why I prefer "loosely scripted vacations". I might have one or two destinations/activities planned in advance but always try to leave some days/times open if possible to explore the unknown. Sometimes this means not even booking a hotel for some nights and deciding where to go/stay the same day.
- arthurcolle 3y agoI think I'm a rogue bee
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- mr_toad 3y agoAdding random noise to gradient descent is a well known technique for avoiding things like local minima and overfitting.