5 ms·

I 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:

I 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 ago
This 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.
- drekk 3y ago
  You're forgetting the part where the queen is never alone, being prodded along by workers to continue laying eggs at an acceptable pace. When the hive (not the queen!) decides it's time to swarm, they'll force the queen to move more briskly in the hope she loses some weight and the second flight of her life can go more than a few meters. If the queen isn't up to the task the workers will go to some existing brood comb and give the larvae some "royal" jelly to get a replacement. As soon as one spawns the other infantile queens are slaughtered. The entire reason we get the language of queen/worker/drone is because Europeans saw a complex ordered system and projected their own hierarchy on it. A "queen" bee never issues commands. She's only good for laying more larvae and even if she were to die suddenly the only issue is finding some immature larvae already in the hive to feed "royal" jelly. They don't decide when or where to swarm, and are basically carried by the mass of bees "escorting" them to their new home. Yes, the queen is the reproductive source of the hive and losing a queen can really mess everything up depending on the timing. To say that all the other bees are simply "arms of the queen" is incredibly reductive though. She can be replaced at any time, and often is as she ages. The "productivity" curve rapidly decreases after the first or second year of life. It's not uncommon for commercial beekeepers to replace a queen every 2 years, and the worker bees aren't much more forgiving when it comes to her performance. Small aside, it's only in summer that workers live ~7 weeks. They live 150-200 days in the winter. The labor they provide is incredibly metabolically taxing, in comparison with eating and giving birth all day every day.
- mcny 3y ago
  > Some fraction may not go through the normal cycle, but it can't be many. Maybe it is because I just saw an animated video on cancer (I’ll find the link when I get home) on YouTube but then so are we thinking of a bee hive as one individual? Like in the video, they talk about how cancer cells refuse to die when something bad happens like they are supposed to… So this is going to sound cheesy but now I have to wonder, could you zoom out on humans as well? On earth? Are what we call “living beings” what we would call “malignant cells” or at best mutations? Now that’s a scary thought. Edit: I think it is this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmpuerlbJu0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmpuerlbJu0
  - rhn_mk1 3y ago
    The Earth ecosystem is made of living beings. Why would they be compared to cancer cells? It sounds more reasonable to me to compare them to worker bees.
    - GuB-42 3y ago
      Cancer cells are essentially a new parasitic life form living inside of you. It is born from you but it is not you. It decided to play by its own rules and pursue its own goals, ignoring the signals that makes the host body functional. Often, it is attacked by the host body immune system like other intruders and it has to defend itself. Some cancer cell lines HeLa have well outlived their host and are used in scientific research. In a way, cancer is life and life is cancer.
    - mistermann 3y ago
      Like cancer, we are (allegedly) killing our host environment.
  - jddj 3y ago
    Certain insect colonies typically make good "individual" analogues due to certain roles being infertile and so the genetic lineage actually working in units that are larger than a single bee. If you think about it, the way we define an individual is a bit blurry anyway - think of those plants and creatures which produce more "individuals" by letting pieces break off and float down the river to take root elsewhere, or reproduce asexually to produce clones. Aphids, for example, on the same plant are commonly clones. So you can cling tight to the individual as being the thing that is delineated by a mixing of genes in sexual reproduction and have things still make some sense. But if you let that slide and zoom out then indeed life as we know it is just one branching, breaking, mutating organism.
- eep_social 3y ago
  Worker bees die when they sting mammals because mammal skin retains the barbed stinger tip. However, workers are not inherently one-shot stingers in all cases.
  - vermilingua 3y ago
    And mammal skin retains the stinger because the barbs were evolved for that purpose, so that venom glands continue to drive venom into the stung animal.
    - lostlogin 3y ago
      The bees don’t always die when they sting, they sometimes don’t get it lodged and can attack again. Top tip, wearing a bee suit will help with this, but it’s so damn hot, so if the stings are relatively few, just taking the hit is preferable. Be more gentle and it’s the best of both worlds - cool and venomless.
codetrotter 3y ago
> Some bees being predisposed through biology or chemical messaging to ignore information is fundamentally different from an individual deciding to ignore messaging Why can’t it be that people who are prone to ignore messaging also do so because of biological predisposition? Brain chemistry!
- lazide 3y ago
  I guess it all boils down to the age old question - do we (uh, I mean ants) have free will?
- aeturnum 3y ago
  It could be - but that's not what the author was invoking! They were talking about how having a subset of the population that doesn't follow the trends is essential for keeping up the health of the hive. It's wrong to say that "any bee could ignore the directions" - part of the system that only a small subset does. So if you want to transpose this into advice that you suggest to individuals (as the author did) - you should also suggest some notion of how an individual might detect when too many people are "following directions." Otherwise you're just advocating for following your personal inclinations - which may also be a fine thing to do - but was not what the author was saying bees do.
giantg2 3y ago
"definitely a different thing!" Is it in all cases though? People with stuff like oppositional defiant disorder might be predisposed to act that way through biology.
- aeturnum 3y ago
  Sure - but the part I quoted is urging people to consider that they themselves might choose not to "follow the swarm" as it were. I think you could use this example to argue that a lot of the diversity in how human brains work (autism, adhd, oppositional defiant disorder like you said) should be viewed as a strength and a source of alternative and interesting viewpoints that are grounded in biological difference we should honor and recognize. But - people in those situations don't chose how their brains work.
  - mistermann 3y ago
    > But - people in those situations don't chose how their brains work. It makes one wonder how much choice you have in believing otherwise... After all, such things may not be knowable, at this point in time anyways.
    - aeturnum 3y ago
      I think it's good to be suspicious of things that we consider out of our control, but it seems to me that suspicion is pretty "built in" to modern psychiatric medicine and I don't have any reason to doubt their conclusions around these conditions.
      - mistermann 3y ago
        A reason I doubt their conclusions is because of the complexity and inconsistency of the underlying problem space, as well as their methodologies. By default I think the epistemic status we should assign to such things is unknown, not the experts' beliefs are correct until proven otherwise.

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 ago

This 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.
drekk 3y ago
You're forgetting the part where the queen is never alone, being prodded along by workers to continue laying eggs at an acceptable pace. When the hive (not the queen!) decides it's time to swarm, they'll force the queen to move more briskly in the hope she loses some weight and the second flight of her life can go more than a few meters. If the queen isn't up to the task the workers will go to some existing brood comb and give the larvae some "royal" jelly to get a replacement. As soon as one spawns the other infantile queens are slaughtered. The entire reason we get the language of queen/worker/drone is because Europeans saw a complex ordered system and projected their own hierarchy on it. A "queen" bee never issues commands. She's only good for laying more larvae and even if she were to die suddenly the only issue is finding some immature larvae already in the hive to feed "royal" jelly. They don't decide when or where to swarm, and are basically carried by the mass of bees "escorting" them to their new home. Yes, the queen is the reproductive source of the hive and losing a queen can really mess everything up depending on the timing. To say that all the other bees are simply "arms of the queen" is incredibly reductive though. She can be replaced at any time, and often is as she ages. The "productivity" curve rapidly decreases after the first or second year of life. It's not uncommon for commercial beekeepers to replace a queen every 2 years, and the worker bees aren't much more forgiving when it comes to her performance. Small aside, it's only in summer that workers live ~7 weeks. They live 150-200 days in the winter. The labor they provide is incredibly metabolically taxing, in comparison with eating and giving birth all day every day.
mcny 3y ago
> Some fraction may not go through the normal cycle, but it can't be many. Maybe it is because I just saw an animated video on cancer (I’ll find the link when I get home) on YouTube but then so are we thinking of a bee hive as one individual? Like in the video, they talk about how cancer cells refuse to die when something bad happens like they are supposed to… So this is going to sound cheesy but now I have to wonder, could you zoom out on humans as well? On earth? Are what we call “living beings” what we would call “malignant cells” or at best mutations? Now that’s a scary thought. Edit: I think it is this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmpuerlbJu0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmpuerlbJu0
- rhn_mk1 3y ago
  The Earth ecosystem is made of living beings. Why would they be compared to cancer cells? It sounds more reasonable to me to compare them to worker bees.
  - GuB-42 3y ago
    Cancer cells are essentially a new parasitic life form living inside of you. It is born from you but it is not you. It decided to play by its own rules and pursue its own goals, ignoring the signals that makes the host body functional. Often, it is attacked by the host body immune system like other intruders and it has to defend itself. Some cancer cell lines HeLa have well outlived their host and are used in scientific research. In a way, cancer is life and life is cancer.
  - mistermann 3y ago
    Like cancer, we are (allegedly) killing our host environment.
- jddj 3y ago
  Certain insect colonies typically make good "individual" analogues due to certain roles being infertile and so the genetic lineage actually working in units that are larger than a single bee. If you think about it, the way we define an individual is a bit blurry anyway - think of those plants and creatures which produce more "individuals" by letting pieces break off and float down the river to take root elsewhere, or reproduce asexually to produce clones. Aphids, for example, on the same plant are commonly clones. So you can cling tight to the individual as being the thing that is delineated by a mixing of genes in sexual reproduction and have things still make some sense. But if you let that slide and zoom out then indeed life as we know it is just one branching, breaking, mutating organism.
eep_social 3y ago
Worker bees die when they sting mammals because mammal skin retains the barbed stinger tip. However, workers are not inherently one-shot stingers in all cases.
- vermilingua 3y ago
  And mammal skin retains the stinger because the barbs were evolved for that purpose, so that venom glands continue to drive venom into the stung animal.
  - lostlogin 3y ago
    The bees don’t always die when they sting, they sometimes don’t get it lodged and can attack again. Top tip, wearing a bee suit will help with this, but it’s so damn hot, so if the stings are relatively few, just taking the hit is preferable. Be more gentle and it’s the best of both worlds - cool and venomless.

codetrotter 3y ago

> Some bees being predisposed through biology or chemical messaging to ignore information is fundamentally different from an individual deciding to ignore messaging Why can’t it be that people who are prone to ignore messaging also do so because of biological predisposition? Brain chemistry!

lazide 3y ago
I guess it all boils down to the age old question - do we (uh, I mean ants) have free will?
aeturnum 3y ago
It could be - but that's not what the author was invoking! They were talking about how having a subset of the population that doesn't follow the trends is essential for keeping up the health of the hive. It's wrong to say that "any bee could ignore the directions" - part of the system that only a small subset does. So if you want to transpose this into advice that you suggest to individuals (as the author did) - you should also suggest some notion of how an individual might detect when too many people are "following directions." Otherwise you're just advocating for following your personal inclinations - which may also be a fine thing to do - but was not what the author was saying bees do.

giantg2 3y ago

"definitely a different thing!" Is it in all cases though? People with stuff like oppositional defiant disorder might be predisposed to act that way through biology.

aeturnum 3y ago
Sure - but the part I quoted is urging people to consider that they themselves might choose not to "follow the swarm" as it were. I think you could use this example to argue that a lot of the diversity in how human brains work (autism, adhd, oppositional defiant disorder like you said) should be viewed as a strength and a source of alternative and interesting viewpoints that are grounded in biological difference we should honor and recognize. But - people in those situations don't chose how their brains work.
- mistermann 3y ago
  > But - people in those situations don't chose how their brains work. It makes one wonder how much choice you have in believing otherwise... After all, such things may not be knowable, at this point in time anyways.
  - aeturnum 3y ago
    I think it's good to be suspicious of things that we consider out of our control, but it seems to me that suspicion is pretty "built in" to modern psychiatric medicine and I don't have any reason to doubt their conclusions around these conditions.
    - mistermann 3y ago
      A reason I doubt their conclusions is because of the complexity and inconsistency of the underlying problem space, as well as their methodologies. By default I think the epistemic status we should assign to such things is unknown, not the experts' beliefs are correct until proven otherwise.