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> This is a claim so extraordinary It's your claim thats is extraordinary. Humans are beholden to a single form of organisation? I feel that you are so stuck

> This is a claim so extraordinary It's your claim thats is extraordinary. Humans are beholden to a single form of organisation? I feel that you are so stuck in this mode of thinking that you struggle to see these other forms of organisation despite the fact that they surround you. Markets dominate the world, they are not a hierarchy. Social networks form a web, they are not a hierarchy. If you try to organise any data, you will find it cannot be fit into a hierarchy, it is either relational or a graph. Relationships dominate the world, hierarchy is an illusion

tiahura 3y ago
So dogs, camels, and chimps all have hierarchys, but humans don’t? Strong claim.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  >dogs If you're referring to the whole "alpha" thing, remember that was shown to be invalid and only occurred in captivity. Wild dogs are pretty communal.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  A school of fish is not a hierarchy. Other things exist besides hierarchies
- komali2 3y ago
  Famously, humans are the only creatures on earth that do lots of stuff. Like talking, writing, drawing pictures, or riding rockets into orbit. I don't see what's so unbelievable about our massively unique cognitive ability vs instinct ratio leading us to also have different forms of social organization, or that this could lead to our social organization being detached from instinct almost entirely. I feel like this whenever people try to do that Lobster argument. "right, but we aren't lobsters."
  - Sprocklem 3y ago
    Additionally, humans are unique in their ability to create complex social constructs and realities, which is a reasonable prerequisite for a potential to create novel methods of social organization.
    - thworp 3y ago
      This is a truism. Of course we could create social organizations that are totally unconstrained, but they will fail catastrophically. We are (and will always be) constrained and as soon as we prefer one goal to another we want to bring that hierarchy to reality. To do that we necessarily need to adjust the rewards for working towards that goal, thereby creating a social hierarchy.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - komali2 3y ago
        Even if that were the case, the "lobster arguments for social hierarchy" usually lean far more rigid and totalitarian than human history indicates. For every Roman empire you show me I can find you five cultures with fluid or nearly flat hierarchies.
thworp 3y ago
> Markets dominate the world, they are not a hierarchy. Correct. But markets are downstream from hierarchy. The hierarchy determines the access to its rewards, those rewards can then be used to participate in the market, either by directly spending them or by influencing other to do so. > Social networks Social networks are most certainly a hierarchy. They distribute rewards proportional to a user's success and prominently show the metrics underlying that success. They are a kind of turbo-hierarchy where your position is always obvious to everyone and changes instantly. If everyone unsubscribes from your YouTube channel everyone will know, but if nobody reads your book you can still derive status from your 1982 bestselling book. On a more general note, a hierarchy is just a mechanism for aligning an agent's actions towards group goals via the distribution of rewards. I don't know how or why there are so many people that associate it only with the Caste system or hereditary aristocracies. Funnily enough, the hereditary aristocracies were quite adept at changing their hierarchies in response to external events.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  > Social networks are most certainly a hierarchy. I don't mean facebook, I mean real networks of real people. Relationships do not form hierarchies. Suppose I respect you, and you respect your boss. That does not mean I must respect your boss, maybe he lost to me in poker and I laugh at him. Even when it comes to social networks, when researchers visualise what's happening on twitter, they don't a hierarchy, they use a graph. Social network analysis uses graph theory. Even a family tree is not a hierarchy, and not a tree. Ancestry forms a directed acyclic graph.
- adolph 3y ago
  > But markets are downstream from hierarchy. Nope, the bazaar does not need the cathedral. Example: "Silent Trade" Group A would leave trade goods in a prominent position and signal, by gong, fire, or drum for example, that they had left goods. Group B would then arrive at the spot, examine the goods and deposit their trade goods or money that they wanted to exchange and withdraw. Group A would then return and either accept the trade by taking the goods from Group B or withdraw again leaving Group B to add to or change out items to create an equal value. The trade ends when Group A accepts Group B's offer and removes the offered goods leaving Group B to remove the original goods. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_trade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_trade

tiahura 3y ago

So dogs, camels, and chimps all have hierarchys, but humans don’t? Strong claim.

mrguyorama 3y ago
>dogs If you're referring to the whole "alpha" thing, remember that was shown to be invalid and only occurred in captivity. Wild dogs are pretty communal.
ClumsyPilot 3y ago
A school of fish is not a hierarchy. Other things exist besides hierarchies
komali2 3y ago
Famously, humans are the only creatures on earth that do lots of stuff. Like talking, writing, drawing pictures, or riding rockets into orbit. I don't see what's so unbelievable about our massively unique cognitive ability vs instinct ratio leading us to also have different forms of social organization, or that this could lead to our social organization being detached from instinct almost entirely. I feel like this whenever people try to do that Lobster argument. "right, but we aren't lobsters."
- Sprocklem 3y ago
  Additionally, humans are unique in their ability to create complex social constructs and realities, which is a reasonable prerequisite for a potential to create novel methods of social organization.
  - thworp 3y ago
    This is a truism. Of course we could create social organizations that are totally unconstrained, but they will fail catastrophically. We are (and will always be) constrained and as soon as we prefer one goal to another we want to bring that hierarchy to reality. To do that we necessarily need to adjust the rewards for working towards that goal, thereby creating a social hierarchy.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - komali2 3y ago
      Even if that were the case, the "lobster arguments for social hierarchy" usually lean far more rigid and totalitarian than human history indicates. For every Roman empire you show me I can find you five cultures with fluid or nearly flat hierarchies.

thworp 3y ago

> Markets dominate the world, they are not a hierarchy. Correct. But markets are downstream from hierarchy. The hierarchy determines the access to its rewards, those rewards can then be used to participate in the market, either by directly spending them or by influencing other to do so. > Social networks Social networks are most certainly a hierarchy. They distribute rewards proportional to a user's success and prominently show the metrics underlying that success. They are a kind of turbo-hierarchy where your position is always obvious to everyone and changes instantly. If everyone unsubscribes from your YouTube channel everyone will know, but if nobody reads your book you can still derive status from your 1982 bestselling book. On a more general note, a hierarchy is just a mechanism for aligning an agent's actions towards group goals via the distribution of rewards. I don't know how or why there are so many people that associate it only with the Caste system or hereditary aristocracies. Funnily enough, the hereditary aristocracies were quite adept at changing their hierarchies in response to external events.

ClumsyPilot 3y ago
> Social networks are most certainly a hierarchy. I don't mean facebook, I mean real networks of real people. Relationships do not form hierarchies. Suppose I respect you, and you respect your boss. That does not mean I must respect your boss, maybe he lost to me in poker and I laugh at him. Even when it comes to social networks, when researchers visualise what's happening on twitter, they don't a hierarchy, they use a graph. Social network analysis uses graph theory. Even a family tree is not a hierarchy, and not a tree. Ancestry forms a directed acyclic graph.
adolph 3y ago
> But markets are downstream from hierarchy. Nope, the bazaar does not need the cathedral. Example: "Silent Trade" Group A would leave trade goods in a prominent position and signal, by gong, fire, or drum for example, that they had left goods. Group B would then arrive at the spot, examine the goods and deposit their trade goods or money that they wanted to exchange and withdraw. Group A would then return and either accept the trade by taking the goods from Group B or withdraw again leaving Group B to add to or change out items to create an equal value. The trade ends when Group A accepts Group B's offer and removes the offered goods leaving Group B to remove the original goods. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_trade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_trade