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I’ve come to the same conclusion. But not just about companies, but everything. Talk to someone in the military, or government agencies, or working on large inf

I’ve come to the same conclusion. But not just about companies, but everything. Talk to someone in the military, or government agencies, or working on large infrastructure projects. It’s the same story everywhere - chaos. And it’s generally not because of malice, being dumb, or lack of trying. I think as a civilization we’re much more like ants than a troop of smart chimps. In that our civilization is a kind of a proverbial emergent anthill. And most likely the relative individual understanding of our respective anthills doesn’t differ too much between ants and us. And it’s kind of freeing. You just move your proverbial bit of earth that you’re just compelled to put somewhere else, and don’t stress the rest. Emergence will take care of it.

KineticLensman 3y ago
> But not just about companies, but everything For me, it's a good argument against conspiracy theories. There's no way there could be secretive organisations running for years and controlling the world without screwing up in stupid and obvious ways.
- jgilias 3y ago
  Yeah. I think anyone who has had experience with school/kindergarten parents chats trying to organize _anything_ would find the idea of shadowy organizations running the world laughable.
- lootsauce 3y ago
  To the contrary does it not imply any well organized group should have an easier time of accomplishing their aims while the rest are mired in the chaos?
  - esrauch 3y ago
    The claim is that there are literally no observable organizations running without chaos, so are we to believe the only one to achieve it is nefarious instead of just regular profiteering? I like the meta conspiracy theory that the only organizations running without chaos are covert ones though.
    - tsunamifury 3y ago
      It’s more that within that chaos there are short bursts of organization that can pull off narrow conspiracies. There are also natural long term aligned players who conspire in ways that they can use their energy for their benefit. “Market makers” There are also random alignments that appear to be conspiracies ex post facto.
  - insane_dreamer 3y ago
    > To the contrary does it not imply any well organized group should have an easier time of accomplishing their aims while the rest are mired in the chaos? This take makes sense to me. It's not the org as a whole that is accomplishing secret aims, but a sub-org within a chaotic org, or spread across multiple chaotic orgs, that is able to do so since no one is paying close attention to anything.
- polynomial 3y ago
  Right, the conspiracy is to destroy things, not build them.
CabSauce 3y ago
I think this is the cause of my depression. It's horrendously sad to think about what we could be accomplishing if we were just a little efficient.
- hiddencost 3y ago
  We blame large, intractable systems for our problems when it's too dangerous to look at the small, local causes.
- jgilias 3y ago
  Sorry to hear this! I hope you can manage to get out of it, depression can be a real bitch! Do seek help, it’s nothing to be ashamed of.
- dtech 3y ago
  Efficient how? Ants are extremely efficient and successful, second only to humans in biomass. Turns out making good global decisions is hard to impossible, so you see decentralized decision making pop up everywhere.
- Towaway69 3y ago
  Efficiency, trust and cooperation, what an amazing place it could be. Finding a hobby that provides a little of that helped me. What I also noticed, having spent far too much time in front of a screen and programming, that I began to think of the world as a giant program that is really really buggy. Trying to fix those bugs got me down ... just gotta live with those bugs.
  - ElevenLathe 3y ago
    > began to think of the world as a giant program that is really really buggy I think this is an excellent way to phrase the experience of "programmer brain" and I will be blatantly ripping it off in the future. It's definitely an occupational hazard, and something we should be wary of, but it's only a small symptom of the larger technologized worldview that permeates Western thought (and via export, a lot of global thought). There are definite upsides to technology and programming, but: "we shape our tools, our tools shape us". I think we technologists think a lot about the former, and rarely about the latter (that's for those squishy humanities types!) -- at our own peril.
hoseja 3y ago
Emergence is an agent that isn't me. Why am I even conscious if all my agency is subsumed by the egregore. This isn't freeing in the slightest, maybe only for the most conditioned megacity dwellers.
- layer8 3y ago
  Within a group of n people, everything else being equal, why would you expect to be able to steer its behavior by more than 1/nth?
  - hoseja 3y ago
    But that's the problem with emergence, you don't even get the 1/n. You get zero, or very near it.
    - jgilias 3y ago
      I think you misunderstand what emergence is. It’s really not an argument about if you have agency or not in your individual actions.
    - layer8 3y ago
      Well, you had the agency to read HN today, to comment here, and to choose the contents of your comment. So I’m not sure what you’re getting at, beyond the well-trodden free-will debate.
- jgilias 3y ago
  This couldn’t be farther from the truth though. As in, I don’t think any place I’ve even been to would count as a megacity. Let alone where I live. The way I see it is that emergence is not an agent. More like some basic law of nature. Think about planned gardens and suburbs versus natural forests and medieval city centers. You can mow your lawn every week, expend obscene amounts of water during the summer, pour everything with herbicides in a misguided effort to have the perfect lawn, but the moment you stop doing it, nature takes over and introduces a fractal amount of complexity in just a few seasons. In my opinion an old forest where nature has been let alone for some time is much more beautiful and interesting than any planned garden, and a medieval city centre much more beautiful and interesting than any planned neighborhood. And then, emergence explaining our civilization doesn’t necessarily imply that you don’t have agency as an individual. It just says that the total of whatever we collectively do, irrespective of if we’re compelled to do it, or have free will, results in more than just the sum of individual parts.
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
"emergent anthill" Wonder if this concept could also be Moloch. Moloch is sometimes used to represent how humans just consume. And, what do ants do, expand and consume. More and More I think the ant-human analogy is best. We are organizing, we form structures, but it isn't a plan, it's just twitching on our feedbacks. We have some loose internal functions to respond to inputs. That when stacked up by millions form some pattern. Ant's don't have an 'anthill plan' and humans don't have a 'city/town plan'. Like ants, we just kind of group together and follow the chemical paths laid down by others (coffee, beer).
- djhn 3y ago
  Coffee, beer and sex hormones.
schrectacular 3y ago
Sounds Daoist to me.
rbanffy 3y ago
It’s kind of a side effect of capitalism. You get the culture of doing more with less and drive it until the point you are doing less than adequate with less money than you’d need to do it properly. The end result is software that puts postal workers in jail and doors that fall off planes.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
  Like democracy, it sucks, but it's all we have. Depending how you define capitalism (currency, trade, investing in capital?) and software (something executed on a digital or analog computing machine) there was no software 10,000+ years ago before capitalism
  - rbanffy 3y ago
    In the end it's about process and dumbing it down enough that it can be followed by the cheapest resource available (while also pressing down the cost of such resources through managed poverty). This race to the bottom is never good. As for democracy, it's great, much better than any alternative. It's inconvenient (to the powers of the day), however, that it tries (at least the functional ones) to prevent the widening of the chasm between the haves and the have nots. One thing any functional democracy must aggressively prevent is the acquisition of power from any means other than popular vote.
    - CamperBob2 3y ago
      It's inconvenient (to the powers of the day), however, that it tries (at least the functional ones) to prevent the widening of the chasm between the haves and the have nots. If there was a central lesson of the twentieth century, it's that the chasm between the haves and have-nots cannot be closed without doing more damage than simply allowing it to exist. People are not created equal, no matter how tightly you shut your eyes and how loudly you chant. Meanwhile, the central lesson of the twenty-first century is beginning to come into focus: giving smart people and stupid people the same voting rights is maladaptive to civilized society. You can forget any notion of progress while this state of affairs prevails; just ask your local Trumpers. Does this refute democracy? Very well, then, it refutes democracy. I'm not super optimistic on either front, I guess. Optimism simply requires too much denial. Preservation of equal opportunity is likely to be the best goal we can aim for.
Octabrain 3y ago
My conclusion is that this "chaotic scenario" happens when humans work in big groups. It's extremely hard/pretty much impossible to coordinate big group of humans and made them to work efficiently. In fact, this is one of the reasons by which nowadays, I personally prefer to work on a small start up environment instead of a big corporation.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  It is possible, they just need to spend more than half of the work day in coordination meetings and doing paperwork. And not many organization are willing to pay thousands of people to do paperwork to help other departments do their paperwork more effectively and so on. Or somehow they found a group of extremely trustworthy and reliable employees who will never fudge the truth even at the cost of their jobs/reputation/etc...
  - mlrtime 3y ago
    Where have you seen this where the group is > 500 people?
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      If you mean the latter, I haven't.

KineticLensman 3y ago

> But not just about companies, but everything For me, it's a good argument against conspiracy theories. There's no way there could be secretive organisations running for years and controlling the world without screwing up in stupid and obvious ways.

jgilias 3y ago
Yeah. I think anyone who has had experience with school/kindergarten parents chats trying to organize _anything_ would find the idea of shadowy organizations running the world laughable.
lootsauce 3y ago
To the contrary does it not imply any well organized group should have an easier time of accomplishing their aims while the rest are mired in the chaos?
- esrauch 3y ago
  The claim is that there are literally no observable organizations running without chaos, so are we to believe the only one to achieve it is nefarious instead of just regular profiteering? I like the meta conspiracy theory that the only organizations running without chaos are covert ones though.
  - tsunamifury 3y ago
    It’s more that within that chaos there are short bursts of organization that can pull off narrow conspiracies. There are also natural long term aligned players who conspire in ways that they can use their energy for their benefit. “Market makers” There are also random alignments that appear to be conspiracies ex post facto.
- insane_dreamer 3y ago
  > To the contrary does it not imply any well organized group should have an easier time of accomplishing their aims while the rest are mired in the chaos? This take makes sense to me. It's not the org as a whole that is accomplishing secret aims, but a sub-org within a chaotic org, or spread across multiple chaotic orgs, that is able to do so since no one is paying close attention to anything.
polynomial 3y ago
Right, the conspiracy is to destroy things, not build them.

CabSauce 3y ago

I think this is the cause of my depression. It's horrendously sad to think about what we could be accomplishing if we were just a little efficient.

hiddencost 3y ago
We blame large, intractable systems for our problems when it's too dangerous to look at the small, local causes.
jgilias 3y ago
Sorry to hear this! I hope you can manage to get out of it, depression can be a real bitch! Do seek help, it’s nothing to be ashamed of.
dtech 3y ago
Efficient how? Ants are extremely efficient and successful, second only to humans in biomass. Turns out making good global decisions is hard to impossible, so you see decentralized decision making pop up everywhere.
Towaway69 3y ago
Efficiency, trust and cooperation, what an amazing place it could be. Finding a hobby that provides a little of that helped me. What I also noticed, having spent far too much time in front of a screen and programming, that I began to think of the world as a giant program that is really really buggy. Trying to fix those bugs got me down ... just gotta live with those bugs.
- ElevenLathe 3y ago
  > began to think of the world as a giant program that is really really buggy I think this is an excellent way to phrase the experience of "programmer brain" and I will be blatantly ripping it off in the future. It's definitely an occupational hazard, and something we should be wary of, but it's only a small symptom of the larger technologized worldview that permeates Western thought (and via export, a lot of global thought). There are definite upsides to technology and programming, but: "we shape our tools, our tools shape us". I think we technologists think a lot about the former, and rarely about the latter (that's for those squishy humanities types!) -- at our own peril.

hoseja 3y ago

Emergence is an agent that isn't me. Why am I even conscious if all my agency is subsumed by the egregore. This isn't freeing in the slightest, maybe only for the most conditioned megacity dwellers.

layer8 3y ago
Within a group of n people, everything else being equal, why would you expect to be able to steer its behavior by more than 1/nth?
- hoseja 3y ago
  But that's the problem with emergence, you don't even get the 1/n. You get zero, or very near it.
  - jgilias 3y ago
    I think you misunderstand what emergence is. It’s really not an argument about if you have agency or not in your individual actions.
  - layer8 3y ago
    Well, you had the agency to read HN today, to comment here, and to choose the contents of your comment. So I’m not sure what you’re getting at, beyond the well-trodden free-will debate.
jgilias 3y ago
This couldn’t be farther from the truth though. As in, I don’t think any place I’ve even been to would count as a megacity. Let alone where I live. The way I see it is that emergence is not an agent. More like some basic law of nature. Think about planned gardens and suburbs versus natural forests and medieval city centers. You can mow your lawn every week, expend obscene amounts of water during the summer, pour everything with herbicides in a misguided effort to have the perfect lawn, but the moment you stop doing it, nature takes over and introduces a fractal amount of complexity in just a few seasons. In my opinion an old forest where nature has been let alone for some time is much more beautiful and interesting than any planned garden, and a medieval city centre much more beautiful and interesting than any planned neighborhood. And then, emergence explaining our civilization doesn’t necessarily imply that you don’t have agency as an individual. It just says that the total of whatever we collectively do, irrespective of if we’re compelled to do it, or have free will, results in more than just the sum of individual parts.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

"emergent anthill" Wonder if this concept could also be Moloch. Moloch is sometimes used to represent how humans just consume. And, what do ants do, expand and consume. More and More I think the ant-human analogy is best. We are organizing, we form structures, but it isn't a plan, it's just twitching on our feedbacks. We have some loose internal functions to respond to inputs. That when stacked up by millions form some pattern. Ant's don't have an 'anthill plan' and humans don't have a 'city/town plan'. Like ants, we just kind of group together and follow the chemical paths laid down by others (coffee, beer).

djhn 3y ago
Coffee, beer and sex hormones.

schrectacular 3y ago

Sounds Daoist to me.

rbanffy 3y ago

It’s kind of a side effect of capitalism. You get the culture of doing more with less and drive it until the point you are doing less than adequate with less money than you’d need to do it properly. The end result is software that puts postal workers in jail and doors that fall off planes.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
Like democracy, it sucks, but it's all we have. Depending how you define capitalism (currency, trade, investing in capital?) and software (something executed on a digital or analog computing machine) there was no software 10,000+ years ago before capitalism
- rbanffy 3y ago
  In the end it's about process and dumbing it down enough that it can be followed by the cheapest resource available (while also pressing down the cost of such resources through managed poverty). This race to the bottom is never good. As for democracy, it's great, much better than any alternative. It's inconvenient (to the powers of the day), however, that it tries (at least the functional ones) to prevent the widening of the chasm between the haves and the have nots. One thing any functional democracy must aggressively prevent is the acquisition of power from any means other than popular vote.
  - CamperBob2 3y ago
    It's inconvenient (to the powers of the day), however, that it tries (at least the functional ones) to prevent the widening of the chasm between the haves and the have nots. If there was a central lesson of the twentieth century, it's that the chasm between the haves and have-nots cannot be closed without doing more damage than simply allowing it to exist. People are not created equal, no matter how tightly you shut your eyes and how loudly you chant. Meanwhile, the central lesson of the twenty-first century is beginning to come into focus: giving smart people and stupid people the same voting rights is maladaptive to civilized society. You can forget any notion of progress while this state of affairs prevails; just ask your local Trumpers. Does this refute democracy? Very well, then, it refutes democracy. I'm not super optimistic on either front, I guess. Optimism simply requires too much denial. Preservation of equal opportunity is likely to be the best goal we can aim for.

Octabrain 3y ago

My conclusion is that this "chaotic scenario" happens when humans work in big groups. It's extremely hard/pretty much impossible to coordinate big group of humans and made them to work efficiently. In fact, this is one of the reasons by which nowadays, I personally prefer to work on a small start up environment instead of a big corporation.

MichaelZuo 3y ago
It is possible, they just need to spend more than half of the work day in coordination meetings and doing paperwork. And not many organization are willing to pay thousands of people to do paperwork to help other departments do their paperwork more effectively and so on. Or somehow they found a group of extremely trustworthy and reliable employees who will never fudge the truth even at the cost of their jobs/reputation/etc...
- mlrtime 3y ago
  Where have you seen this where the group is > 500 people?
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    If you mean the latter, I haven't.