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Comment by csneeky | Hacker News Reader

All employers want their employees to "do the job to the best of their ability". But the freedom given to you to decide how your success is measured is proportional to your experience and past performance. There are those in both academia and private industry that get a lot of freedom to do their work/research.

But there is a hierarchy to this just like everything in nature. The exceptionally strong and bright animals have more freedom in why they choose to do and how they do it. And that system has worked to get us all this far.

The system this article is pushing against isn't fun for many but inevitable. The further you are from the top the more subject your performance is to poor evaluation schemes conceived by those far from the top too.

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Scientists aren't employees. They are given the tools, real estate and funding to do their thing, usually through research grants or private funding.

The fact that nowadays they are treated as employees is exactly the problem.

...Oh, and by the way, nature has no hierarchy.

Scientists are employees in many contexts (almost all contexts). We may just have to agree to disagree on that one. Be they in service for an NGO, school, or oligarch.

But to say nature has no hierarchy? I suppose "hierarchy" can mean many things. But in my case I mean fitness and selection for it. The most fit are at the top. Nature tends to select for those better suited to their environment. And those best suited thrive and push the success of us all forward. It is how you got here and have what you have. Intellectual, emotional, and physical traits are all subject to this selection. The thriving academics with the most freedom are closer to the top. The best employees (however you want to define employee) tend to be given the most freedom and trust.

If you look at any nature's habitat of N kinds of animals, even there what you see can't be called a hierarchy. It's a semi-stable state on the verge of chaos which can be very easily broken by introducing a species of animals new to the area.

So no, it's not hierarchy. Lions can kill almost anything if they feel like it, but hyenas kill lions on a regular basis. Does that make them the top of the food chain in the savannah? Definitely not. It only makes a pack of hyenas stronger than a single lion or lioness.

Rock, paper, scissors. No hierarchy. It's the same in the human systems. Hierarchy is an artificial system enforced by humans and has almost zero relation to anything natural.

Not all lions kill as well as other lions though. Take a snapshot of all the lions in the world alive right now and rank them by their ability to kill and the number of offspring they have. Some are better at these two things (they killed more and attracted more mates). This is quantifiable and trivial to fit into a hierarchical scheme of some kind.

It isn't hard to extract similar hierarchies from other species...including humans.

If we're talking about a single species, sure.

> But there is a hierarchy to this just like everything in nature

do you truly believe that everything in nature is hierarchical?

Yes, as far as life is concerned I do.

Everything we or other life forms do comes from an attempt to make an improvement. Be it selfish or altruistic, it is always to alter some state of the world for a perceived benefit.

But our competence varies. So we all fall on some spectrum of competence in any given endeavor no matter how small. From this variation and rank we can derive hierarchy.

This transcends all species and their traits.

there is such a thing as variation, and there is such a thing as varying degrees of fitness for some particular configuration [of whatever] in some particular environment [wherever and whenever]. that does not automatically imply hierarchy. that is an intellectual construct of your own mind. Hierarchy is a human social structure that you map onto all of nature at your own peril.

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