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Comment by mathgladiator | Hacker News Reader

One of the things that I find challenging is getting people to think beyond a few months. We really are victims of short-term thinking, and this spoke to me.

The challenge of course with having visions is whether or not they are relevant to the world.

My hope is to retire and be absolutely prolific without having to constrain myself by a shared engineering discipline (i.e. I'll write my own language and ship code that people will not understand without a heavy investment of time; market failure for sure, but I'll be happy because it is my art)

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> One of the things that I find challenging is getting people to think beyond a few months. We really are victims of short-term thinking.

That's why we evolved groups to overcome individual weakness. Then bigger groups to overcome group weakness. Understanding how and why groups form/evolve/break/merge etc will change how you think about what can and can't be done by yourself.

Check out Robert Axelrod's Evolution of Cooperation, and Complexity of Cooperation.

I don’t know, groups seem more prone to short-term thinking than isolated individuals. Groups tend to be stuck in a local maximum, whereas an independent individual can more easily make a broad survey of existence.

"A broad survey of existence" may be the wrong way to look at it. Think about a group of people searching for the bathroom in a completely darkened apartment, or breadth-first vs. depth-first search.

The group of people scatter out from their starting point but have to remain close enough to communicate their results (or lack of) to each other. The alternative is a depth-first search that immediately heads for a likely location, but that is hard to parallelize.

These comments made me wonder why the democratic principle is never used in corporations. Is it a flawed principle?

Democracy’s killer feature as a system of government is peaceful alteration of power. Counting heads to see who the likely winner of a civil war would be is much cheaper in terms of bloodshed and property damage than actually having a civil war. Corporations don’t have a monopoly on the use of violence like states do so this advantage is irrelevant. Democracy isn’t really that great as an organizing principle except insofar as it promotes stability and order. Fantastic in a state, pretty meh for a corporation which seeks to maximize profit.

> These comments made me wonder why the democratic principle is never used in corporations

It is used in some corporations.

Labor coops are usually corporations. So are labor unions. So are consumer coops, which also apply the democratic principle with a different constituency.

"Governing the Firm" by Gregory Dow is all about that exact question. Why aren't labor coops more common? What's holding them back, in game theory economics terms?

One reason is that it's much easier to capture entrepreneurial rents for a capital-managed firm. A capitalist with a grand plan can hire a lot of workers and realize his plan. In a labor coop, a majority has to agree that the plan is sound - and if it's a first-mover thing, it's hard to keep some workers from starting their own business and getting there first. Dow gives some other reasons too.

Labor coops do exist, but they're usually not startups, and some types of business are much more common than others.

As I understand it (from reading [0]), that would have historically been called "socialism" (the term changed a bit to mean command economies during the Cold War).

The Mondragon [1] corporation organizations around these lines.

In general - as I understand it - you could view Unions and Coops as attempts to apply democratic processes to operating a business.

[0] - https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-at-Work-Cure-Capitalism/dp/...

[1] - https://www.mondragon-corporation.com/en/about-us/

EDIT: for clarity and link organization

Corporations are democracies .. of the shareholders.

Correct. Representation is the difference here.

Although these days the lines seems to be blurring into democracy since corporations are getting larger horizontally and vertically.

Would be true if individuals were rational. We are not. And without interaction and dependence on others nothing very interesting is ever found.

Well explained here - https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25426

Rationality has nothing to do with what I said. I said that groups tend to coalesce around short-term, immediate concerns. Imagination and the capacity to dream is an individual, not group, activity. It often takes a true outsider to expand the bounds of a culture's thinking or time perspective. This by definition can't come from a group.

Nor is rationality itself necessarily an ideal end goal. In fact, this obsession with rationality (exemplified by sites like Less Wrong and in general by scientism-adherents) is itself a perfect example of my point - a group of individuals stuck in their worldview, incapable of seeing beyond the walls of their own local culture.

Newton wasn't sitting and dreaming under a tree in the Serengeti. There was a particular group that identified, nurtured, challenged and protected him for his dreams to reach their full potential.

For all we know there are a lot of top notch dreamers sitting in the Serengeti today that are going to die there because the groups they are surrounded by can't help them in anyway.

Without the right group surrounding the individual good luck realizing dreams and changing the behavior or thinking of any other group.

Well that sort of proves my point - Newton was an individual. Yes, he needed the support of a community to reach his full potential, but it wasn't the community that came up with his ideas - it was him.

And for a contrarian example, consider someone like Nietzsche. Probably in the top 5 most influential philosophers of the past ±150 years and yet he wrote most of his books alone while wandering Europe. He also published most of them at his own expense and didn't have much of a readership until near his death, at which point he had gone mad from syphilis. There was no group around him and no community helping him. Yet here we are, deeply influenced by his ideas.

Change your word selection from group to community and your point is more effective. Your point about newton is exactly right and you can see it again in the physicist community that unraveled the secrets of the atom. You can see it again in the creation of the internet and again in Silicon Valley today. Communities do matter but not in the collective organizing sense that most people think of when they read the word.. more in the rapid feedback and competition for ideas.

> I'll write my own language and ship code that people will not understand without a heavy investment of time; market failure for sure, but I'll be happy because it is my art

Perhaps not a great way to make money, but likely a good way to get a cult following!

The issue is nothing is guaranteed. What is put off til tomorrow may never come

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