What if you did the exact opposite, like rogue bees do (2020)
mrdbourke.com
mrdbourke.com
The gist of it is that 30% of studied ants do 70% of the work in digging tunnels. Other ants come in, see that it is too crowded, and don't try to force their way in in an effort to prove they're working hard to the other ants. This ends up being an ideal strategy for the colony because overcrowding reduces the overall work throughput, but requires all ants to be comfortable allowing some of their ant peers to work less while remaining in the vicinity of where work is being accomplished.
Pretty interesting stuff, if you ask me! :)
The reproductive success of an ant hill is determined at the hill level, so the ants have no evolutionary incentive for selfishness at all.
(Not saying successful communism is impossible for humans, especially at smaller scales, just that evolution is working against it, rather than for it).
We have a lot of ants in our place at the moment and they're fascinating to watch. They do seem to solve problems and even show empathy towards each other. Sadly one was badly injured the other day and two other ants tried to come to the rescue, it was beautiful and sad to watch.
I despise using poisons of any kind against insects and animals for this reason.
Even watching butterflies dance together while flying around is quite fascinating. I guess they must have some kind of self-awareness too?
I have a bird near my place who stops nuts from a large height to crack then open. I only can imagine what that bird might do if it had hands ha
I am still working on it across all beings! However, I have come to the conclusion that a certain amount of toeing the line is possible but left to their own devices, they probably would!
some ants love to mountain bike, and who can blame them?
"in in an effort to prove they're working hard to the other ants"
"all ants to be comfortable allowing some of their ant peers to work less"
Or maybe on some instinctive level they realize they just literally cannot work in the crowd and wait until they can and that's that.
No, I don't believe ants are actually acting with intelligent, social behavior in an attempt to win over their fellow ants. They're just little statistical robots searching for optimality.
That said, there have been times that I've been frustrated when I feel I am working harder than my peers and, in those moments, it's been easy for me to feel justified by looking at what's optimal for me rather than extrapolating to what's optimal for the greater good. I thought adding a little anthropomorphism to my descriptors would be a gentle way of helping others reflect on similar situations.
Humans think they have free will. I don’t think so, we all do what we are compelled to do (and that could just be follow the herd)
Yes, there needs to be a statistical distribution of effort for intrinsic reasons --in this case of physics. Even if it wasn't needed, it would exist. The workers can console themselves with the thought that when times get hard, the idlers will be nice, tender, succulent food.
I would have opted out. But I never figured out how to be "in"!
I suspect a lot of people forging their own paths didn't really choose too, although they might assume they did.
When you see things differently, you don't just have different visions of where to go, but an aversion to those well worn paths that often seemed inexplicably depressingly difficult.
Wikipedia's entry on the waggle dance seems to suggest that bees often don't make use of the information in the dance. It's not some rare maverick bees per se. It's more that the information may not be important given the season or climate or presence of competition for the food. So it can be adaptive to ignore it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance#Efficiency_and_ad...
Your point is a great one. Most information in our world is of extremely low quality. That's what happens when attention is incentivized, not teaching.
That said, I don't believe that computer programmers are, as a group, significantly more skeptical than other professions. Like most people we muddle along with generalizations, lore, and myth.
Unthinkable! Why, next thing I suppose you’ll impugn Mathnet for fibbing.
That was the literal point of the thing from the beginning. You haven't refuted the idea, you have just explained it in other words.
> 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!
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.
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
In a way, cancer is life and life is cancer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why can’t it be that people who are prone to ignore messaging also do so because of biological predisposition? Brain chemistry!
Is it in all cases though? People with stuff like oppositional defiant disorder might be predisposed to act that way through biology.
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.
By default I think the epistemic status we should assign to such things is unknown, not the experts' beliefs are correct until proven otherwise.
That said I think "how should we talk about and hold things when we are uncertain" is an important and interesting discussion in itself. One does know some things about some things - but not all things about all things. Language is hard to use well, but we could improve our use of it!
I'd say: it can depend on this, to some degree, but does not necessarily.
For me it's both: the problem space is too complex for any human to understand, plus I do not trust The Experts, because they constantly demonstrate that epistemology is not a first class concept in their model of reality.
This space holds massive potential for human benefit,it's a shame so many people have such strong aversions to it....being a conspiracy theorist, I often wonder if this aversion is 100% organic.
Bees probably feel they are deciding too :)
Being the rogue bee might be fine. Being the rogue turtle, well... it might be good for the species but bad for the individual.
Its as if species were a sentient organism playing some complex survival strategy game, sacrificing few individuals for that rare occasion that they could make a big difference.
Its a fantastic evolutionary advantage when you think about species and eras, not individuals and their tragedies as we are wired to do. Any complex species not possessing it would be outcompeted eventually, or destroyed by some cataclysmic event that destroys balance built over time by more conforming populations. I am sure in some form this could be applied to economics too.
In the book A Mote in God's Eye, they have a concept of the Crazy Eddie (presumably named after the 'eddies' in fluid dynamics), which is a mythical social phenotype where the member disagrees with the status quo and believes there is an unknown solution to their thus-far unsolved generational problem. Simply believing in a solution that is worth searching for denotes the member as 'insane'.
Kind of seems like we, as natural beings and members of natural systems, absolutely have some kind of pattern-breaking behavior built in at a systemic level. A master-level emergent behavior that can exploit local maxima but still succeed in finding other local maxima to ensure the survival and adaptation of a species.
-- George Bernard Shaw
https://towardsdatascience.com/intuition-exploration-vs-expl...
Society needs defectors. Groups benefit from the fact that some members do not follow the group norms. These are the outliers: the people who resist popular opinion for moral or other reasons. These are the people who invent new business models by copying and distributing music, movies, and books on the Internet. These are people like Copernicus and Galileo, who challenged official Church dogma on astronomy. These are the people who—to take a recent example—disrupt energy auctions to protest government responsibility for climate change. They're also people living on the edge of society: squatters, survivalists, artists, cults, communes, hermits, and those who live off the grid or off the land. In 2011, U.S. Marine Dakota Meyer received the Medal of Honor for saving three dozen of his comrades who were under enemy fire. The thing is, he disobeyed orders in order to do so.
If you pick a wrong point, all you can infer is that "not that point" is correct, not "opposite point" is correct.
There are many, many ways to be wrong.
Another example:
Redundancy. We have two lungs, two nostrils, etc.
Anything that I'm stressed about breaking or not having enough of, if it's practical to get a second one, I do, that way the stress is gone. Not always practical, but great when it is.
A helpful way to remember it: 3 is 2, 2 is 1, and 1 is none.
Probably, selfish individuals would only want to try this if they're already well-fed, or if they're confident that there will be some food left over if they don't find any of their own.
So, for the benefit of the population, we should probably make sure that everyone is well-fed, so that everyone feels confident to go and find new sources of food :)
When there's safety in failure, take risks, and favor risks that have asymptotic upside.
Seems like good advice to me!
Seems to me that the real trick is knowing when there actually is safety in failure. Quit your steady job, strike out on your own, oops the economy popped and every steady job is now on a hiring freeze. Good luck!
The evolutionary emergence of stochastic phenotype switching in bacteria https://microbialcellfactories.biomedcentral.com/articles/10...
Breeding only the ‘deviant’ mice, resulted in exactly the same percentage in the next generation ==>> hypothesis: this is an evolutionary advantageous trait.
I.e. a "random walk" would not get them very far and would spend way too much time criss-crossing locations.
Highly creative people have methods to their madnesses too.
what if we perfectly align the agi and then it gets the idea to do this. suddenly every training for docility and goodness will turn to active maliciousness.
Simple reason: In a crowd, the probability for you to be alive is less than when you're ignorant.
It's from when i was a child already and it's been that way. I have no reason to change, too. My nickname is (rev)skill in reverse, you can see, i just want to reverse the crowd, because i know they're mostly wrong.
The essense is always behind the curtain, i'm sure about it.
One note is, there's difference between follow the crowd and know what they do. To avoid something, you need to get a knowledge of them.
(tl;dr - one of the most touted folks in US Finance is a guy named Jim Cramer - he has been wrong on a vast majority of his financial recommendations to the point that he is a litmus on finance whereby if you do the opposite of any of his recommendation, you win)