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Comment by neilk | Hacker News Reader

I couldn't find any other reference to this rogue bee thing (except other inspirational essays).

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...

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I think your skepticism is warranted; the "rogue bees" seem to be an inspirational essay thing, rather than a scientific thing. The closest I could find was a study that the waggle dance usually had errors of 10–15°. These errors are pretty big when you're foraging, but these errors turned out to be beneficial for finding new food sources. It may be that these "sloppy bees" turned into rogue bees in the storytelling. Coincidentally, the earliest reference to rogue bees that I could find is 2014, same year as the Nature paper. The rogue bees seem to be popularized by Rory Sutherland's 2020 book "Alchemy" and TED talks.

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep04175.pdf?proof=t

It's interesting, that even in a community like HN, almost nobody seems to ask for the scientific reference here. Might have something to do with confirmation bias? Or is there such a thing like sounds-interesting-AF-bias?

On CorporateNews the version of the article going around talks about how 98% of rogue bees don't find a better flower patch and die starving and alone. ;)

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.

Well, let's give people a break. It sounded plausible. We've all heard of the story of the waggle dance, often in grade school, in a simplified form. TIL 3-2-1 Contact lied to me.

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.

> TIL 3-2-1 Contact lied to me.

Unthinkable! Why, next thing I suppose you’ll impugn Mathnet for fibbing.

You would have better luck pressing ghostwriter for sources.

“Monday. 9:43 AM. The economy had gotten so bad in New York that people couldn’t afford to eat in restaurants anymore; instead they brown bagged it at their desks. They didn’t eat food at their desks, just brown bags.”

Except that someone did question it and look up Wikipedia, a trusted source of sorts. And this thread about questioning sources is near the top of the whole thread.

I was gonna for citations too, fwiw, but found this comment and upvoted it instead.

Or perhaps the important thing is the story being told rather than the exact scientific accuracy of the setting. Tortoises and hares don't literally talk or enter foot races with one another, either, yet there's still plenty of value to be had from the fable featuring them.

Right, just like Trump's strategy. Immigrants are bad for 'merica. Don't mind the details or ask for proof. It's the story that counts, and in the story they are all rapists taking the jobs of hard-working 'mericans.

Also, consider a hive in which all foraging bees exclusively followed waggle dances. Pretty obviously they would eventually all end up going to the same place and the hive would run out of food. Therefore it makes sense that at least some bees should ignore the waggle dance at least some of the time. But it doesn't have to be the same bees each time, and the article doesn't present any evidence that it is.

> 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.

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.

It also seems they may prefer to rely on their own personal knowledge. It's easier to go back to places you know then follow your friends' directions.

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