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Comment by SeanAnderson | Hacker News Reader

The whole "opt out of expected group-think behavior" reminds me of a paper regarding the tunneling and movement behavior of ants: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/science/ants-worker-idlen...

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! :)

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some ants love to work, it brings them meaning.

some ants love to mountain bike, and who can blame them?

Other ants have to look after their disabled a[u]nts and antkle-biters. Others still brighten the nest with their antics and antworks.

sounds like we need a universal basic antcome.

Let's put an ant to those silly jokes.

Hive had enough!

> The whole "opt out of expected group-think behavior" [...]

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.

Very nice answer! For me it was always about being myself, not that I had much against the 'in' crowd, I just wasn't interested enough to play along, they weren't me and I wasn't them.

I’m gonna write my book called ‘living with a difficult person (me)’ I don’t mean to be, it just is that way.

Guessing when working ants get too tired (burned out?) it also gives the ‘work-adjacent’ ants a chance to get in with it being less crowded.

This is so cool.

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 have a cherry tree. Grown from a sapling. A few years ago I noticed the leaves turning in. Aphids. I then discovered that Ants farm those aphids. They place a guard ant to stop predators (lady bugs) and let this black little fellas grow and grow. Then the other ants feed off their sugary goodness. Incredible. Where does that direction come from? Collective consciousness with inherent intelligence?

It is interesting, an ants brain must be the size of a pin head and runs on how much energy ? Yet some how they solve problems like that and can co-ordinate in large numbers.

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

Being lucky enough to have a garden and partaking in ‘experiments’ of growing things really has opened my eyes to the magic of nature. I was always an outdoors person but was a consumer of sorts. Digging in some beds and doing my own compost I have really started to think about soil, the role of worms and the lower level, taken for granted, entities. Life has a frequency and observing it in play is incredible.

Which is why I always squint at people claiming only humans have intelligence. Have they ever seen an animal? And I don't mean now the "soul" discussion, just the intelligence for which the goalposts often get swiftly moved "oh they can't solve equations" "most humans can't either" "ok but they can't paint" "elephants do that" "yeah but...".

A final anecdote: I have 2 boys with ADHD (inattentive and impulsive) and I also have low grade impulsive ADHD. I also have an English Pointer who is a hunting dog (but doesn’t) When you have these fairly ‘disobedient’ or strongly instinct driven creatures, it teaches you a lot about what it takes to assimilate a sentient being into another’s way of life.

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!

We talk about strength and relative strength. Ants! Their relative intelligence is off the scale! I think our egos are much bigger than our intelligence

Worker ants are all sister and they don't reproduce, so no problem letting others do the hard work.

I think the “letting others do the hard work” makes it easy to interpret your comment as somehow very negative.

The reproductive success of an ant hill is determined at the hill level, so the ants have no evolutionary incentive for selfishness at all.

Individual ants in a colony can be understood as cells of a multicellular organism operating at a higher level of independence. It's a fascinating adaptation and one wonders what "selfishness" would even mean in such a context. Do ants have memetic behavioural evolution or are their reactions to environmental stimuli purely genetically determined? It's actually quite a fascinating question with a number of implications and avenues for exploration.

True. The evolutionary success of ants happens at the colony level rather than the individual level, so they have an evolutionary pressure to "unfairly" divide the labor like this if it's more efficient overall. I'm sure there is no "awkwardness" for them. We humans cannot evolve this way because it disadvantages the productive ones. No wonder communism works so well for ants and bees.

(Not saying successful communism is impossible for humans, especially at smaller scales, just that evolution is working against it, rather than for it).

Evolution is working for it, on those smaller scales, though. Families will happily help each other, friends don’t need a detailed ledger to figure out who’s buying the next round. Most people have a good inherent sense of fairness I think.

It’s also pretty easy to imagine a family member to whom money is never given because he cannot be trusted.

The MBAs could learn something from this!

That's some heavy handed humanization of ants attitudes there.

"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.

It was intentional! :) After all, the title of the post we're commenting on is contrasting human behavior to bees.

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.

Social behaviour doesn’t imply intelligence, or at least conscious intelligence. Most ants will never reproduce. Their life has no meaning beyond the wellbeing of the colony. It make sense that what is statistically optimal for the ant is social behaviour.

Meaning? What meaning does our lives have beyond our colony (which is at risk)?

It's always been at risk and always will be. Maybe you learned about previous mass extinctions and that a big eruption is all you need to wipe us out. Earth will still be here though. I throughly agree with you regarding the lack of meaning, but I disagree there's meaning in the colony. There's no meaning, there's just nature.

What about our nature? I don’t believe there isn’t meaning, only what we as humans apply. If an ant applies meaning, it still counts. Just might be less than we can perceive.

There are indeed only two categories: either we say there's no meaning at all (and at the scale of the universe it definitely looks so) then there's no difference between a human and an ant, we're all nothings. Or, we say there is a meaning in humans, then we must give meaning also to smaller critters like you suggested, just don't look at the scale of the universe :) Or of course, we accept meaning as a very local thing then everybody can redefine their own, even the ants which would surely say "what a meaningless thing is that hooman colony New York".

I believe that meaning is derived by the living organism. I imagine ants to have a form of OCD where they feel the fear if they don’t do what they are compelled to do.

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)

ant-hropomorphism?

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.

One has to wonder if such a social organism is possible in nature with a lifespan of only a few weeks.

Yes we should be careful not to anthropomorphise ants. They really don't like it, and it causes them a lot of anxiety.

Antxiety?

Go to the ant, O sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise. - written some 2400 years ago

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