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Comment by jgilias | Hacker News Reader

I’ve come to the same conclusion. But not just about companies, but everything. Talk to someone in the military, or government agencies, or working on large infrastructure projects. It’s the same story everywhere - chaos. And it’s generally not because of malice, being dumb, or lack of trying.

I think as a civilization we’re much more like ants than a troop of smart chimps. In that our civilization is a kind of a proverbial emergent anthill. And most likely the relative individual understanding of our respective anthills doesn’t differ too much between ants and us.

And it’s kind of freeing. You just move your proverbial bit of earth that you’re just compelled to put somewhere else, and don’t stress the rest. Emergence will take care of it.

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My conclusion is that this "chaotic scenario" happens when humans work in big groups. It's extremely hard/pretty much impossible to coordinate big group of humans and made them to work efficiently. In fact, this is one of the reasons by which nowadays, I personally prefer to work on a small start up environment instead of a big corporation.

It is possible, they just need to spend more than half of the work day in coordination meetings and doing paperwork.

And not many organization are willing to pay thousands of people to do paperwork to help other departments do their paperwork more effectively and so on.

Or somehow they found a group of extremely trustworthy and reliable employees who will never fudge the truth even at the cost of their jobs/reputation/etc...

Where have you seen this where the group is > 500 people?

If you mean the latter, I haven't.

I think this is the cause of my depression. It's horrendously sad to think about what we could be accomplishing if we were just a little efficient.

Sorry to hear this! I hope you can manage to get out of it, depression can be a real bitch! Do seek help, it’s nothing to be ashamed of.

Efficient how? Ants are extremely efficient and successful, second only to humans in biomass. Turns out making good global decisions is hard to impossible, so you see decentralized decision making pop up everywhere.

Efficiency, trust and cooperation, what an amazing place it could be.

Finding a hobby that provides a little of that helped me. What I also noticed, having spent far too much time in front of a screen and programming, that I began to think of the world as a giant program that is really really buggy. Trying to fix those bugs got me down ... just gotta live with those bugs.

> began to think of the world as a giant program that is really really buggy

I think this is an excellent way to phrase the experience of "programmer brain" and I will be blatantly ripping it off in the future. It's definitely an occupational hazard, and something we should be wary of, but it's only a small symptom of the larger technologized worldview that permeates Western thought (and via export, a lot of global thought). There are definite upsides to technology and programming, but: "we shape our tools, our tools shape us". I think we technologists think a lot about the former, and rarely about the latter (that's for those squishy humanities types!) -- at our own peril.

Thank you for ripping it off - I call it sharing :)

> at our own peril.

I always like to quote the frog in water. As the water is heated to boiling point, apparently the frog doesn't spring out. That is, in fact, an urban legend - the frog does spring out. However we are the frogs that don't spring out.

Trust and self sacrifice for the greater good.

It is exceeding difficult to sacrifice yourself for someone you barely know even if you know it is for the betterment of everyone. Ants have 0 problem with this.

Perfect isn't efficient. The loss from wastage and chaos is less than the resources it would take to eliminate it.

Well, everything exists along a gradient.

The example often given is Japan vs the West.

Especially people in the West laud how great Japan its collectivist society is, how streets are clean, relatively little gets stolen, personal responsibility is still a thing, etc; But they completely skip over the other side of the coin: collectivist societies crush much of the independence out of a person.

So, in this one sense, you can trade independence for social “efficiency”. I imagine it is much the same for humanity. We could become more harmonized, at the cost of becoming more drone-like.

An interesting book that deals with this exact dilemma (among other things) is “A Deepness In the Sky” by Vernor Vinge. Worth a read!

You should consider that you might be the one wrong here. What you think is efficient is just an individual perspective.

I’ve come to accept this after years of fighting “the system”.

The system doesn’t care about you or what you want. It is a ruthlessly collective thing and it makes short term mistakes you will pay for but long term builds foundations you benefit from.

Also over and over efficiency in many cases proves to be maladaptive as it kills flexibility.

We blame large, intractable systems for our problems when it's too dangerous to look at the small, local causes.

"emergent anthill"

Wonder if this concept could also be Moloch.

Moloch is sometimes used to represent how humans just consume.

And, what do ants do, expand and consume.

More and More I think the ant-human analogy is best.

We are organizing, we form structures, but it isn't a plan, it's just twitching on our feedbacks. We have some loose internal functions to respond to inputs. That when stacked up by millions form some pattern.

Ant's don't have an 'anthill plan' and humans don't have a 'city/town plan'.

Like ants, we just kind of group together and follow the chemical paths laid down by others (coffee, beer).

Coffee, beer and sex hormones.

> But not just about companies, but everything

For me, it's a good argument against conspiracy theories. There's no way there could be secretive organisations running for years and controlling the world without screwing up in stupid and obvious ways.

Yeah. I think anyone who has had experience with school/kindergarten parents chats trying to organize _anything_ would find the idea of shadowy organizations running the world laughable.

To the contrary does it not imply any well organized group should have an easier time of accomplishing their aims while the rest are mired in the chaos?

The claim is that there are literally no observable organizations running without chaos, so are we to believe the only one to achieve it is nefarious instead of just regular profiteering?

I like the meta conspiracy theory that the only organizations running without chaos are covert ones though.

It’s more that within that chaos there are short bursts of organization that can pull off narrow conspiracies.

There are also natural long term aligned players who conspire in ways that they can use their energy for their benefit. “Market makers”

There are also random alignments that appear to be conspiracies ex post facto.

> To the contrary does it not imply any well organized group should have an easier time of accomplishing their aims while the rest are mired in the chaos?

This take makes sense to me. It's not the org as a whole that is accomplishing secret aims, but a sub-org within a chaotic org, or spread across multiple chaotic orgs, that is able to do so since no one is paying close attention to anything.

Right, the conspiracy is to destroy things, not build them.

It’s kind of a side effect of capitalism. You get the culture of doing more with less and drive it until the point you are doing less than adequate with less money than you’d need to do it properly.

The end result is software that puts postal workers in jail and doors that fall off planes.

Like democracy, it sucks, but it's all we have. Depending how you define capitalism (currency, trade, investing in capital?) and software (something executed on a digital or analog computing machine) there was no software 10,000+ years ago before capitalism

In the end it's about process and dumbing it down enough that it can be followed by the cheapest resource available (while also pressing down the cost of such resources through managed poverty). This race to the bottom is never good.

As for democracy, it's great, much better than any alternative. It's inconvenient (to the powers of the day), however, that it tries (at least the functional ones) to prevent the widening of the chasm between the haves and the have nots. One thing any functional democracy must aggressively prevent is the acquisition of power from any means other than popular vote.

It's inconvenient (to the powers of the day), however, that it tries (at least the functional ones) to prevent the widening of the chasm between the haves and the have nots.

If there was a central lesson of the twentieth century, it's that the chasm between the haves and have-nots cannot be closed without doing more damage than simply allowing it to exist. People are not created equal, no matter how tightly you shut your eyes and how loudly you chant.

Meanwhile, the central lesson of the twenty-first century is beginning to come into focus: giving smart people and stupid people the same voting rights is maladaptive to civilized society. You can forget any notion of progress while this state of affairs prevails; just ask your local Trumpers. Does this refute democracy? Very well, then, it refutes democracy.

I'm not super optimistic on either front, I guess. Optimism simply requires too much denial. Preservation of equal opportunity is likely to be the best goal we can aim for.

> If there was a central lesson of the twentieth century, it's that the chasm between the haves and have-nots cannot be closed without doing more damage than simply allowing it to exist.

I don’t think there is evidence supporting this conclusion.

> People are not created equal, no matter how tightly you shut your eyes and how loudly you chant.

And yet they have equal rights, including the same right to influence political decisions, which is clearly not being respected.

> the same voting rights is maladaptive to civilized society.

Democracy requires an informed electorate. That’s why public schools exist and why they should be well (and equally well) funded, without some schools being privileged by donations that’ll only exacerbate unequal rights to education.

Exactly, which is why the right is defunding and attacking public education with every fiber of their being.

There's a showstopping exploit in American representative democracy, and they finally found it. "I love the poorly-educated (... and I will work hard to increase their numbers.)"

Sounds Daoist to me.

Emergence is an agent that isn't me. Why am I even conscious if all my agency is subsumed by the egregore. This isn't freeing in the slightest, maybe only for the most conditioned megacity dwellers.

This couldn’t be farther from the truth though. As in, I don’t think any place I’ve even been to would count as a megacity. Let alone where I live.

The way I see it is that emergence is not an agent. More like some basic law of nature. Think about planned gardens and suburbs versus natural forests and medieval city centers.

You can mow your lawn every week, expend obscene amounts of water during the summer, pour everything with herbicides in a misguided effort to have the perfect lawn, but the moment you stop doing it, nature takes over and introduces a fractal amount of complexity in just a few seasons.

In my opinion an old forest where nature has been let alone for some time is much more beautiful and interesting than any planned garden, and a medieval city centre much more beautiful and interesting than any planned neighborhood.

And then, emergence explaining our civilization doesn’t necessarily imply that you don’t have agency as an individual. It just says that the total of whatever we collectively do, irrespective of if we’re compelled to do it, or have free will, results in more than just the sum of individual parts.

Tell it to the choanoflagellates.

The emergent agent isn't a harmonious oak old growth. It's a ravenous, homogenizing beast, primally unable to die; accelerating forever in the red queen race; killing everything that isn't itself, fundamentally unaware and uncaring of the individuals it's made of.

But you don’t know that. As in, it’s impossible for you (or me) to know that.

I do care about my cells. Like, not individually, but I do care that they are in as good an environment for them as I can muster. I don’t think they have any concept of me. Or if they do, I don’t think they can reason about how murderous am I.

Within a group of n people, everything else being equal, why would you expect to be able to steer its behavior by more than 1/nth?

But that's the problem with emergence, you don't even get the 1/n. You get zero, or very near it.

I think you misunderstand what emergence is. It’s really not an argument about if you have agency or not in your individual actions.

Well, you had the agency to read HN today, to comment here, and to choose the contents of your comment. So I’m not sure what you’re getting at, beyond the well-trodden free-will debate.

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