To be read in conjunction with the Babbler hypothesis - The amount of time some people spend talking gets them into leadership positions. It doesn't matter what they say, just how much they rant on. I read that, and realised how insanely true it is
How do you keep a group of chimps who all have different interests, personalities, needs, beliefs, values, upbringings, culture, religion, language, history etc etc in sync?
And these days groups grow quite large quite fast.
Historically, if you take rewards, bribery, force, domination and manipulation out of the story, the babblers/non threatening people can bridge differences as groups grow larger and larger in size.
No solution is perfect, cause its quite an unnatural thing for groups to form around anything. Given all the differences.
Just try to work with your entire extended family on a project, and watch what kind of strange rituals, stories and behaviors keep the group from breaking apart.
That is a big "if". It works on the family level, but in the real world babbling is coupled with dominance, coercion, blackmail, exploitation etc.
It is easy to see in any average company that no one believes the babbler but is forced to listen to them and applaud.
Modern management theory says you put the one that throws the most shit and chimps the loudest in charge; give them 90% of the banannas and tell all the others they should be more like that one if they want nice things.
Humans aren't chimps. Our closest animal relative is the Bonobo, and the corporate world would be a much more interesting place if we solved our conflicts the way they do: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bonobo-sex-and-so...
not everyone needs to be in a group.
not everyone in a group needs to be in sync with interests AND personalities AND needs AND beliefs AND...
but I see the paradox here: we need to believe the above is true to live happier and more meaningfully
Not everyone is in a civilisation. Few people in a civilisation would rather be in e.g. Sudan or Ethiopia.
Lower the sizes of groups and increase async communication, and the burden/overhead of management goes down. Groups small enough can manage themselves, in fact.
He is also quite fond of using poorly defined (in this context) words like "dialectical" and "illegibility" that makes the reader doubt whether he's actually full of shit or that he is actually so brilliant that the reader simply doesn't comprehend him.
I do not agree with his idea of promotion of overachievers into middle management and many other things. Some of his points are self-contradictory.
There are many variations on the main principle like Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy:
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
(None of this applies applies to startups that are founded by actual programmers.)
People who have a reason to form a group will cooperate/collaborate best when they have some confidence in one another. People share ideas, projects, and skills, and "read" one another and form bonds. This is a social system. It could be a brief association or have a long duration. It could have a formal context, such as a business or a governmental entity.
Social interactions build people's confidence and sense of value in the group, in the individuals, and the work at hand. The challenge grows exponentially as the population of the group scales. Communication is hard.
An individual's discernment and connectedness (a confidence/value score) within the group will reflect potential for success. Communication matters.
The human plot twist is that there can be dysfunctional social systems as well as dysfunctional individuals.
For a very serious discussion, the great writer Primo Levi published his reflections on his harrowing experiences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primo_Levi
This related article about social systems and connectedness was also recently discussed on HN with much interest: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-upstream-cause-of-the-youth...
Your initial point is the simplest explanation for how groups of people self-organise... and meta-organise.
I realise that I went far in explaining and gave far more than I will receive in this case.
But then again, you responded and that's a connection. ^_^
What do you think a leader’s job is?
You mean: to influence them?
The Dumb Ape Hypothesis: we are at our most dumb when declaring others so.
You want someone who is a naturally fluent speaker, strongly outspoken, who holds strong opinions, and wants to focus on processes and long-term roadmaps and so on. All the stuff a dilligent IC disdains.
One person's 'all talk' is another person's 'all walk'.
> never wanted to take on advice, always fought on really shady grounds, but he fought everything, almost like it was either his idea of what was on-point or nothing
Yes, you can be productive through communication, but if that's the kind of "talk" you want in your C-suite then I don't want to work in any company where you have influence.
It's almost like communicating effectively requires detailed knowledge of the real world, knowledge most often and most effectively gained by... doing things.
You might be inverting cause and effect.
This simple process is from an emergent behavior of rational actors acting in accordance to the incentives of the structure. Unlike other theories it does not necessitate irrational actors, morons, or sociopaths. Where you have people you have politics so it almost always occurs just at different speeds, hence the pervasiveness and the inevitability of the cycle of collapse and rebirth. It appears to me that only a highly competent king (someone whose position cannot be threatened by a peer) can stop this process and maybe reverse it.
Management has to collect information, disseminate information, coordinate, make decisions and propagate them.
All of that requires a lot of communication, aka talking.