'Shallow' sports and 'deep' social hierarchies | Hacker News Reader

'Shallow' sports and 'deep' social hierarchies

phys.org

57 pointsPaulHoule59 comments

> The social hierarchy of hyenas is even more rigid and predictable, with a depth of more than 100 layers

I would like to read more about this. The largest known hyena pack [0] is about 130, with most being smaller. So we can say this claim is almost equivalent to saying there's a total ordering of the hyena pack, where between any two animals the seniority is clear. Reading the article supports this interpretation.

Sorting 100 things is a difficult feat of computation! How does every hyena in the pack remember its relative place in the hierarchy? How do updates to the hierarchy (presumably it's not strict unchanging seniority order) happen, and how do they get propagated through the pack? If hyena A sees a lower-ranked hyena B exert dominance over a higher one C, how does it now update its place in the pecking order vs B or C?

Perhaps this is out of scope for the statistics paper, but it's one for the people who like to develop theories of computation inspired by the animal world.

[0] https://ideas.ted.com/everything-you-know-about-hyenas-is-wr...

You seem to believe this total ordering is accessible to hyenas, is there a reason you suspect this?

In my mind just because these scientist found an algorithm to model this total ordering of the pack, does not imply that there must be an algorithm actually in use in the pack. In fact, I would suspect that if the hyenas had total knowledge of the hierarchy, there would be less competition between distantly ranked hyenas, and that the model would actually calculate a shallower competition.

But I don't know anything about hyenas, and I may be misunderstanding the paper.

If I'm reading it right, there are very few "upsets", where a hyena the scientists model as lower-ranked exerts dominance over a higher one.

That suggests that even if every hyena doesn't know the total ordering of the pack, he knows whether each other hyena ranks higher or lower than him. Maintaining that knowledge doesn't absolutely require knowing the total ordering, but it's an interesting computer science problem to maintain it without.

When looking at the pre-1914 world, it's amazing how much they tried to introduce (propagate?) artificial total orders: if you have a bishop and a baron over for dinner, who gets served first, that sort of thing.

You still see some of that in etiquette books from the mid 20th century.

I think it's funny how hierarchies proliferate in people's imaginations, for instance in Chinese mythology they believe fox spirits form a hierarchy under

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huxian

I guess the one-tail foxes follow the two-tail foxes and so forth. Maybe it is just my fox affinity but I like my vision of that.

Those things still apply.

The difference is that we hear the voices of people who don't run in the same circles as bishops and barons...or to put it another way, bishops and barons still exist with all that their existence implies.

The bishops* and barons of my acquaintance don't stand on outdated protocol during social events — or at least they don't during the sorts of events to which I'm invited.

* then again, our local bishop has fallen on hard times: the bishopric used to wield both spiritual and temporal power, but these days is pretty much restricted to the former.

Are you referring to the United Kingdom? Because there is no formal difference between 'spiritual' and 'temporal' power in the upper house, only a difference in how the peer gets into it. All bishops in the House of Lords (which is only a fraction of bishops in the Church) can vote on the same motions that the lords can, and some of them (but not that many) choose to do so.

Such customs are still around and are proudly followed in places like military especially the Navy.

Common wealth navies still have ceremonial dinners which cater to the attendance of the Queen (or King now). There is a whole lot of intricacies that goes on there.

In official diplomacy that is very much alive, eg for the US: https://www.state.gov/bureaus-offices/secretary-of-state/off...

Not just hierarchy but to create a common ground for everyone involved. Very helpful. If you’ve ever felt awkward at an event because you didn’t know the customs — this is to avoid that.

EDIT: here is another example, UN protocol in Geneva https://www.eda.admin.ch/dam/mission-onu-omc-aele-geneve/en/...

Of course, while the USA has been so organised as to develop and document its customs in great detail, this in itself has created a whole new set of customs for foreign diplomats to learn!

I also noted with amusement this extract from the USA's Office of the Chief of Protocol website:

> Formal invitations... ...preferred lettering style is script and all wording is spelled out without the use of acronyms.

Répondez s'il vous plaît?

That is not USA specific thing. This is general diplomacy thing. As in, USA is not special and other countries behave in exactly the same way.

Diplomats are used to this.

The other way to avoid it is to just respect everyone at your table, like Guru Nanak and those like him who have trod the road to universal compassion, and just keep things as simple as possible.

Hierarchies are great for govt, militaries, and companies, but only when kept to a minimum. The US was successful in WWII because the commanders set the goals and then let their sub-leaders get on with their jobs, allowing for creative, adaptive improvisation. Korean Airlines' cultural hierarchies almost got them delisted from Canada's airspace.

Spiritual folks within their orgs each have different levels of development, but if someone believes they are "better" than another person, that's the ego.

An enlightened individual is kind and respectful to everyone. At the same time, they always bear the truth without regard to people's ego-bruises and supposed slights. Those are what they are and are solely that person's responsibility to level-up from.

There's a larger % of the population that you might expect that have no capability for empathy, let alone anything higher

The structure is great for those people because then they can get their needs met without having to deal with ideas they do not understand like trust and mutual reciprocation or long-term relationships the structure is easy to exploit with no morals so we end up disproportionately rewarding these people

That's why you can't just expect everyone to be respectful and for it to work

I didn't say I expect anything from anyone, but we all have the choice, with the very rare exception for those that are developmentally disabled and incapable of rationally choosing.

For the vast majority of those of us who have the power to think and consult one's conscience, we can and do choose the course of our action. Over time, we can also choose to escape our ignorance and learn the ideals that facilitate humanity in our mostly mammalian body, and then choose to learn how to be better and then actualize being better.

Very few of us have anything but a lame-ass excuse, usually falling back on one's cultural upbringing to make excuses for our deliberate, if unthinking, choices.

The best "structure", as you put it, is to make empathy a major part of childhood education, teaching that we are all human beings, each differently endowed but worthy of respect to some degree. As well, we have to teach that we have to resist the inner urgings towards selfishness and ignorance in favor of willful action that will the benefit of the whole.

But, no, I do not agree that most people cannot learn such a moral framework, and the proof is the simple fact that we are all living in groups, none of us being completely self-sufficient for all our human survival needs, not to mention those things that bring us entertainment and relaxation.

> There's a larger % of the population that you might expect that have no capability for empathy, let alone anything higher

And another big % that purposefully surpress empathetic instincts because of other beliefs.

Willful ignorance and oppression of others have many causes, none of them anything less than an evil perversion of the life of compassion we should each be choosing to manifest.

Such evil is always worse under the guise of religion, because religion is ONLY supposed to lead us to greater compassion for all our neighbors, especially those who are on different paths. We are to light the way forward for others by our own selfless, loving, generous, and kind compassion for others.

A particularly tricky bit is that the Paradox of Tolerance requires us to "love" the oppressed differently than their oppressors, which may require what Holmes called "vigorous action" in the defense of the innocent. And it doesn't matter what the oppressor calls themself, because the beliefs and claims of the destructively self-deluded hypocrites carries no weight in the universe's court of truth, which is all there is.

Respect doesn't tell us who sits next to whom at the table, the order in which people should be introduced, etc. any more than astrology does.

Protocol is what is needed in an imperfect real world in which people do feel awkward and insecure during social events.

I understand what you mean, but the point of respect would be for this all games and pretense not to matter. I know, in the real world we can't just count on that sadly.

Yes, indeed. We can only endeavor to level ourselves up (as both positive contribution and social example), and then educate those around us who are willing to open to learning.

You'd give the racist and the brain surgeon the same level of respect? Or would there be a hierarchy of respect?

What about racist brain surgeons?

That’s great until you cross cultural boundaries. Different cultures interpret these things completely differently so, for officials who have to interact with many cultures. What I consider respectful is different to what you would. Protocols are used so people don’t accidentally offend each other by, say, refusing food when offered (or offering a gift when it’s not appropriate).

You might think “just have respect” but what seems innocuous to you might be the equivalent of spitting in someone’s face in a different culture.

FYI, the German military tended to promote “individual initiative” of the soliders more than the allied militaries did.

I don't doubt it, but I don't count it for sh_t because, using some words from the great Suzi/Eddie Izzard, they were in the service of "a mass-murdering f_ckhead."

Every culture has a moral compass, because each is a sum-total amalgam of its free-will-endowed human members, and some cultures just need to be stripped of their power to callously and cruelly oppress innocents.

The Abrahamic books do not mince words about oppressors. Life is meant to be joyous, free from stress, with enough for all of us, in a pristine environment purpose-built for our physiology. But we must choose that Path of Peace and Love, each of us. And, as always, the Paradox of Tolerance must be contemplated and honored. Love's dictate is that no one is compelled to help anyone, but no one should be permitted to harm innocents.

"Know your enemy." --RATM

Are you not mistaking the Nazi-era Wehrmacht for the post-WW2 Bundeswehr? The Bundeswehr promotes individual initiative and the right to refuse military service is guaranteed by the constitution (Grundgesetz Artikel 12a). I'm not aware of any such formal policy that existed during WW2.

> The other way to avoid it is to just respect everyone at your table, like Guru Nanak and those like him who have trod the road to universal compassion, and just keep things as simple as possible

Some people are not worthy of this

If you have me at a table with someone who volunteers at an orphanage and another who has ordered genocide, one of those people is getting more of my respect and kindness

There is nothing enlightened about treating both of these people as equivalent

Yes, there may be a baseline level of respect for someone being human, fundamental rights and freedoms

Most of the time when people talk about respect, they are talking about extra respect above the absolute baseline

I agree that what most people call respect falls far short of what is required by universal compassion. What Wisdom calls respect has to be doled out by the person such that it does not violate the Paradox of Tolerance.

This ability is called discernment, and is a given gift that must then be developed further within and by the journeyer on the Path of Love.

For those not deliberately evil-minded and -hearted -- for the merely confused and noncommittal -- respect for their being a human being with a mother, wants, and needs, successes and failures, is a necessary act of loving kindness for the student of love. It is indeed a primary purpose of the Path of Love for we are information processors who rely upon verbal teachings to absorb and communicate ideas.

Once we begin becoming embued with such a love, we are spurred on to help others choose the better path for both their and others' happinesss, due to our growing gratitude for the universe's blessings of Wisdom and the happiness accompanying it. Discernment then helps keep us from wasting too much time on the bitter, selfish fools of this troubled world.

Another perspective is that the evil-minded and -hearted people will not want to sit at the Guru's table, even if they were invited. They become allergic to such lovingkindness, for their inner master is loathe to let them be reminded of what they could be should they exercise their free will and instead choose the Way.

From the UN PDF:

>These well-established and time-honoured rules allow nations and peoples from a wide range of cultures and values to conduct their activities with dignity in an environment devoid of frictions. Such animosity can easily arise when one of the parties concerned does not feel treated with respect.

>...

>Current protocol practices are rooted in history but evolve continuously. There is always a legitimate reason behind a protocol rule or practice.

Makes a lot of sense to me. Training your diplomats in protocol is very cheap compared with going to war.

I feel like these protocol'd orderings are useful because they eliminate one source of politic-ing. There's nothing to read into the seating order or serving order when it's all by the book. There's no worrying about "what will the bishop think if you serve the baron first?". Your rivals and your guests aren't trying to read into your actions (at least in this sphere).

It's true that any arbitrary ordering would suffice (for example, Olympic parades are in alphabetical order), and that the orders chosen are basically the agreed upon overall social/political order, it still serve similar utility.

Seems like a good way to keep the peace in a world where rule-of-law is weak.

Writing the book is still a political action, reading and following the book are still political actions.

This is just a nonsense excuse for cowards to hide behind.

Except when there are two books. The old guard, and the progressive. “Will the host turn the traditions around and serves the guests by alphabetical order, or will they keep serving the oldest people first?”

Still there a bit . There was just a story how Camilla politely offered Anne enter some place before her, but Anne had to refuse due to hierarchy - queen goes before a princess.

https://people.com/queen-camilla-attempts-to-break-royal-pro...

In which humans continue to try to understand complex systems by projecting them onto a single axis.

You have a point, but you know where it originates: we all want to know if A is better than B. This article adds a bit to existing models by not only estimating the values of the As and Bs, but also of the structure of the competition.

But you're right: it remains superficial.

Bingo! That's where the ego lives and breathes and exerts its influence.

And our ego is a direct descendent or our underlying mammalian brains who work hard to grok hierarchies and develop strategies to ascend within, with or without regard to the competition.

To be truly human is to transcend that inheritance by consciously levelling up to the realization we are all just human beings (at various levels of development and skill) and that compassion is the most important cohesive force in every human group, including our entire human race!

Wouldn’t roughly half the population always be below average in ‘compassion’,’realization’, etc…?

The averages vary from culture to culture and are different as the gradients change over time, sometimes up and sometimes down.

The important point is that every person has a conscience (however much they choose to ignore its suggestions) and our cultures [we are a sum of many cultures, from the large (country, religion, ethnicity, ...) to the small (neighborhood, school, family, ...)] each exert a force towards vice or towards virtue, for any of the 19 pairs.

We are the only creatures who can self-evolve, but we all have the free will to self-evolve in any direction we choose. This explains how WWII Germany, Japan, and others created their oppressive terror movements.

Compassion is the highest ideal, but its opposite, selfishness, is endemic to our lower, mammalian (and still lower reptilian) processing centers of the brain, and the current direction our planet is moving is due to our worldwide complacence with moral ignorance.

But as things improve, the bar gets pushed up? So in relative terms it hasn’t improved.

Sure, but as Thomas Kuhn states (I only read the first chapter or so), there are critical levels whereby breakthroughs occur. It's also in Gleick's Chaos, IIRC.

What matters is that compassion becomes even slightly more operant in the ideals, attitudes, and behaviors of a population. That will decrease strife and increase happiness via the selfless service to others' happiness that true compassion entails.

We are social beings, and the effects on even the most unthinking, inertia-based folks would yield positive results, even if it's simply due to their just wanting to fit in. Still better, though, is when they have a real breakthrough and realize how a compassionate, service-oriented life actually makes them happier.

The source of happiness operates at the most sublime level of the universe -- the human-only level -- where the karmic effects due to our treatment of others are dominant. Yes, we need Maslow's needs to be met and all that, but once we reach a relatively pain-free state, karma rules (though pain can have its own karmic source, which can be either beneficial or punitive).

Desires also accumulate… and they can also have ‘critical levels’?

Certainly. That's where honest introspection and humility must be utilized to develop a more positively moral moral compass, and then use it to choose our desires very carefully. Self-evolution can go in any direction we choose with our free will, and both paths -- the light of compassion and the darkness of selfishness -- contain momentous decisions that will change our journey's octave in the direction in which we travel. The third possibility is to instead defer such learning and choose to not commit to either positive or negative. Such people remain 'confused by confusion', being sometimes virtuous, sometimes vice-eous, as per how the wind blows upon their life.

Those momentous decisions will change their perspective from there out, but "there's still time to change the road you're on"; it just becomes less likely as we traverse either tail of the bell curve of human spiritual potential. As such, the wicked tend to become more so, more confident in their path through the resulting delusions borne of their having chosen selfishness over selflessness, lies over truth, hatred over love, etc. Like the infospace of our computer networks, there are also malicious actors acting upon our psyche to deflect us from our happiness, right within our headspace and heartspace.

Converse to the dark path, the person who enters the door that leads to the Path of Love experiences such a joy in the transformations that commence that it is unlikely for that person to reenter the ignorance of their previous life from before crossing that threshold. It is not that our intrinsic negative gravity via human weakness suddenly ceases resisting our efforts to improve; it a slog, for sure, filled with moments that build humility, which is as necessary a tool on the spiritual path as it is on the journey to becoming one of Dunning-Kruger's true experts.

Along the way, as well, we regularly gain karma from the relentless slings and arrows of the committed narcisists, whose "master" demands not just their continued ignorance of the benefits and possibility of Love, but to actively deny or even fight it, lest they be swayed by our loving kindness, wisdom, inner peace, and happiness. That is why the "woke" are such a threat to the evil-minded buffoons of the world.

Can you write down the actual arguments?

Stating a few dozen sentences of opinions several times in a row isn’t offering much in the way of discussion…

I thought you wanted facts. My bad.

Self proclaimed facts, are taken as opinions by other readers… unless actual arguments are supplied, or some proof from a credible source is supplied, etc…

Hence why it would be desirable for you to write down the relevant arguments.

In order to explain their position it would require a piece of paper larger than our universe. Larger than several copies of our universe.

That's not an indictment of anything, it's just the nature of being.

Probably the most useful here is Kabbalah. Once you intuit parts of that, hierarchies become irrelevant. Human power structures turn from ladders to bridges.

It's deeply isolating.

Could you elaborate on how human power structures are seen more as bridges?

So ask me questions, and then read my answers. I'm not going to have an argument with myself, that's absurd. I've answered your questions to the best of my ability. If you think there's something missing, ask for clarification.

Eugene Parker is one of my heroes. You should read about him. His "opinion" was utterly disregarded by his peers, and now the solar probe named after him actively monitors the sun.

Read through my comment history, and you will get much more background.

Or just ask me questions, but don't call what I'm saying opinions. That's disrespectful to your own curiosity, and tells me much about you that you don't wish to understand. At worst, you can call them theories, but they're not even that.

I know what I know, and I know that you don't know (yet) how to know the things I know, though you could, if you opened up your mind and heart. Your karma on HN is nothing compared to the karma a person can accrue in real life. That's no opinion.

Watch Gukesh in the WCC; what is he doing when he closes his eyes in peaceful tranquility? We Sufis know, but most people are simply uninterested in what he is doing, and you are most people. The universe is giving you a chance to level up, but you have the confidence of a fool. I suggest you put that aside and engage in a humble, honest conversation. Yes, these are challenging concepts you've not heard before, but I'm here to help folks to learn the truth, but you have to be an intellectually honest participant.

You may believe they ought not to be perceived as opinions.. but your oughts do not automatically equal what is the case, or what the oughts of other HN readers may be…?

Clearly anyone can type out any series of words whatsoever, but that doesn’t even guarantee it is distinguishable from random noise.

I’m not implying that it is anywhere close to random noise, but I am implying it can not automatically be this or that. There simply is no such mechanism.

For a very long time, people have told me that what I'm doing is impossible. What I've realized is that they say that because they have limited themselves as to what they're capable of, and then they slather on a bunch of hubris and claim that because they don't know, no one else can know. Puh-lease.

I know that I know. And I know that you don't know, but think that you know. And I know that you could know, because I know that what I know is available to anyone who is not physically developmentally disabled. And I know that it is your own choice to live in ignorance of what you could know, if you humbly sought the truth from the universe's Creator, which I know you have no contact with, which is both why you don't know that you can know, and why you think your thinking is equal to my knowing, which you don't even understand you could also know.

Ya know? No. You think, which is only the beginning of knowledge. You don't think someone is touching your arm; when someone does touch your arm, you know that they're touching your arm. That sense of knowing is able to be extended far out from our physical body, into the mysteries of the universe. Developing such knowing is possible, but only if we seek it and then make the requisite counscious effort.

"Love is the astrolabe of God's mysteries." --Rumi

You, like most of the human race, are so confident of your ignorance that you miss learning the coolest sh_t a human being can know. You also miss, by denying its power and necessity, the supreme joy of being a loving, selfless human being.

I'm at your service. I love you. You would do better if you used your intelligence to get your head out of your keister. But that takes humility, just like all Dunning-Kruger's true-experts. Remember that the D-K slackers thought they were experts, but were not; and the true experts did not value themselves as much as they deserved.

I know which side we're on here, my brother, and I know you think it's the other way around. And I absolutely KNOW that.

You can learn a great deal from my many comment history here on HN. Good luck, and enjoy!

How does this relate to the question in my prior comment?

Is there some explanation why your oughts or opinions matter more than any other HN user’s oughts or opinions?

The problem isn't the projecting. The problem is treating a projection as if it was the thing itself, or its One True Representation, instead of merely a facet that should be considered together with many other projections along different axes.

Skimming the paper (which honestly I am still trying to understand), the paper authors suggest that the "depth of competition" parameter can be understood as "a measure of the imbalance in strength or skill between the average pair of players".

In other words, it's statement about the skill/strength/power distribution of your population of players.

As I understood it, the general model they are working with (Bradley-Terry) is about how to take a set of win/loss measurements amongst a fixed set of participants, and then try to predict the win/loss probability of unobserved competitions (and I guess also allow you to generate rankings).

Intuitively, I think you can imagine how you could take that type of observation and build out a ranking of participants basically through a series of pairwise comparisons on win/loss rates. But then when it comes time to predict the win/loss ratio of an unobserved competition, you're forced to make assumptions about how to model/extrapolate win/loss ratios. This depth of competition parameter would be part of that extrapolation.

EDIT: Just a thought, I think it's fun to consider the language around "depth of competition". The paper uses "deep" to mean there is a strong gradient in strength. But when we often talk about "depth" in sports, we typically say that "deep" teams or "deep" leagues have a swallow gradient. Think about teams having "deep benches".

Could this be also used to model wealth inequality?

Or more directly predict the win/loss probability of university admissions rates by ethnicity and class?

Example: US university admission competitions in which poor Americans are pitted against wealthy Americans and international students from Asia.

Interesting that this may be visible in the gaming world. Many complex games can pose complex circumstances that require preparation, training, equipment, and cooperation in order to perform certain tasks. Oddly enough, these are not the most popular challenges, and many prefer to spend time with Candy Crush or play in the complex environments while only taking on a small fraction of available challenges. It seems that for many players the appeal of gaming comes in part from being able to spend time in situations where competition is simple and hierarchies are relatively short and flat.

It's sort of like gaming as a whole is some form of entertainment, and people in general don't like real life-esque problems in their games.

It's the same reason I watch Bob's Burgers on repeat. Escapism and low friction entertainment.

compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_type...

I am going to see if this can be used to forecast wins for sports betting.

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