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Comment by nialv7 | Hacker News Reader

This made me lose a bit of faith in humanity, because it seems like when a group of humans get together, no matter what kind of structure the group take, it's going to be bad in some way.

Hierarchical, flat, or structureless (as pointed out by this article); with a rigid procedure, without a rigid procedure. Doesn't matter how the group is organized, it's going to be bad in some way.

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That's not the case. There are plenty of very functional groups of people. They usually aren't flawless, but I don't see why "people aren't perfect" would make you lose faith in humanity.

because the chasm between people aren't perfect and the fourth reich is very tiny

That people almost always self-organize into structured organizations gives me hope for humanity. Social structures provide people with means to make life easier. They provide support and a guide on how to accomplish things without having to worry about all the details or the "big picture". And, of course, no organization is perfect. Hoping for perfection is not only folly, it is the enemy of good.

Check out Dunbar's Number [0] (you might already know this). It's a theoretical constraint on the size of successful human groupings where everyone knows of everyone else, and is approximately the size of company-sized (in the military sense) subunits. Of course, these have very explicit structure, even if they contain 'characters'

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

Definitely read the criticisms section of this article, because it shows how strange and unsound the whole notion is.

A group with superpowers is one that can spontaneously and optimally reconfigure structure. Including dissolving and spontaneously re-emerging. Group dynamic arrangements grow quickly, combinations for without rank, permutations for ordered ones, both factorial. Then there's distributing N tasks over M people. Lots of unique and special ways build a team, if it's able to change.

This was a key insight Alexander Hamilton had after growing up in the West Indies seeing the worst of slavery and then moving to the American colonies and receiving a classical education.

The American democracy he sought to co-create was one that could reign in humanity's worst impulses while enabling our better ones.

The issue is assuming that your dogma of organization building is correct and that it absolves you from actually resolving inevitable issues between people and between people and the organization.

If you don't take on this assumption I think it will go smoother than if you're relying on structure or lack of structure to save you from actually taking on each issue (where each issue will, each time, have their own sets of tricky, subtle and thorny trade-offs).....

The best you can do is at least make the badness legible so you can fix and optimize your structure in an intelligent way instead of getting randomized default primate settings.

It's almost like you can't really make generalizations about what good human groups look like.

Have you heard of people who need to have a very clear structure to their lives in order to live a good life? Does that make you lose faith in existence?

Well some commenters here are about a hair-width away from declaring losing faith in humanity. Anyway.

I think it more imperative that we are mindful of the natural evolution of groups and consciously put structures in place at the right time.

Knowing that initial structurelessness is good and eventually becomes bad can help us preempt failures

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