I’m saying that trying to optimize for being “high up a social hierarchy” is, structurally, the kind of thing one does when their social network is hierarchical, and having a hierarchical social network is something to ideally optimize against. far better to have a distance-based attention hierarchy-of-distance, which is optimized to spend more attention on those who don’t currently have an excess of attention. “social hierarchy” is another term for the same thing as “status”—my point is that healthy social networks only appear to have “hierarchy” of who’s closest, not a tapering as you go one direction. optimize the aesthetics you accept into your life to be ones that build community networks, not ones that build top down control structures. down with all -archy.
This in conflict with my personal strong prior that all institutions function better the fewer the number of people required to make decisions for the group.
In my 8-person group-house, one person was picked to be responsible for maintaining and improving the house. We chipped in to pay this person a small monthly salary, and could majority-vote them out of the position at any time. The person was welcome to make any decision they wanted about furniture, events, house meetings, the gardens, and so on. This led to an equilibrium of them putting in the work to get house buy-in for their decisions, and led to much faster and more functional decisions than anything more consensus-shaped.
In my team, one person on any project is the decision-maker. This person can lose enough social capital to be removed from their role or fired, but unless that severe action is taken, they are within their rights to make whatever decisions they chose, to listen to others as much or as little as they choose, etc. This allows them to see a project through full in their vision, and be responsible for as much of it as possible, and in my experience leaves them with much less friction in carrying out great work, rather than each decision being carefully weighted in a conflict with those who disagree.
I suspect basically all healthy groups will function well if there’s someone with the power to improve it, and accountability in place so that they will lose power and respect if they do a bad job. This is true of even very fun/social groups (e.g. sports groups, interest clubs, shared housing, towns, web forums, etc).
This leads to many many social hierarchies, so I disagree that social hierarchies are not worth the costs.
hierarchical control is fundamentally unstable for what amount to incentive corruption safety reasons. while it is important for there to be people who know it is their job to take an action, it is also critical that nobody be given authority over another being, under any circumstances. the only kind of hierarchy that could be imagined to be acceptable is a temporary skill hierarchy. if we are to create a world worth living in, we’re going to need to move past this obsession with hierarchy. and to keep it on topic—since women are more often on the losing side of zero- or negative-sum play of authority-power games, I’d expect that as a man, you’ll be more successful if you make an effort to remove authority-status from yourself and instead make yourself independently capable and able to produce positive-sum cooperation in groups. ie, don’t attempt to take power over others via “status”, simply take actions to make things better.
It seems to me that you assert that a world with hierarchy would be better without providing an argument for why you believe that. Given Ben made an argument just saying you disagree without arguing why is not what I want to see on LessWrong.
I’m saying that trying to optimize for being “high up a social hierarchy” is, structurally, the kind of thing one does when their social network is hierarchical, and having a hierarchical social network is something to ideally optimize against. far better to have a distance-based attention hierarchy-of-distance, which is optimized to spend more attention on those who don’t currently have an excess of attention. “social hierarchy” is another term for the same thing as “status”—my point is that healthy social networks only appear to have “hierarchy” of who’s closest, not a tapering as you go one direction. optimize the aesthetics you accept into your life to be ones that build community networks, not ones that build top down control structures. down with all -archy.
This in conflict with my personal strong prior that all institutions function better the fewer the number of people required to make decisions for the group.
In my 8-person group-house, one person was picked to be responsible for maintaining and improving the house. We chipped in to pay this person a small monthly salary, and could majority-vote them out of the position at any time. The person was welcome to make any decision they wanted about furniture, events, house meetings, the gardens, and so on. This led to an equilibrium of them putting in the work to get house buy-in for their decisions, and led to much faster and more functional decisions than anything more consensus-shaped.
In my team, one person on any project is the decision-maker. This person can lose enough social capital to be removed from their role or fired, but unless that severe action is taken, they are within their rights to make whatever decisions they chose, to listen to others as much or as little as they choose, etc. This allows them to see a project through full in their vision, and be responsible for as much of it as possible, and in my experience leaves them with much less friction in carrying out great work, rather than each decision being carefully weighted in a conflict with those who disagree.
I suspect basically all healthy groups will function well if there’s someone with the power to improve it, and accountability in place so that they will lose power and respect if they do a bad job. This is true of even very fun/social groups (e.g. sports groups, interest clubs, shared housing, towns, web forums, etc).
This leads to many many social hierarchies, so I disagree that social hierarchies are not worth the costs.
hierarchical control is fundamentally unstable for what amount to incentive corruption safety reasons. while it is important for there to be people who know it is their job to take an action, it is also critical that nobody be given authority over another being, under any circumstances. the only kind of hierarchy that could be imagined to be acceptable is a temporary skill hierarchy. if we are to create a world worth living in, we’re going to need to move past this obsession with hierarchy. and to keep it on topic—since women are more often on the losing side of zero- or negative-sum play of authority-power games, I’d expect that as a man, you’ll be more successful if you make an effort to remove authority-status from yourself and instead make yourself independently capable and able to produce positive-sum cooperation in groups. ie, don’t attempt to take power over others via “status”, simply take actions to make things better.
I have tried both approaches at different points in my life, and I have found in my experience, your expectation here does not hold
It seems to me that you assert that a world with hierarchy would be better without providing an argument for why you believe that. Given Ben made an argument just saying you disagree without arguing why is not what I want to see on LessWrong.