Can this be generalized as what happens when a feedback loop finds a local maxima? We see these all over, in software and society.
What makes this particular phenomena fascinating to me, is that it can be right under our nose, going on around us (because the circles can be big), and we don't realize it. Our regularly observed behavior and model of ants isn't this, and when we see one wandering, we don't realize there might be a bigger thing going on. And then we zoom out and there's this "aha" reveal moment, where we discover a model other than what we thought was going on.
It's like a stock-market bubble/crash, where prices can keep going up/down because [investors are acting following one-anothers' lead](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trend_following ).
In both cases, the social-animals are following their peers, inferring direction from them, ultimately forming a big loop that doesn't actually progress to a desired social-outcome because everyone's following everyone-else.
Is it a local maxima, or is it a metastable solution? Or are those the same thing, at their root?
(this is a legitimate question; I have a very limited math background, and would love to understand the distinctions better, or what variable is being locally maximized, if that's what this is)
In physical/chemical systems metastability and local _minima_ (of an energy function) are the same. But for cases where the thing being optimized is not energy, and where the universe isn't driven to the optimal state, do they need to be the same?
> An ant mill was first described in 1921 by William Beebe, who observed a mill 1200 ft (~370 m) in circumference. It took each ant 2.5 hours to make one revolution.
I’m pretty sure I could also get stuck in a loop in a forest if the circular trail is 370m in circumference, let alone the human-sized equivalent of it (which, assuming a human walks at 3 mph, would be 7.5 miles or 12 kilometers)
> An ant mill was first described in 1921 by William Beebe, who observed a mill 1200 ft (~370 m) in circumference. It took each ant 2.5 hours to make one revolution.
Assuming the ants are unaware when they are in an ant mill, wouldn't it be naive to assume that we would be able to recognize if/when we were in an equivalent phenomena as humans?
I would say no, unless there were similar phenomena documented in a statistical majority of known species and also maybe only if a statistical majority of ants experienced this. It sounds like its super rare.
Still, human mill, culture mill, economic mill etc. Brain exploding slack emoji. Favorite HN post of the week.
It would probably not happen
in a city with clear landmarks, because humans are good at recognizing places they have already been, but could easily happen in a forest or desert. Or in an underground network, as soon as everything looks the same.
Most of the time humans will think the problem through though instead of just following others.
But if you think it at another scale, humans can follow each other into traps like this, thinking of hate for example, when nobody really knows why they hate something or some group of other people, they just do because others do.
See also the monkey ladder experiment: https://www.wisdompills.com/monkey-ladder/ - The behaviour is, of course, not as stupid as it seems. Humans are especially prone to copy extra steps from others that don't seem to add anything.
But sometimes, when you skip over the "useless" steps while preparing a certain kind of food (e.g. for some manioc variant), you may slowly poison yourself over the years. Also, remember to always brush your teeth.
I like the hate example. In the same way that another poster mentioned local minima and metastable solutions, I see that unfolding in the current socio-political landscape. There is a metastable solution we're currently refining. That memeplex becomes an increasingly difficult well from which to escape. In a sense there may even be an ideological escape velocity to some of these memetics attractors.
On broader scales, the dominant mode of production is a metastable state. In the same way we might experience false vaccum decay, the current mode of production may undergo the same kind of spontaneous transformation. What's even more interesting is that it has done this at least three times already.
If you take it quite literally as running around in a circle, then probably not. The ants are unable to know their position in the world or know very much at all. They don't have memory to remember they have been at a location before or probably even the brainpower to work out what is going on.
These days with GPS it would not happen but even pre gps we have always had the stars, compasses, the sun, etc to know where we are and where we are going. If you take it as a more abstract concept about going in circles, than idk, maybe?
I would argue that a majority of humans are in a human mill, blindly following the next person, who follows the next person, ad infinitum, and are blind to it. I say this not scornfully, but rather as an outside observer, who having been flicked off the trail by a series of accidents, now observes the same humans passing by, over and over. Or perhaps they’re different humans, but are functionally indistinguishable. Same wants, same needs, same counterproductive and counterintuitive but “normal” decisions and behaviours.
A fundamental feature of behaviour in the animal kingdom is mimicry, memetics, whatever you want to call it - and the behaviours which propagate are usually favourable to the gestalt, rather than the individual.
What does it mean the follow another human in this context? I went to the store today. I believe I did so by my own free will. I wasn’t aware of anyone else going to the store.
Not OP, but I'd interpret it in a broader sense, that is, not focusing on specific and daily activities, but rather on general, social trends. Anthropologically, humans (but also animals) tend to mimic others so that they can integrate into a social group, and thus have better chances at surviving. Even if people are unaware of it, they're constantly influenced, directly or indirectly, in the modern world, whether it be through ads, fashion, music trends, hobbies... Generally, people try to conform to other people's tastes lest they'll be rejected and isolated. I mean, the prime example of that is high school, where you have the popular groups on the one side, the members of which all like the same type of stuff, and who reject those they call the "weirdos" because they're not into the same things.
Study hard, get a good job, work hard, aspire to own things, buy things, work hard, get a promotion, aspire to more things, buy more things, work hard, buy things, die. It’s absolutely a mill and is absolutely possible to leave - but most will deny that it’s a mill, that they are on a unique and special journey. Sure, this ant wears a party hat, that ant has clogs on, but they’re still all walking in a circle.
Most existences are functionally indistinguishable. Not all, by any means, but most.
Where do you get your food? What are you reading HN on? You’re making “working hard for a promotion” seem like a futile endeavor, and yet you likely sustain yourself and entertain yourself with the fruits of those working the jobs you deride.
This article is about an ant mill, which occurs when a group of ant’s start following a circular track of pheromones The ants think they’re heading towards the colony, but they’re not. What you describe as a “mill” is really just society, i.e. the ant colony. To me, it seems like you’re on the mill, following an idea that ultimately leads nowhere.
I produce about half of my own food, and hope to get that to 100% within the next five years - but for that I have to wait for trees to grow.
I deride nobody - I feel great empathy for those walking the well trodden industrial path, as I too was born into it, and I too saw it as The Path. I understand your anger at my position - it is quite an affront to have someone say that your existence may as well have been manufactured on a production line.
What you see as society is, in my view (and of many, many philosophers - see Baudrillard, Sartre, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, for starters) a gigantic mill, spiralling in on itself, self referential and crippled through the reification of concepts introduced in 18th century Britain.
We are so deeply inured to the ideas that industrialisation bought that we are mostly blind to the idea that there are other paths to tread, other goals to seek. Our entire value system has been harnessed by a mindless machine of capital, with no human or humanity at the helm - it is a pattern, self sustaining through humans’ tendency to do as others do, and fear of social ostracism.
This indolent peasant decided to go back to the land, rather than to continue to toil in a dark, satanic mill. I am ostracised for it, and that’s quite alright.
Are you really being "ostracized" for it? Lots of people I know semi retire on hobby farms. And you simply can't produce food as efficiently or cheaply as modern farming techniques, so you're in the privileged position (probably as the result of studying and working and earning) that you can afford to spend a large amount of time and money growing your on food.
This is a nice and fulfilling/entertaining lifestyle choice, that's great for you and you that you are in this position now. Maybe that advice you got about getting ahead wasn't so bad then?
This mill is the only thing that keeps this many humans alive though. To have humanity abandon it is to subject 90% of the population to starvation. A steep price to pay to become people living off the land without industrialization.
The only reason you are able to wait for trees to grow in peace is also because you live in the protection of modern society. You are only allowed to “go back to the land” because of the massive industrial military protecting you.
Here's a story.
Imagine a jigsaw puzzle. But not any jigsaw puzzle. An unbelievably huge jigsaw puzzle that's been mixed up with other jigsaw puzzles. Some of them are really old and faded. Some of them are brand new. Some are larger and some are smaller. The edges change from jagged to smooth. Like everyone else at the table, you've been trying to put this one puzzle together for years, trying out numberless pieces until one day you realize that you don't even have the box for it. Like everyone else, you were told what it looked like when you were first sat down in this room and left to it. But you're not making any progress and the solution, the memory faded by time and others, doesn't feel right and you abandon it.
Now, you ask everyone around you about what the puzzle looks like. And they are all certain about what it looks like when it's finished, despite the fact that you know they haven't spent nearly enough time looking in the box, or the pieces, and you're pretty damn sure it's not a picture of your loved ones burning, a giant man creating smaller men, or nothingness.
And you start to talk with other people who don't believe in these solutions. They have their own ideas about the puzzle. The vast majority of them think the idea of a pre-solution is the problem. If only those who have been working on their own sections piece by piece were allowed to work together with their work corroborated by other piece-by-piece sectioners, without pre-solutionists telling them what it looks like, it'd be put together by now. You think this is the right course of action going forward. So you dabble in doing your own piece-by-piece work, keeping up with the latest pictures of the latest additions to different sections, published and funded by the people who originally sat you down at the table.
And everything is fine. For a while. Then you begin to see that the sectioners' works are being used to justify new pre-solutions by onlookers that aren't compatible with each other. Some sectioners are just producing pictures of themselves and their funders. And you realize that this just doesn't make any sense. None of it makes any sense. Not the pre-solutionists, not the sectioners. It's all a giant question with no authority and no one seems to realize how insane and un-ending the whole process is. Then you pick up a piece that changes everything. In it you merely see the Self and your own reflection in it. But it changes everything.
You look up from the table and see through eons. You see everyone who has ever been sat down at this puzzle table. You see the same people wearing different costumes as the endless passage of time flows. You see the same puzzle processes and sections arising, maturing, then being scattered. You notice this and infinite other things, lost to the ephemera of cognition and memory. Then the pieces fall into place in your brain. And you see that it isn't a puzzle. It was never a puzzle. You realize in your vision that there were countless people throughout time who stood up from the table. And they saw a door and went through it. And came back. And they said in exaltation in the plurality of dialects and tongues that this is not a puzzle. It is a map. A map to exit the room. These chosen few make a new map of the room, offering it triumphantly to the rest. Some see it and in turn stand up and leave the room to go outside. Others follow. But the stream of people slows and stops. The map is left, abandoned by those who followed it to those that didn't or couldn't. And those remaining beings slowly rip it apart, piece by piece, to fit in their view of the puzzle until it too resembles... a puzzle.
You proceed to come down from grasping this piece, realizing the truth of what you have seen; That this in fact a massive collection of old, incomplete maps, made puzzles by mankind, all showing the way to a door that leads to outside the realm of the puzzle. So you stand up from the table, go to the exit, and open the door. And there it is. Outside. The Sun. Indescribable to anyone who has been left inside the cave their entire lives. This is so apparent to you that it is the very definition of self-evidence, bound with knowledge ascertained by pure observation. And you realize that nothing, absolutely nothing can erase the certainty that outside and the Sun exists, having been there. You now have a decision to make. In an act of compassion, you return to the room and proceed to draw yet another map for those left behind...
Alright I'll bite. This obviously starts out as an allegory for the ways we attempt to make sense of the world, with the different solutionist dogmas stand in for religion / truth from authority and the sectioners being a stand in for science / truth from evidence. The way the pre-solutioners twist the sectioners words is a stand in for rationalizations like trying to shoe-horn the big bang into creation myths. The sectioners making pictures of themselves and their funders is a swipe at academia, the fallible real approximation of science in its true platonic form.
Then there's the whole leaving the room epiphany and I don't really get what is meant by this. To exit the room, to go beyond the reality we can't make sense of, means what exactly? Do psychedelics? Meet god and become a prophet? Stop trying to make sense of the world and find the door to happiness? Or maybe all these questions missing the point and I'm just tearing the map into puzzle pieces as we speak.
My brother got into something similar a few days ago. I was on the phone with him when he saw 3 cars in the drive-thru line at McDonalds on MLK day. He joined the line but by the time he got to the voice box, he realized it was closed (though the exterior lights made it seem as if it were open). By the time he left and went someplace else, the line had grown to 5 or so. He started laughing on his way back home as he drove back by the same McDonald’s and said there were now 15 cars in the line.
I'm curious how often this leads to mass death. I suspect that there is some escape from this, or else conditions leading to an ant mill are extremely rare, because it seems evolutionarily expensive. On the other hand nature is profligate with life, and especially bugs. For example perhaps once exhausted to a certain point, the pheromone scent changes to one that signals not to follow.
I would wager that, if you get a large ant mill going, the level of pheromone signal would become enormous and be sustained for as long as the mill is going and the ants are alive. So, a sustained, very high level of pheromones might trigger some kind of break-glass response where they invert their logic and seek _low_ levels of pheromone, seek if get _off_ of their track. Or perhaps they begin to erase the pheromone trail (if they can).
Which breaks the ant mill, but now you have to get back to having a functioning colony. Don't know how that would work.
Idea: spend one neuron to track how often the ant thinks it's turning right (left). The input could be differential motion between sets of legs, or an internal accelerometer (if it exists). It takes very little storage to track an exponential moving average (just one persistent variable),
I have seen figure-8 ant mills on YouTube, fwiw. It involved a "going underground" step, eg, go through a tunnel, pop out, turn and walk over the tunnel, turn and go back into the tunnel. I'll see if I can find it again.
following unrewarding pheromone trail for too long could trigger a timeout and walk in the random direction. Then search for a new trail.
Even better if an ant could just return to the last visited anthill on timeout
I'm sure you will get enough problems with the definition of "unrewarding" and time control to make the change a net loss. How stable is the travel speed of ants anyway? Because trails do change form all the time.
As a comic in all seriousness, though, I would imagine any search strategy that avoids a local maximum could be useful, such as other siblings have pointed out.
But I wonder if the ants even have a way of detecting they are trapped in a local maximum. If the signal detection is simply based on the strength of the signal, I don't know how they could detect the trap. If the pheromones of each ant were somewhat different, and if ants have memory -- maybe that's what would be required.
Otherwise if all ants just take random walks deviating from the signal, would you expect them to become isolated, or simply form a more elaborate ant mill whose position changes until the path to the nest is found or they become exhausted?
Wouldn’t be enough to form pheromone trail strong enough to cause other ants to follow.
At best it would just cause ant mills to slowly bleed ants into their surroundings where individuals are at a high risk of predation or simply becoming lost and starving anyway. At worst they follow a random path back into the ant mill.
If it's truly a "death spiral" aren't they all going to die anyway? The off chance that one breaks the loop and finds it back to the colony seems better than just infinitely going in a loop. But I'm no ant entomologist haha
You should watch the videos of these things. They have thousands of individual ants in them, sure having one or two break away and making it back is better than zero. But it’s better in the same way that zero rice falling out of bag is better than one or two grains falling out, zero is definitely better, but nobody bothers to pickup dropped grains of rice.
The more one looks at the animal kingdom, the more one wonders where the clear demarcators of individuality are. Emergent behaviors like this suggest to me that maybe the ant colony itself is more of an independent organism than any individual ant.
Isn't this true of humans too when we rely on entire supply chains for our food, water, and electricity?
Similar to a fractal, the difference between an organism and a superorganism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superorganism) depends on how close you zoom in. It's easy to think about an ant colony as a superorganism, and from there to think about human civilization as a superorganism, and then the entire Earth's biosphere as a single superorganism. Then you can go the other way and think about how every human body is its own superorganism; your body is composed of approximately as many human cells as non-human cells (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microbiome). You are an entire ecosystem.
The human body and the ant colony are units of reproduction; an individual ant, like an individual cell, cannot reproduce. Only the colony or the human can do that.
Human societies aren't like that; the humans are free to reproduce on their own. It is a mistake to generalize from the ant colony to human society, much less to the entire world.
> Human societies aren't like that; the humans are free to reproduce on their own.
It's not nearly that simple. If you take away "society" (running water, sewage, electricity, traffic lights, medical treatment, fresh diverse food, security, etc) most people would die off and the few survivors would find childrearing very burdensome.
The study of how human organizations can reproduce themselves and maintain vitality, rather than dying off when a leader or generation dies off, is critically important. Classical biology doesn't have a monopoly on "reproduction".
I don't agree that societies don't reproduce. A society grows as its population of humans increases, and eventually the population grows large enough that it splits into multiple societies, e.g. the depletion of local resources via overpopulation leads to diasporas setting up new societies elsewhere, and these new societies tend imitate the familiar structures of the original society. IMO, that's reproduction.
Yes, that is a quote from me. It matches my description of what I said. (Of course, it matches it even better if you don't cut it off in the middle of a sentence:)
> Human societies aren't like that; the humans are free to reproduce on their own.
It doesn't match your description of what I said. What are you trying to say?
So then you do think that human societies can reproduce, despite appearing to say that human societies, unlike humans and ant colonies, cannot reproduce? Can you re-word your statement to clearly indicate what you believe?
> despite appearing to say that human societies, unlike humans and ant colonies, cannot reproduce?
This is not even an attempt to approximate what I said. I said that humans are composed of cells which cannot reproduce, colonies are composed of ants which cannot reproduce, and human societies -- unlike humans and ant colonies -- are composed of humans which reproduce independently of the society. When I specifically indicate that what distinguishes human societies from ant colonies is that ants can't reproduce and humans can, what else could that mean?
This makes nonsense of the idea that a human society could be viewed as a superorganism. They don't have the coherence; they are constantly subject to betrayal by the humans of which they are composed. There are historical processes which look like the reproduction of a society: in the wake of Alexander the Great, northern India received a bunch of Greek colonists who built theaters, spoke Greek, practiced Greco-paganism, and wrote a lot of history, which marked a big contrast with the existing societies which built stepwells, spoke Sanskrit, practiced Buddhism, and wrote almost no history. And then the Greeks took up Buddhism. And they started speaking Sanskrit. And they stopped writing history. And they stopped building theaters. But they didn't go anywhere.
If societies were superorganisms, that couldn't have happened. The loss of Greek culture in India would have simultaneously been the loss of all the Greeks.
Human societies "reproduce" like the human individual organism "reproduces itself" (its constituent cells are continuously replaced), not the way individual humans "reproduce" (make another human like it).
(Except sometimes human societies do really reproduce, like by colonization of foreign lands.)
> The human body and the ant colony are units of reproduction; an individual ant, like an individual cell, cannot reproduce. Only the colony or the human can do that.
I honestly don't know if you're trying to be rhetorical here or what, but individual cells DO reproduce and individual humans do not.
A human cell dividing is not reproduction in the evolutionary sense, unless the cell is cancerous. It is reproduction in the same sense that my shoes can reproduce by means of me buying another pair when the first pair wears out.
> Or does the unit of reproduction require mixing genes[?]
No, there are clonal organisms.
> Would human reproduction to human societies be similar to mitosis to cells?
No; all the cells in a body divide on the terms the body sets and they die when the body does. (Or earlier, when so directed.) The only way for them to reproduce is indirectly, through the production of gametes. They do not and generally cannot have an independent existence. Human reproduction within human societies is the analogue of a cell within the body becoming cancerous. At that point, the cancer's uncontrolled mitosis is a form of independent reproduction, though it tends not to work out for the cancer because they almost never develop a way to leave the body, and end up killing themselves.
There are some exceptions, such as HeLa and the cancer that lives in Tasmanian devils.
> Emergent behaviors like this suggest to me that maybe the ant colony itself is more of an independent organism than any individual ant.
That’s Aunt Hillary from Gödel, Escher, Bach :)
I forget the specific line, but at some point Achilles asks the Anteater if it hurts the Colony when he eats some ants, and the response is along the lines of “Does it hurt Achilles when he gets a haircut?”
Anteater: [...] I am on the best of terms with ant colonies. It's just ANTS that I eat, not colonies--and that is good for both parties: me, and the colony.
Achilles: How is it possible that--
Tortoise: How is it possible that--
Achilles: --having its ants eaten can do an ant colony any good?
Crab: How is it possible that--
Tortoise: --having a forest fire can do a forest any good?
Anteater: How is it possible that--
Crab: --having its branches pruned can do a tree any good?
Anteater: --having a haircut can do Achilles any good?
> maybe the ant colony itself is more of an independent organism than any individual ant
Yes, of course. The ant queen mates only once in her life, and the colony she starts right after is made from the genetic material collected during this one foundational act.
Genetically speaking, all the ants in the colony are one organism. (Lots of different and weird ways to express the genetics phenotypically, though.)
To me it looks like attempts to axiomatize natural numbers with first order logic.
You can assure there's a "zero" and an infinite chain of successors starting from it but you cannot assure there are no cycles disconnected from the chain.
This is incorrect. You cannot assure that there are no bi-infinite chains disconnected from the starting chain, but you can assure that there no cycles disconnected from the chain. To see this, note that Peano proves that, given x and y, if there exist z and w such that x+z=y and y+w=x, then x=y.
Really, introducing natural numbers -- with addition and multiplication -- is overcomplicating this. There's absolutely no multiplication involved here; you could think of this as a purely additive thing, I suppose, but really directed graphs with outdegree 1 (i.e., functions on a set) are a better fit (if you want a simple model like that).
Edit/elaborate: First order rules like "no element X has successor(X)=0" and "two distinct elements have two distinct successors" assure there is a chain of successors that starts with zero and does not cycle into itself.
This however does not mean that every model is isomorphic to the natural numbers because a cycle of elements separate from this chain does not falsify any of the rules(axioms).
So you need an additional rule to stipulate that every element of the set is reachable from zero. To express this you have to go outside first order logic.
So, the. followers" enter a do-loop because they somehow got sepearated from the leading foraging group. To me, the interesting question is - how are foraging leaders differentiated from the followers. Seems like the former would have a much more complex set of rules to follow to explore and navigate the uncertaintaies of the world ahead of them.
By the way I was hoping this article would be either a device for milling ants into something useful (food? Varnish?) or a whimsical name for something that stamped out a huge number of small objects.
The actual definition turns out to be even more interesting.
I was hoping that the ants were somehow milling food, perhaps using small rocks and sand (or a mutualistic relationship) over time to break it down. If a valuable food source was locked up and could only be accessed this way, I can certainly imagine an ant colony evolving to mill it somehow. They already farm fungus and aphids. I predict a new kind of ant mill will be discovered!
Given that we are busy killing off all the vertebrates, perhaps in a few million years their technology will be as advanced as ours. Then the ant archeologists will wonder if these strange giant quadrupedal creatures could have been intelligent, perhaps even enough to have a civilization.
It seems surprising these can happen in nature... There is an efficient no-communication no-memory-required way out of such a cycle...
If the feet of every ant slightly smell of 'ant was here', then when that smell gets too strong the ants should stop following one another and walk towards that scent being less strong.
Such an 'algorithm' could easily evolve. It uses the same scent and pheromone communication used by ants for lots of other tasks, and there is a strong evolutionary push towards colonies who can escape such spirals.
Like when American manufacturers hire an MBA to run the company and they decide to stop manufacturing and do tricks with money in an endless loop until one of those goes wrong and the entire company collapses.
'Self licking ice cream cone' as I first heard it described is similar, although the currently available definitions have unfortunately oversimplified it.
You see this in incident response. Trying to prove a negative can’t be done to sociopaths standard but if one is in a leadership demands it then analysts go and do it. This leads to a feedback loop. Then entropy kicks over time and the importance of proving the negative dwindles to the point it gets closed. People wonder why all that time was wasted. AARs get written and usually ignored. Time marches on.
It's any interesting question whether or not it's rational to invest in a speculative bubble, solely on the basis of everyone else also investing in that same bubble. On a per-transaction basis, each step can be individually rational, even as it contributes to an eventual net loss systemically. Steering clear of such "Keynesian beauty contests" [0] is a curious sort of collective action problem.
There was an interview with a fund manager, after the toxic asset crash. The person said they had known the bubble would burst but the (short term, on-paper) profits were so high that they bought anyway in fear of customers moving their money to other funds if they didn't.
Sort of a collective chicken race towards a hard wall.
just yesterday biking back i ran into a fleet of birds eating bread, as i got close to the first one, he flew away, then the others etc etc
I realized that it's probably just a safe heuristic to do what others do. It can lead to lemmings falling off a metaphorical cliff, but I'd bet 10$ our social nature is a direct descendant of that. Even mirroring desires that cause so much troubles in human lives.
I find this is both a blessing and a curse of a society (no matter in which animal kingdom). Provides safety when it's needed, and the opposite of safety when followed blindly.
Before asking such questions one has to define "rational".
It's obviously very profitable to the few that excell at that (Soros is the best known example) and creates losses for the others, sometimes substantial losses.
Fair, "rational" is a thorny term in general. I suppose it's easier to invert the proposition, that it is not obviously irrational: one can have complete information, and be of sound mind, and yet still choose to buy into a tulip bubble, knowing that that individual transaction's externality might only contribute 0.00...1% to the inevitable crash (or wealth extraction, if one wants to frame it that way).
You seem to be mixing externalities with personal gain here.
It is obviously "rational" (as in you'll be better off) to add fuel to the fire if you know reasonably well when to pull back and book profits, then move on to the next thing. It just happens at the expense of others. Hence my question - define "rational", then we can decide what is and isn't "rational".
The moral/legal concensus of the current era is that "everything is allowed by default, unless it gets so obviously bad that we ban it" (blacklisting). This wasn't always the case (though it usually was the case), for example the Soviet countries had a list of all possible agreements, and you couldn't make anything outside of this list (whitelisting).
Thank you for clarifying. I'm assuming (without endorsing) the "capitalist realism" and "rational self-interest" Overton Window of the industrialized West.
I suppose what I'm pushing back against, is the conventional story that tulip bubbles are purely a sucker's game: a belief that "a fool and their money are soon parted" (and the follow-on belief that they deserve to!). There are indeed low-information investors, quasi-gambling-addictions, true believers, etc; but I think we underestimate the game-theoretic trap of zero-sum speculative bubbles, if we merely scoff at the "suckers" buying into beanie babies, or NFT jpegs, or whatever the next thing ends up being.
The thing is that in practice the vast majority ends up down, always, and I mean always. Maybe not completely rekd (people do have some sense of danger) but surely down. This is one of the (valid) arguments used by indexers, the vast majority of individual trading portfolios end up with negative returns. Also corroborated by many stories from successful traders, they usually blew up a few accounts before they figured out something that actually has an edge.
OTOH if you're a young zoomer it really doesn't matter if you blow up your (larger) lunch money.
What makes this particular phenomena fascinating to me, is that it can be right under our nose, going on around us (because the circles can be big), and we don't realize it. Our regularly observed behavior and model of ants isn't this, and when we see one wandering, we don't realize there might be a bigger thing going on. And then we zoom out and there's this "aha" reveal moment, where we discover a model other than what we thought was going on.