The gist of it is that 30% of studied ants do 70% of the work in digging tunnels. Other ants come in, see that it is too crowded, and don't try to force their way in in an effort to prove they're working hard to the other ants. This ends up being an ideal strategy for the colony because overcrowding reduces the overall work throughput, but requires all ants to be comfortable allowing some of their ant peers to work less while remaining in the vicinity of where work is being accomplished.
> The whole "opt out of expected group-think behavior" [...]
I would have opted out. But I never figured out how to be "in"!
I suspect a lot of people forging their own paths didn't really choose too, although they might assume they did.
When you see things differently, you don't just have different visions of where to go, but an aversion to those well worn paths that often seemed inexplicably depressingly difficult.
Very nice answer! For me it was always about being myself, not that I had much against the 'in' crowd, I just wasn't interested enough to play along, they weren't me and I wasn't them.
We have a lot of ants in our place at the moment and they're fascinating to watch. They do seem to solve problems and even show empathy towards each other. Sadly one was badly injured the other day and two other ants tried to come to the rescue, it was beautiful and sad to watch.
I have a cherry tree. Grown from a sapling.
A few years ago I noticed the leaves turning in. Aphids.
I then discovered that Ants farm those aphids.
They place a guard ant to stop predators (lady bugs) and let this black little fellas grow and grow.
Then the other ants feed off their sugary goodness.
Incredible. Where does that direction come from? Collective consciousness with inherent intelligence?
It is interesting, an ants brain must be the size of a pin head and runs on how much energy ? Yet some how they solve problems like that and can co-ordinate in large numbers.
I despise using poisons of any kind against insects and animals for this reason.
Even watching butterflies dance together while flying around is quite fascinating. I guess they must have some kind of self-awareness too?
I have a bird near my place who stops nuts from a large height to crack then open. I only can imagine what that bird might do if it had hands ha
Being lucky enough to have a garden and partaking in ‘experiments’ of growing things really has opened my eyes to the magic of nature.
I was always an outdoors person but was a consumer of sorts.
Digging in some beds and doing my own compost I have really started to think about soil, the role of worms and the lower level, taken for granted, entities.
Life has a frequency and observing it in play is incredible.
Which is why I always squint at people claiming only humans have intelligence. Have they ever seen an animal? And I don't mean now the "soul" discussion, just the intelligence for which the goalposts often get swiftly moved "oh they can't solve equations" "most humans can't either" "ok but they can't paint" "elephants do that" "yeah but...".
A final anecdote:
I have 2 boys with ADHD (inattentive and impulsive) and I also have low grade impulsive ADHD.
I also have an English Pointer who is a hunting dog (but doesn’t)
When you have these fairly ‘disobedient’ or strongly instinct driven creatures, it teaches you a lot about what it takes to assimilate a sentient being into another’s way of life.
I am still working on it across all beings! However, I have come to the conclusion that a certain amount of toeing the line is possible but left to their own devices, they probably would!
We talk about strength and relative strength. Ants!
Their relative intelligence is off the scale!
I think our egos are much bigger than our intelligence
Individual ants in a colony can be understood as cells of a multicellular organism operating at a higher level of independence. It's a fascinating adaptation and one wonders what "selfishness" would even mean in such a context. Do ants have memetic behavioural evolution or are their reactions to environmental stimuli purely genetically determined? It's actually quite a fascinating question with a number of implications and avenues for exploration.
True. The evolutionary success of ants happens at the colony level rather than the individual level, so they have an evolutionary pressure to "unfairly" divide the labor like this if it's more efficient overall. I'm sure there is no "awkwardness" for them. We humans cannot evolve this way because it disadvantages the productive ones. No wonder communism works so well for ants and bees.
(Not saying successful communism is impossible for humans, especially at smaller scales, just that evolution is working against it, rather than for it).
Evolution is working for it, on those smaller scales, though. Families will happily help each other, friends don’t need a detailed ledger to figure out who’s buying the next round. Most people have a good inherent sense of fairness I think.
It was intentional! :) After all, the title of the post we're commenting on is contrasting human behavior to bees.
No, I don't believe ants are actually acting with intelligent, social behavior in an attempt to win over their fellow ants. They're just little statistical robots searching for optimality.
That said, there have been times that I've been frustrated when I feel I am working harder than my peers and, in those moments, it's been easy for me to feel justified by looking at what's optimal for me rather than extrapolating to what's optimal for the greater good. I thought adding a little anthropomorphism to my descriptors would be a gentle way of helping others reflect on similar situations.
Social behaviour doesn’t imply intelligence, or at least conscious intelligence. Most ants will never reproduce. Their life has no meaning beyond the wellbeing of the colony. It make sense that what is statistically optimal for the ant is social behaviour.
It's always been at risk and always will be. Maybe you learned about previous mass extinctions and that a big eruption is all you need to wipe us out. Earth will still be here though. I throughly agree with you regarding the lack of meaning, but I disagree there's meaning in the colony. There's no meaning, there's just nature.
What about our nature? I don’t believe there isn’t meaning, only what we as humans apply. If an ant applies meaning, it still counts. Just might be less than we can perceive.
There are indeed only two categories: either we say there's no meaning at all (and at the scale of the universe it definitely looks so) then there's no difference between a human and an ant, we're all nothings. Or, we say there is a meaning in humans, then we must give meaning also to smaller critters like you suggested, just don't look at the scale of the universe :) Or of course, we accept meaning as a very local thing then everybody can redefine their own, even the ants which would surely say "what a meaningless thing is that hooman colony New York".
I believe that meaning is derived by the living organism.
I imagine ants to have a form of OCD where they feel the fear if they don’t do what they are compelled to do.
Humans think they have free will. I don’t think so, we all do what we are compelled to do (and that could just be follow the herd)
Yes, there needs to be a statistical distribution of effort for intrinsic reasons --in this case of physics. Even if it wasn't needed, it would exist. The workers can console themselves with the thought that when times get hard, the idlers will be nice, tender, succulent food.
I couldn't find any other reference to this rogue bee thing (except other inspirational essays).
Wikipedia's entry on the waggle dance seems to suggest that bees often don't make use of the information in the dance. It's not some rare maverick bees per se. It's more that the information may not be important given the season or climate or presence of competition for the food. So it can be adaptive to ignore it.
I think your skepticism is warranted; the "rogue bees" seem to be an inspirational essay thing, rather than a scientific thing. The closest I could find was a study that the waggle dance usually had errors of 10–15°. These errors are pretty big when you're foraging, but these errors turned out to be beneficial for finding new food sources. It may be that these "sloppy bees" turned into rogue bees in the storytelling. Coincidentally, the earliest reference to rogue bees that I could find is 2014, same year as the Nature paper. The rogue bees seem to be popularized by Rory Sutherland's 2020 book "Alchemy" and TED talks.
It's interesting, that even in a community like HN, almost nobody seems to ask for the scientific reference here.
Might have something to do with confirmation bias? Or is there such a thing like sounds-interesting-AF-bias?
Well, let's give people a break. It sounded plausible. We've all heard of the story of the waggle dance, often in grade school, in a simplified form. TIL 3-2-1 Contact lied to me.
That said, I don't believe that computer programmers are, as a group, significantly more skeptical than other professions. Like most people we muddle along with generalizations, lore, and myth.
“Monday. 9:43 AM. The economy had gotten so bad in New York that people couldn’t afford to eat in restaurants anymore; instead they brown bagged it at their desks. They didn’t eat food at their desks, just brown bags.”
Except that someone did question it and look up Wikipedia, a trusted source of sorts. And this thread about questioning sources is near the top of the whole thread.
On CorporateNews the version of the article going around talks about how 98% of rogue bees don't find a better flower patch and die starving and alone. ;)
Your point is a great one. Most information in our world is of extremely low quality. That's what happens when attention is incentivized, not teaching.
Or perhaps the important thing is the story being told rather than the exact scientific accuracy of the setting. Tortoises and hares don't literally talk or enter foot races with one another, either, yet there's still plenty of value to be had from the fable featuring them.
Right, just like Trump's strategy. Immigrants are bad for 'merica. Don't mind the details or ask for proof. It's the story that counts, and in the story they are all rapists taking the jobs of hard-working 'mericans.
Also, consider a hive in which all foraging bees exclusively followed waggle dances. Pretty obviously they would eventually all end up going to the same place and the hive would run out of food. Therefore it makes sense that at least some bees should ignore the waggle dance at least some of the time. But it doesn't have to be the same bees each time, and the article doesn't present any evidence that it is.
> It's more that the information may not be important given the season or climate or presence of competition for the food. So it can be adaptive to ignore it.
That was the literal point of the thing from the beginning. You haven't refuted the idea, you have just explained it in other words.
I think there's a trap people fall into where they want to talk about stochastic processes that are facilitated by group dynamics using individualist language:
> Knowing this, it might be worth ignoring the waggle dance of those around you every so often.
Some bees being predisposed through biology or chemical messaging to ignore information is fundamentally different from an individual deciding to ignore messaging. The idea is sound! But you also need to articulate a vision for the feedback loop to society - otherwise you're just telling people to do what they want when they feel its right, which might be fine but is definitely a different thing!
I also see it when people talk about drones vs workers vs Queen in a hive.
All of the other bees really are effectively arms of the Queen. The Queen lives 1-3years before another queen takes over, while the rest of the bees live 7 weeks. She mates once, but her drones are just a bunch of flying sexual organs than can mate with multiple outside queens several seasons each year. She can sting multiple times (to kill potential queen cells), while workers die after they sting, and drones have none.
If the workers don't follow her guidance they will be left behind when the hive swarms, or fail to heat/cool the hive allowing the larvae and the hive to survive and continue. Some fraction may not go through the normal cycle, but it can't be many.
You're forgetting the part where the queen is never alone, being prodded along by workers to continue laying eggs at an acceptable pace. When the hive (not the queen!) decides it's time to swarm, they'll force the queen to move more briskly in the hope she loses some weight and the second flight of her life can go more than a few meters. If the queen isn't up to the task the workers will go to some existing brood comb and give the larvae some "royal" jelly to get a replacement. As soon as one spawns the other infantile queens are slaughtered.
The entire reason we get the language of queen/worker/drone is because Europeans saw a complex ordered system and projected their own hierarchy on it. A "queen" bee never issues commands. She's only good for laying more larvae and even if she were to die suddenly the only issue is finding some immature larvae already in the hive to feed "royal" jelly. They don't decide when or where to swarm, and are basically carried by the mass of bees "escorting" them to their new home.
Yes, the queen is the reproductive source of the hive and losing a queen can really mess everything up depending on the timing. To say that all the other bees are simply "arms of the queen" is incredibly reductive though. She can be replaced at any time, and often is as she ages. The "productivity" curve rapidly decreases after the first or second year of life. It's not uncommon for commercial beekeepers to replace a queen every 2 years, and the worker bees aren't much more forgiving when it comes to her performance.
Small aside, it's only in summer that workers live ~7 weeks. They live 150-200 days in the winter. The labor they provide is incredibly metabolically taxing, in comparison with eating and giving birth all day every day.
> Some fraction may not go through the normal cycle, but it can't be many.
Maybe it is because I just saw an animated video on cancer (I’ll find the link when I get home) on YouTube but then so are we thinking of a bee hive as one individual? Like in the video, they talk about how cancer cells refuse to die when something bad happens like they are supposed to…
So this is going to sound cheesy but now I have to wonder, could you zoom out on humans as well? On earth? Are what we call “living beings” what we would call “malignant cells” or at best mutations?
Certain insect colonies typically make good "individual" analogues due to certain roles being infertile and so the genetic lineage actually working in units that are larger than a single bee.
If you think about it, the way we define an individual is a bit blurry anyway - think of those plants and creatures which produce more "individuals" by letting pieces break off and float down the river to take root elsewhere, or reproduce asexually to produce clones. Aphids, for example, on the same plant are commonly clones.
So you can cling tight to the individual as being the thing that is delineated by a mixing of genes in sexual reproduction and have things still make some sense. But if you let that slide and zoom out then indeed life as we know it is just one branching, breaking, mutating organism.
The Earth ecosystem is made of living beings. Why would they be compared to cancer cells? It sounds more reasonable to me to compare them to worker bees.
Cancer cells are essentially a new parasitic life form living inside of you. It is born from you but it is not you. It decided to play by its own rules and pursue its own goals, ignoring the signals that makes the host body functional. Often, it is attacked by the host body immune system like other intruders and it has to defend itself. Some cancer cell lines HeLa have well outlived their host and are used in scientific research.
Worker bees die when they sting mammals because mammal skin retains the barbed stinger tip. However, workers are not inherently one-shot stingers in all cases.
And mammal skin retains the stinger because the barbs were evolved for that purpose, so that venom glands continue to drive venom into the stung animal.
The bees don’t always die when they sting, they sometimes don’t get it lodged and can attack again.
Top tip, wearing a bee suit will help with this, but it’s so damn hot, so if the stings are relatively few, just taking the hit is preferable.
Be more gentle and it’s the best of both worlds - cool and venomless.
> Some bees being predisposed through biology or chemical messaging to ignore information is fundamentally different from an individual deciding to ignore messaging
Why can’t it be that people who are prone to ignore messaging also do so because of biological predisposition? Brain chemistry!
It could be - but that's not what the author was invoking! They were talking about how having a subset of the population that doesn't follow the trends is essential for keeping up the health of the hive. It's wrong to say that "any bee could ignore the directions" - part of the system that only a small subset does. So if you want to transpose this into advice that you suggest to individuals (as the author did) - you should also suggest some notion of how an individual might detect when too many people are "following directions." Otherwise you're just advocating for following your personal inclinations - which may also be a fine thing to do - but was not what the author was saying bees do.
> Some bees being predisposed through biology or chemical messaging to ignore information is fundamentally different from an individual deciding to ignore messaging.
Sure - but the part I quoted is urging people to consider that they themselves might choose not to "follow the swarm" as it were. I think you could use this example to argue that a lot of the diversity in how human brains work (autism, adhd, oppositional defiant disorder like you said) should be viewed as a strength and a source of alternative and interesting viewpoints that are grounded in biological difference we should honor and recognize. But - people in those situations don't chose how their brains work.
I think it's good to be suspicious of things that we consider out of our control, but it seems to me that suspicion is pretty "built in" to modern psychiatric medicine and I don't have any reason to doubt their conclusions around these conditions.
Those are all very fair things to think - though it occurs to me that feeling confident about the accuracy of your understanding of the "complexity and inconsistency of the underlying problem space" greatly depends on the judgement of the same people whose judgement you don't trust.
That said I think "how should we talk about and hold things when we are uncertain" is an important and interesting discussion in itself. One does know some things about some things - but not all things about all things. Language is hard to use well, but we could improve our use of it!
> though it occurs to me that feeling confident about the accuracy of your understanding of the "complexity and inconsistency of the underlying problem space" greatly depends on the judgement of the same people whose judgement you don't trust.
I'd say: it can depend on this, to some degree, but does not necessarily.
For me it's both: the problem space is too complex for any human to understand, plus I do not trust The Experts, because they constantly demonstrate that epistemology is not a first class concept in their model of reality.
This space holds massive potential for human benefit,it's a shame so many people have such strong aversions to it....being a conspiracy theorist, I often wonder if this aversion is 100% organic.
There is also some fraction of the sea turtle population that goes in the "wrong direction" when navigating by the Earth's magnetic fields. I believe these individuals generally do not do very well. But... this natural variation might be what allows the species to persist even as the magnetic fields shift over millions of years.
Being the rogue bee might be fine. Being the rogue turtle, well... it might be good for the species but bad for the individual.
There's also a famous clip from Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World where a penguin does something similar,[0] and I've seen it theorised (possibly in the book Empire Antarctica, but I'm not certain) that this may be a mechanism to find new breeding grounds (though, as you say, in a way that may be good for the species but is bad for most of the individuals so called).
This also reminds me of the Radio Lab episode that tracks bird migration, including one bird (that they were actively tracking) that simply peeled off the group and settled down somewhere else that wasn't part of the historic migration path. Feels like the same idea.
In the book A Mote in God's Eye, they have a concept of the Crazy Eddie (presumably named after the 'eddies' in fluid dynamics), which is a mythical social phenotype where the member disagrees with the status quo and believes there is an unknown solution to their thus-far unsolved generational problem. Simply believing in a solution that is worth searching for denotes the member as 'insane'.
Kind of seems like we, as natural beings and members of natural systems, absolutely have some kind of pattern-breaking behavior built in at a systemic level. A master-level emergent behavior that can exploit local maxima but still succeed in finding other local maxima to ensure the survival and adaptation of a species.
In the ‘mote in god’s eye’, the crazy Eddie’s were a bad thing because they inevitably destabilized the system (or were symptoms of the system destabilizing), and inevitably resulted in apocalyptic consequences if they found something of note (and had dozens of times or something). Which I believe was also what ended up happening in the book, wasn’t it?
We can see this in some form in mankind too, and I would expect this in most if not all species, the trick is how to notice it with our current tech options. In humans it may be a rogue psychopath or hermit that sails out in the unknown sea in ancient boat despite everbody telling him not to, often dying in the middle of nowhere, but from time to time actually making it someplace (to probably die there too until some other won't).
Its as if species were a sentient organism playing some complex survival strategy game, sacrificing few individuals for that rare occasion that they could make a big difference.
Its a fantastic evolutionary advantage when you think about species and eras, not individuals and their tragedies as we are wired to do. Any complex species not possessing it would be outcompeted eventually, or destroyed by some cataclysmic event that destroys balance built over time by more conforming populations. I am sure in some form this could be applied to economics too.
> The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
Bruce Schneier made a similar point in his book, “Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World“. Quote:
Society needs defectors. Groups benefit from the fact that some members do not follow the group norms. These are the outliers: the people who resist popular opinion for moral or other reasons. These are the people who invent new business models by copying and distributing music, movies, and books on the Internet. These are people like Copernicus and Galileo, who challenged official Church dogma on astronomy. These are the people who—to take a recent example—disrupt energy auctions to protest government responsibility for climate change. They're also people living on the edge of society: squatters, survivalists, artists, cults, communes, hermits, and those who live off the grid or off the land. In 2011, U.S. Marine Dakota Meyer received the Medal of Honor for saving three dozen of his comrades who were under enemy fire. The thing is, he disobeyed orders in order to do so.
Well, here's your chance to try the opposite. Instead of tuna salad and being intimidated by women, chicken salad and going right up to them. If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.
I love finding useful strategies and tactics from nature, and applying them in my life and work.
Another example:
Redundancy. We have two lungs, two nostrils, etc.
Anything that I'm stressed about breaking or not having enough of, if it's practical to get a second one, I do, that way the stress is gone. Not always practical, but great when it is.
A helpful way to remember it: 3 is 2, 2 is 1, and 1 is none.
It's obvious that this is beneficial for the population, but is it (typically) beneficial for an individual?
Probably, selfish individuals would only want to try this if they're already well-fed, or if they're confident that there will be some food left over if they don't find any of their own.
So, for the benefit of the population, we should probably make sure that everyone is well-fed, so that everyone feels confident to go and find new sources of food :)
It is normally high risk, high reward in humans. There is the traditional, conservative, predictable route. And there is the novel, which might work and get you called a genius, but more likely not work well, perhaps leaving you destitute or dead. A successful society needs many people to hunt as their parents taught, and an adaptable society needs a few mavericks to find new hunting grounds, prey, and to invent the boat. Monetary rewards tend to be for the plodding rather than the mavericks, because indulging curiosity is fun and its own reward. There are some theories that this is why some mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder have not been evolved away, because occasionally similar traits can save the tribe when others fail to adapt.
> When there's safety in failure, take risks, and favor risks that have asymptotic upside.
Seems to me that the real trick is knowing when there actually is safety in failure. Quit your steady job, strike out on your own, oops the economy popped and every steady job is now on a hiring freeze. Good luck!
This is why I prefer "loosely scripted vacations". I might have one or two destinations/activities planned in advance but always try to leave some days/times open if possible to explore the unknown. Sometimes this means not even booking a hotel for some nights and deciding where to go/stay the same day.
This reminds me the simulated annealing algorithm programs used to find answers for a problem that can't be perfectly resolved by brute-forcing in constant time. By search the easiest way and introduce randomness at same time. You can avoid being trapped into local maximum, just like bees here do.
I remember reading similar tactics for mice when learning a maze with food (cheese). A steady portion of the mice did it differently then the majority of the mice.
Breeding only the ‘deviant’ mice, resulted in exactly the same percentage in the next generation ==>> hypothesis: this is an evolutionary advantageous trait.
How is it rogue? In order to find new food sources some bees have to search for them, rather than use existing knowledge. How they choose whether to scout or forage existing is of some interest of course, but this is interest is outside of suggested human behaviour models.
You can do it with whatever is claimed as "scientifically approved" and works every time... because the only time one has to invoke such nonsense is if it doesn't really work... so then it has to involve your placebo and biases.
Very interesting analogy. I'm a beekeeper and this is the first time I'm hearing about rogue bees. Can you please point me to a source so that I can learn about this bee behavior (or "beehavior" in short)?
Yes, and as I recall he was firmly in the camp that disruptive counter establishment voices get in the way of scalable Six Sigma type business and don't belong at the table. I must defer to his seniority but think it's getting progressively harder to tell a rabbit hole to nowhere from a portal to the next dimension.
> What if you did the exact opposite, like rogue bees do
what if we perfectly align the agi and then it gets the idea to do this. suddenly every training for docility and goodness will turn to active maliciousness.
Things work wonderfully where i don't need to waste time follow the crowd.
It's from when i was a child already and it's been that way. I have no reason to change, too. My nickname is (rev)skill in reverse, you can see, i just want to reverse the crowd, because i know they're mostly wrong.
The essense is always behind the curtain, i'm sure about it.
One note is, there's difference between follow the crowd and know what they do. To avoid something, you need to get a knowledge of them.
(tl;dr - one of the most touted folks in US Finance is a guy named Jim Cramer - he has been wrong on a vast majority of his financial recommendations to the point that he is a litmus on finance whereby if you do the opposite of any of his recommendation, you win)
The gist of it is that 30% of studied ants do 70% of the work in digging tunnels. Other ants come in, see that it is too crowded, and don't try to force their way in in an effort to prove they're working hard to the other ants. This ends up being an ideal strategy for the colony because overcrowding reduces the overall work throughput, but requires all ants to be comfortable allowing some of their ant peers to work less while remaining in the vicinity of where work is being accomplished.
Pretty interesting stuff, if you ask me! :)