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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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! :)
some ants love to mountain bike, and who can blame them?
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.
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.
The reproductive success of an ant hill is determined at the hill level, so the ants have no evolutionary incentive for selfishness at all.
(Not saying successful communism is impossible for humans, especially at smaller scales, just that evolution is working against it, rather than for it).
"in in an effort to prove they're working hard to the other ants"
"all ants to be comfortable allowing some of their ant peers to work less"
Or maybe on some instinctive level they realize they just literally cannot work in the crowd and wait until they can and that's that.
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.
Deleted Comment
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance#Efficiency_and_ad...
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep04175.pdf?proof=t
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
Now that’s a scary thought.
Edit: I think it is this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmpuerlbJu0
Are they?
They make the cells for her to lay eggs in, so that she has a daughter in the old colony when she leaves.
The workers shrink the queen down when they want her to swarm, and they stop her laying so she is ready to fly.
The workers clean the queen and feed her.
They expand the number of cells for brood in spring and shrink it in autumn.
The workers decide when the queen is ready to die, and feed royal jelly to the grub that will supersede the old queen by killing her.
Who controls the hive?
I’m a beekeeper and I don’t know.
Why can’t it be that people who are prone to ignore messaging also do so because of biological predisposition? Brain chemistry!
Bees probably feel they are deciding too :)
Is it in all cases though? People with stuff like oppositional defiant disorder might be predisposed to act that way through biology.
Being the rogue bee might be fine. Being the rogue turtle, well... it might be good for the species but bad for the individual.
[0] https://yewtu.be/watch?v=zWH_9VRWn8Y
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
-- George Bernard Shaw
https://towardsdatascience.com/intuition-exploration-vs-expl...
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CizwH_T7pjg