This is very basic technical information about how the 'net works. — fishfry

Thanks. I'm quite familiar with all that. I was around when IBM was pushing LU6.2.

Second, that we can form hierarchies does not imply that we ought form hierarchies.
— Banno

The question is about nature and why it does in fact organise itself hierarchically - the logical inevitability of that. — apokrisis

I read @JerseyFlight as asking more than just a question about physics; hence mention of quality and value. Ought as well as is.

Thanks. I'm quite familiar with all that. I was around when IBM was pushing LU6.2. — apokrisis

Ok. Then you must agree with my point that the software protocols are peer-to-peer and the opposite of hierarchical. And I concede your point that the present hardware infrastructure is hierarchical.

One still must draw a distinction between a rigid communication hierarchy, in which A talks to B who talks to C in order to communicate with D; and a peer-to-peer network, in which any node can freely communicate with any other. It's a matter of which level you view it from I suppose. You agree at least with this much.

Ah .... explains a lot. SNA is a hierarchical network. Your formative conception of networking is hierarchical. If you'd come to TCP/IP first (as I did) your philosophical understanding of networking might be different. TCP/IP is the exact opposite of SNA. Hierarchical networking failed (at the software level) and peer-to-peer took over the world. Of course from a practical level I suppose hardware is inherently hierarchical, since network traffic must be aggregated at each level. Is this the emergent hierarchy you're talking about? Still, conceptually, TCP/IP is peer-to-peer. I hope you'll work extra hard to overcome your SNA bias here.

You think that hierarchy theory is about stacking levels up like construction bricks? It's actually about forming levels. The symmetry breakings that result in structured flows.

So a BZ pattern for instance....

Ok. Then you must agree with my point that the software protocols are peer-to-peer and the opposite of hierarchical. And I concede your point that the hardware infrastructure is hierarchical. — fishfry

Am I being too subtle?

The hardware was hierarchical because that's just the naturally efficient way to organise the world so it can handle a traffic of data.

Then the software was the attempt to create a new flat virtual realm on top - a unstructured network.

And yet once this software started to handle real world activity, it then developed a hierarchical pattern of activity. As again, that just is what is natural. The flat network became a hierarchical network of networks, with some networks much bigger than most of the others.

Check out constructal theory for the generality it this.

You make it sound like I am trying to enlist some technique of rhetoric here. — JerseyFlight

You keep failing to substantiate your "criticisms".

What do you mean by "tyranny" exactly? Where is the evidence that cannibalism lacks evolutionary context? Why is preventing another Holocaust something to be loaded on the shoulders of hierarchy theory?

It is one rhetorical response after another from you. I'm am waiting for some reply with substance.

You think that hierarchy theory is about stacking levels up like construction bricks? — apokrisis

Well, no; as I said, a hierarchy is characterised by one element that is superior to every other element. Superior is not an ideal word here - perhaps privileged?

Neither the production of bromine, nor its consumption, is privileged in the reaction.

Am I being too subtle? — apokrisis

I think your IBM/SNA background gave you a certain worldview. It's a different reality than the packet-switching approach of TCP/IP. Funny that it's influenced your understanding of philosophy.

The hardware was hierarchical because that's just the naturally efficient way to organise the world so it can handle a traffic of data. — apokrisis

I'm going to concede this point. Even if the AT&T's of the world didn't exist we'd have to invent them. Local aggregation will layer its way up to form a hierarchy, as you say.

Then the software was the attempt to create a new flat virtual realm on top - a unstructured network. — apokrisis

Ok then we are in agreement. The original aim was anti-hierarchical, even if it didn't quite work out. Must that necessarily be the case? Perhaps, and if so I'd need to concede the software point too. Just as utopian human communities always fail. Equality only works in theory; and in the end you always have lords and serfs.

And yet once this software started to handle real world activity, it then developed a hierarchical pattern of activity. As again, that just is what is natural. The flat network became a hierarchical network of networks, with some networks much bigger than most of the others. — apokrisis

So it was all inevitable, and not an awful contingent perversion of the original idea. You're probably right. The utopian vision of the Internet failed; and it wasn't an accident or a plot of the telcos and the government; but rather some sort of structural law of nature in favor of hierarchies, if I can put it that way.

But then you'd say that SNA is a limiting case of TCP/IP; and that, I can't agree with. The TCP/IP packets don't know and don't care how they get where they're going; and surely there's something essential in that.

Check out constructal theory for the generality it this. — apokrisis

Found a couple of interesting references. I see the point you're making. In the end, the packets have to organize themselves into hierarchical flows no matter how utopian the original intent.

That's not hierarchy theory as such.

In hierarchy theory, it is about global constraints imposed on local degrees of freedom. And in self-organisation, both of those things emerge in mutually dependent fashion.

You're talking about some unscientific caricature - a layman's misunderstanding of the subject being discussed.

So it was all inevitable, and not an awful contingent perversion of the original idea. You're probably right. The utopian vision of the Internet failed; and it wasn't an accident or a plot of the telcos and the government; but rather some sort of structural law of nature in favor of hierarchies, if I can put it that way. — fishfry

It is the same as the wealth inequality story. We can't accuse neoliberalism of having a malign intent. It is just a fact of exponential growth that it shifts you from a Gaussian distribution into a Powerlaw regime. Creating a flat market with unbounded growth had to result in new extremes of inequality ... just because randomness and the Matthew effect.

It is the same as the wealth inequality story. — apokrisis

Right, same reason utopian communities always fail. In the end, lords and serfs is a law of nature. How depressing. I think you made your point. It's not all an evil plot. It's an engineering principle of how things flow. Still ... discovering that your worldview comes from IBM mainframes explains a lot :-)

That's not hierarchy theory as such. — apokrisis

Ah, am I? Doubtless. However the phrase "global constraints imposed on local degrees of freedom" seems to be somewhat localised to your posts, so we might see what @JerseyFlight thinks.

It is the same as the wealth inequality story. We can't accuse neoliberalism of having a malign intent. It is just a fact of exponential growth..." — apokrisis

This is exactly what I was getting it. I don't see how my criticisms of Hierarchy Theory fall flat when the whole point was that people like yourself would end up saying things exactly like this: "one cannot classify it in the negative because we observe it as a part of a natural system." If this is the case, and I am not taking you out of context, I don't only reject what you say, but note that it is refuted all the time by human mediation. It would seem the conclusion is not that we need a Hierarchy Theory, but a theory of mediation.

However the phrase "global constraints imposed on local degrees of freedom" seems to be somewhat localised to your posts, so we might see what JerseyFlight thinks. — Banno

Sure. Don’t bother with the science. Sounds like a plan.

In hierarchy theory, it is about global constraints imposed on local degrees of freedom. — apokrisis

'The question I have for hierarchy theorists is how the structuring of such a system avoids the arbitrary negation or deprivation of potentially valuable parts that have been deemed at a lower level of value?'

Come on friend, you gave an analogy of soldiers and generals. And now you confess to "imposed constraints on freedom."

What is most dangerous as I see it, and it is no surprise to me that you cannot see it, is this idea of natural order. Because this is how the constraints would no doubt be justified. You will claim that these are natural, thus normative. This creates a category beyond criticism.

Science is important, but we are human life and human life must be protected, even from science.

I can imagine my analysis here is, if not frustrating, at least disappointing for you, because you are totally correct, this is just a layman criticism of the position, and quite frankly, you are vastly smarter than me. Because of this I would like to make clear that I do not think these objections are somehow comprehensive to your position. I never meant them to be that, I always meant them to be preliminary questions. I was hoping that many of us would explore this emerging field together, not dogmatically but openly. Even now I am simply trying to understand. My position is not dogmatic but one that is open to learn.

Still ... discovering that your worldview comes from IBM mainframes explains a lot :-) — fishfry

It definitely doesn’t. Although now you mention it, IBM did push the 80:20 rule as a primitive expression of the powerlaw story.

I actually did edit an IBM mainframe journal for a couple of years so interviewed guys like Gene Amdahl and Bill Gates. It was right at the time that IBM was losing the battle to impose its proprietary hierarchical SNA cooperative processing architecture on the data processing world.

I actually did edit an IBM mainframe journal for a couple of years so interviewed guys like Gene Amdahl and Bill Gates. It was right at the time that IBM was losing the battle to impose its proprietary hierarchical SNA cooperative processing architecture on the data processing world. — apokrisis

Cool experiences. And now, I have to reframe my understanding of that history. Are you saying that in the end, hierarchies won again? That TCP/IP in effect turned into SNA? That they built an open system but it inevitably turned into a hierarchical one? So they might as well not have bothered? Ok that's clearly not true. So it brings up the question: What did the open peer-to-peer idea bring to the table, in somehow augmenting or improving the hierarchy? Does your theory account for the fact that a hierarchical hardware layer with a peer-to-peer software layer seems to be the winning ticket?

Of course IBM would have loved to have controlled the world's networking standards ... TCP/IP foiled that dream. Will you agree that there is something, even if I'm not nailing it yet, non-hierarchical about the Internet, even today? And that it's an important component?

TCP/IP says that any hardware whatsoever that adhered to publicly published protocols, could participate. In fact you could write your own commentary on the protocols, improvements, new protocols. Any kind of hardware at all. And you don't have to know anything about the network. you just need the address of your destination and the network delivers it. And no one part of the network has to know all the routing. Each node only knows where to send each packet next, and the network itself dynamically adjusts its routing tables as new nodes appear or leave.

All that was a profound advance in networking and it did take over the world. I contend that Its openness was a crucial aspect of its market victory.

There is something to that. I am sort of coming around to my original position. The non-hierarchical nature of the software at its core, has to be acknowledged. You can't just say it's a hierarchy because that's how the packets flow. It's a lot different than a pure hierarchical network.

Does you theory accommodate this situation?

ps -- It's the dynamic routing. A hierarchical network has to do all the routing at the top. It can't compete with dynamic peer-to-peer routing. So at the software level. the Internet works because it is essentially anti-hierarchical. No one node knows the network. No one node controls the network.

I have convinced myself my original point was right. That's a different position from where I was when I started this post so nothing's set in stone. But you have to acknowledge the importance of anti-hierarchy. The Internet's hardware layer is hierarchical; and the software is anti-hierarchical or peer-to-peer. Yeah there are big routers in the middle but they don't control things, they just keep track of their own local sphere of knowledge.

Does your theory account for the fact that a hierarchical hardware layer with a peer-to-peer software layer seems to be the winning ticket? — fishfry

My point was that IBM was trying to preserve the world it knew, which was still a pretty small world. It owned the data processing market with it 370 architecture and its networks of dumb terminals. With minis and then PCs intruding on its monopoly, it wanted to shift to a “seamless” data world, but one still locked into its closed software standards.

But then came the open internet and open standards. Data processing morphed from business computing and eventually into phone driven social media.

So yes, hierarchies will always emerge as the natural way to organise flows - entropic or informational. But if IBM had managed to stay in control, then you would have been stuck with corporate information systems and not evolved to those new levels of information flow.

Another wrinkle of hierarchy theory is it predicts the simplification of its own foundations, constraints shape the degrees of freedom. And evolution moves in the direction of ever greater openness for that reason. It produces general purpose components that enable the shift to higher levels of complexity.

Virtual machines created a considerable increase in software load the hardware has to support. So it is quite a penalty overhead to add the flat world of peer to peer connectivity as an example. Yet that then allows another leap upwards in terms of the functional capacity of the architecture. It soon pays for itself if it leads to a world of increased information flow.

Or at least humans will be happy to pay the data centre electricity bills.

Or at least humans will be happy to pay the data centre electricity bills. — apokrisis

Your post overlapped my edits, I'll try to respond and hope you're rereading the last part of my post. I better leave this for tomorrow. FWIW I came up in the microcomputer business at around that time. So my origin is very "anti-IBM" which perhaps also explains a lot. IBMers wore suits, we had beer busts. And packet-switched networking.

But if IBM had managed to stay in control, then you would have been stuck with corporate information systems and not evolved to those new levels of information flow. — apokrisis

Hence the evolutionary advantage of non-hierarchical systems! You are talking me back into my original point!

Ok time for bed.

What is most dangerous as I see it, and it is no surprise to me that you cannot see it, is this idea of natural order. — JerseyFlight

Is that more dangerous then folk invoking supernatural order?

And did you miss the bit where I said if you understand natural order, then you can actually answer the question of what else could you be doing?

So my point about fossil fuel economics is that it is a Hegelian force that has pushed us into our current economic and political paradigm. Oil produced neoliberalism as its way to achieve its goal.

But how can you even see that is what happened if you don’t understand the way nature works?

Don’t bother with the science — apokrisis

I'm certainly not sure your quantum Hegelianism is entirely as scientific as you would have us believe.

You will claim that these are natural, thus normative. This creates a category beyond criticism. — JerseyFlight

'Twas ever the province of the Dialectic to tell us that one normative system or the other was inevitable. I'm thinking that is an idiosyncratic addition to Hierarchy Theory; but further, I'd be interested to hear why hierarchies might have a preferred place to other structures. My suspicion is that hierarchies are relatively simple and hence one might start a theory of structure there, but that is a long way form the claim that they are inevitable. So Herbert A. Simon's analysis is a start, not the end. The move would not be dissimilar to that described by @fishfry from hierarchic networks to peer-to-peer.

But being an old Hippie, versed in E. F. Schumacher and Bill Mollison, that's just the sort of thing I would say.

As if your opinion is backed by any familiarity with that science. :yawn:

Hence the evolutionary advantage of non-hierarchical systems! — fishfry

The advantage was removing the real world physical limitations on open connectivity. The internet created a world of pure information flows where the cost of connecting was zeroed to some ISP rate. Physical distance, hardware configuration, and anything else that could physical constrain an act of communication were removed to produce a level playing field.

So it had nothing to do with going non-hierarchical and everything to do with creating a new virtual stage where the information was divorced from the physics.

People let rip in this new world. And as is natural, hierarchical order resulted. We ended up with the influencer economy, Trump, cancel culture, and all those other good things.

It is always concerning to see empirical observation and science challenged by ideology. I think you are absolutely on the right side of this debate. I wanted to ask you a question. Do you think moderating how the hierarchy functions insofar as how it is enforced, who rises upward, the power granted to each ring and so on, is the best way to avoid negative outcomes? I think that this is where progress has been and can be made and how we stop hierarchies from being too tyrannical.

Is that more dangerous then folk invoking supernatural order? — apokrisis

It could be more dangerous depending on how the natural order is interpreted.

And did you miss the bit where I said if you understand natural order, then you can actually answer the question of what else could you be doing? — apokrisis

It seems to me the latter premise is here conditioned by the first.

But how can you even see that is what happened if you don’t understand the way nature works? — apokrisis

This question assumes that you have rightly understood Neoliberalism at its most hierarchical and primitive base. Because you have understood it through hierarchy theory? You specifically said that "oil produced it," what about ideology, what about psychology, what about class structure?

I think Banno is asking important questions here: "I'd be interested to hear why hierarchies might have a preferred place to other structures. My suspicion is that hierarchies are relatively simple and hence one might start a theory of structure there, but that is a long way form the claim that they are inevitable."

Where does this theory lead in terms of political power? You have already made statements to the effect that tyranny "is just a fact." Can you say for sure that it doesn't lead here:

Just Hierarchy: Why Social Hierarchies Matter in China and the Rest of the World
by Daniel A. Bell, Wang Pei

A trenchant defense of hierarchy in different spheres of our lives, from the personal to the political

All complex and large-scale societies are organized along certain hierarchies, but the concept of hierarchy has become almost taboo in the modern world. Just Hierarchy contends that this stigma is a mistake. In fact, as Daniel Bell and Wang Pei show, it is neither possible nor advisable to do away with social hierarchies. Drawing their arguments from Chinese thought and culture as well as other philosophies and traditions, Bell and Wang ask which forms of hierarchy are justified and how these can serve morally desirable goals. They look at ways of promoting just forms of hierarchy while minimizing the influence of unjust ones, such as those based on race, sex, or caste.

Which hierarchical relations are morally justified and why? Bell and Wang argue that it depends on the nature of the social relation and context. Different hierarchical principles ought to govern different kinds of social relations: what justifies hierarchy among intimates is different from what justifies hierarchy among citizens, countries, humans and animals, and humans and intelligent machines. Morally justified hierarchies can and should govern different spheres of our social lives, though these will be very different from the unjust hierarchies that have governed us in the past.

A vigorous, systematic defense of hierarchy in the modern world, Just Hierarchy examines how hierarchical social relations can have a useful purpose, not only in personal domains but also in larger political realms.

It is always concerning to see empirical observation and science challenged by ideology. — Judaka

What about human rights?

It is always concerning to see empirical observation and science challenged by ideology. — Judaka

I would have thought that attaching Hegelian dialectic to thermodynamics was exactly science challenged by ideology.

Do you think moderating how the hierarchy functions insofar as how it is enforced, who rises upward, the power granted to each ring and so on, is the best way to avoid negative outcomes? — Judaka

A hierarchy as understood in an organic systems sense, and not just a mechanistic construction sense, is a natural balance of complementary impulses. That is why it is self organising and self balancing.

So a social system would be trying to balance the contrasting things of local competition and global cooperation.

The hierarchy would be driven by the creative freedoms of individuals, and even groups of individuals, striving to better their positions (in whatever ways - money, status, power, reproductive success, happiness, self actualisation).

But this would be matched by some equal degree of cooperativity. Individuals and even groups of individuals, would do the opposite thing of competing hard. They would cooperate hard, because that is also an ultimately functional and self-interested thing to be doing when life is dependent on their being a collective functional social system.

It you want the status of being even an adequate tennis player, you have to support the existence of a tennis club and a game being played by shared rules. Cooperation on a general global level sets the scene such that you can actually express a competitive nature on the local and personal scale.

The same goes for any social function. Democracy is where we all agree to being bound by a collective rule of law that in turn clearly defines our individual rights and freedoms. That sets us up to compete in ways that - if they are functional - will rebuild, even grow, the very society that constrains us.

So our societies make us what we are by placing limits on our actions. And if those limits are well adapted, then we will spend our lives expressing the resulting habits of action in ways that bring personal achievement while confirming those same rules of engagement.

When we talk about negative outcomes, we are usually thinking of some idealised utopian view of the human condition, Maybe Rousseau’s noble savage, or the happy village before the dark satanic mills appeared. Competition and status seeking are modern distortions of what is best in humans - the cheerful commune where all are equal and help themselves to the common wealth as fits their needs.

Negativity is where a social order is authoritarian and suppressive of individuals freedoms. Things are unbalanced where one isn’t in fact free to compete according to a shared framework and so contribute fully to the functioning whole.

And negativity is also about the question of whether the whole system is aimed at a functional direction. What’s the point of the human rat race? Who benefits?

So there are plenty of ways the balancing act could go wrong. But there is still the naturalness, the logical inevitably, of a hierarchical relationship based on some systematised balance of local striving competition and globally constraining cooperativity.

If any social order persists for long, it can only have persisted because it did in fact strike some kind of balance in terms of being able to turn out individuals who then remade the social world as it had made them.

From a modern point of view, we would say that traditional social hierarchies were rather stagnant in character and lacked energetic growth. And yet they were functional for lives lived either as sparse populations of hunter gatherers, or denser populations of agrarian settlements - lives lived within the physical limits of solar energy.

And today we live lives as optimised to dissipate the energy bonanza that is fossil fuels. We have evolved the social settings which promote unbound growth. That’s a positive - or at least natural - for as long as it lasts.

But the main point here is that social structure is a dynamical balance. And that balancing act - in which global constraints need to produce the right kinds of local degrees of freedom to ensure the whole gets persistently rebuilt - is the guts of what hierarchy theory is describing.

I would have thought that attaching Hegelian dialectic to thermodynamics — Banno

Not Hegel but Peirce. And Peirce was a scientist. His orientation was probabilistic and thus thermodynamic.

I think that you would have to trample on those to destroy hierarchies? If that is what free choice creates.

I am far less interested in where you think your plans might take you, I'm more interested to hear your plans. Provided the focus is on hierarchies, I think things will be unclear. I think any sensible proposal to dismantle a hierarchy will require an element of tyranny greater than what was present in the actual hierarchy.