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What if you did the exact opposite, like rogue bees do (2020)

mrdbourke.com

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Re: What if you did the exact opposite, like rogue bees do (2020)

#71

Post by lazide »

SeanAnderson wrote: post #43

The whole "opt out of expected group-think behavior" reminds me of a paper regarding the tunneling and movement behavior of ants: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/science/ants-worker-idlen... 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…

Guessing when working ants get too tired (burned out?) it also gives the ‘work-adjacent’ ants a chance to get in with it being less crowded.

Re: What if you did the exact opposite, like rogue bees do (2020)

#72

Post by jasmer »

SeanAnderson wrote: post #43

The whole "opt out of expected group-think behavior" reminds me of a paper regarding the tunneling and movement behavior of ants: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/science/ants-worker-idlen... 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…

That's some heavy handed humanization of ants attitudes there.

"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.

Re: What if you did the exact opposite, like rogue bees do (2020)

#73

Post by lazide »

codetrotter wrote: post #59
aeturnum wrote: post #17

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.…

> 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!

I guess it all boils down to the age old question - do we (uh, I mean ants) have free will?

Re: What if you did the exact opposite, like rogue bees do (2020)

#74

Post by bloppe »

zentropia wrote: post #46
SeanAnderson wrote: post #43

The whole "opt out of expected group-think behavior" reminds me of a paper regarding the tunneling and movement behavior of ants: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/science/ants-worker-idlen... 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…

Worker ants are all sister and they don't reproduce, so no problem letting others do the hard work.

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).

Re: What if you did the exact opposite, like rogue bees do (2020)

#75

Post by lazide »

frikk wrote: post #31
DicIfTEx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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). [0] https://yewtu.be/watch?v=zWH…

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 soc…

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?

Re: What if you did the exact opposite, like rogue bees do (2020)

#76

Post by lazide »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #48
tikkun wrote: post #47

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.

I was stressed about my relationship with my wife so I got a second one. This advice did not decrease my stress.

Could still be a fluke. Have you tried three? It might be more harmonically stable.

Re: What if you did the exact opposite, like rogue bees do (2020)

#77

Post by neilk »

Abimelex wrote: post #51
neilk wrote: post #8

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. https:…

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.

Re: What if you did the exact opposite, like rogue bees do (2020)

#78

Post by lazide »

jimmySixDOF wrote: post #53
shaburn wrote: post #19

Look up Charlie Munger on Bee Say Something Syndrome with the waggle dance.

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.

Impossible to tell until you take it in my experience.

Re: What if you did the exact opposite, like rogue bees do (2020)

#79

Post by mistermann »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #61
mcny wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Like cancer, we are (allegedly) killing our host environment.

Re: What if you did the exact opposite, like rogue bees do (2020)

#80

Post by [deleted] »

jasmer wrote: post #72
SeanAnderson wrote: post #43

The whole "opt out of expected group-think behavior" reminds me of a paper regarding the tunneling and movement behavior of ants: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/science/ants-worker-idlen... 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…

That's some heavy handed humanization of ants attitudes there. "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.

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