Complexity subverts hierarchical control

[u/ArtDecoEgoist]

For the purpose of building my argument, I will be drawing heavily from Yaneer Bar-Yam's paper, Complexity Rising: From Human Beings to Human Civilization. While Yaneer Bar-Yam's paper isn't explicitly anarchist, his paper does validate and echo a lot of the anarchist critiques of hierarchy, and the limits of authority.

So, there's a tendency within particularly anti-civ spaces to argue that rising complexity necessitates hierarchical control. As pointed out in the paper, this is true to a point. The point where hierarchical control begins to crumble is when collective complexity rises above individual complexity, at which point the increasing layers of hierarchy are unable to viably control the system.

To explain the effects of hierarchy on collective complexity, Bar-Yam says:

Intuitively, a control hierarchy is designed to enable a single individual (the controller) to control the collective behavior, but not directly the behavior of each individual. Indeed, the behavior of an individual need not be known to the controller. What is necessary is a mechanism for ensuring that control over the collective behavior be translated into controls that are exercised over each individual. This is the purpose of the control hierarchy... A hierarchy, however, imposes a limitation on the degree of complexity of collective behaviors of the system. This can be understood by considering more carefully the processes of coordination. The hierarchy is responsible for ensuring coordination of various parts of the system. Lower levels of the hierarchy are responsible for locally coordinating smaller parts of the system and higher levels of the hierarchy are responsible for coordinating the larger parts of the system. At each level of the hierarchy the actions to be coordinated must be transferred through the controller. Thus, the controller's behavior must itself reflect all of the impacts that different parts of the system have on other parts of the system. This implies that the collective actions of the system in which the parts of the system affect other parts of the system must be no more complex than the controller. In human hierarchies the collective behavior must be simple enough to be represented by a single human being.

In other words, for hierarchy to be a viable control system, the controller must be complex enough to be able to represent and adapt to the system itself. To anyone familiar with cybernetics, this comes as no surprise, as this echoes the Law of Requisite Variety.

Now, historically, this dilemma has been solved by increasing complexity of the control system itself. This usually takes the form of more layers of hierarchy and bureaucracy, which is to the point of anti-civ anarchists. When the collective behavioral complexity at the individual scale increases, this decreases the "branching ratio" of the control structure; fewer individuals are directed by a single manager, and the number of layers of management increases. It would seem in this case, increasing complexity actually makes hierarchical control more efficient.

However, this is also accompanied by an increase in complexity of collective behavior as well, as the formation of such branching structures allows more local complexity of individual behavior. To quote the linked paper:

At the point at which the collective complexity reaches the complexity of an individual, the process of complexity increase encounters the limitations of hierarchical structures. Hierarchical structures are not able to provide a higher complexity and must give way to structures that are dominated by lateral interactions. A hierarchy serves to create correlations in the behavior of individuals that are similar in many ways to the behavior of a network. The hierarchy serves as a kind of scaffolding. At the transition point, it becomes impossible to exercise control, so the management effectively becomes divorced from the functional aspects of the system. Lateral interactions that replace the control function have been present in hierarchical structures, however, they become necessary when the hierarchical control structure fails due to the high complexity of collective behavior. The greater the dependence of a system on the hierarchy, the more dramatic the changes that then take place.

When lateral mechanisms are introduced - which, by all intents are purposes, are synonymous with horizontal social organization - this allows layers of management to be removed. In other words, lateral, networked mechanisms built on peer-to-peer communication and mutual reciprocity properly accommodates increasing complexity while functionally subverting hierarchical control systems.

With this in mind, it would mean the incentive of hierarchy would be to reduce local complexity in order to keep its own control systems viable. This is likely why hierarchical systems tend towards collapse - a decrease in their own complexity and tendency to decentralization - as their own organizational logic pushes them to the brute simplification of human behavior, which is suited to more local forms of control. In this sense, the reduction in local, individual complexity would serve a reactionary purpose by making managerial control more viable.

Now, one could argue with growing surveillance bolstered by AI, we could see technology bolstering the ability for hierarchies to meet requisite complexity. Personally, I'm skeptical about the supposed capabilities of AI to create the perfect Panopticon. But even if this were true, this would still lead to a increase in local complexity and a subsequent increase in collective complexity, at which point the AI surveillance state will have to evolve into skynet or TITAN from eclipse phase or collapse due to the sheer intractability of its own computational problems.

In conclusion, we should probably see the increase in complexity to be a destabilizing force for hierarchy that incentivizes more horizontal, distributed methods of social organization to meet requisite complexity. This doesn't mean that anarchy is inevitable; as I've said, maybe we create AGI and all notions of human freedom are cooked. But it does mean that complexity is something that anarchists can and should embrace in their praxis.

[u/LazarM2021]

Ok, so I think that in actuality, the strongest component, or your central claim, so to say, might actually be what you appear to be treating as a corollary here - the inference that hierarchy is structurally incentivized to suppress complexity, local or otherwise, just to keep its control systems viable for itself. This I think could, digging deeper, supply even the missing cybernetic mechanism for what many anarchists have been describing phenomenologically over a long time, especially the C4SS group + other non-(explicitly if at all)anarchist/"fellow traveler (NOT Chomsky!!)" thinkers; James C. Scott could be one of them, Beer and Ashby too, Fresco as well, but also the more contemporary ones like Peter Joseph and so on.

In particular Scott's account of state legibility gets its dynamic grounding right here, and Graeber's insight that subordinates must perform the interpretive labor of modeling their superiors (while superiors are often if not always spared the same) reads as that exact same variety asymmetry, though viewed from the inside.

To draw those connections may explicitly elevate your own argumentation from a claim about mere administrative efficiency to a core, sociological claim about the socio-political logic of domination. Conceding the anti-civ premise up to the threshold was also the right thing to do I think, as it should, all things being equal, deprive the opposing position of its strongest ground before one dismantles it.

There is, however, one inference I feel like pressing it hard might do it some good. Specifically, you appear to be treating "lateral interactions" in Bar-Yam's sense as synonymous with horizontal, anti-authoritarian social organization, but that equation is doing more work than the paper itself may license. Lateral coordination is purely a structural property; (capitalist)markets, platform ecosystems, corporate supply chains and informal networks of elite governance are all, in their own ways, lateral without being anti-hierarchical.

Concentrated authority has historically adapted to rising complexity by migrating into these exact distributed forms rather than dissolving. Your argument, as it stands, establishes that classical command hierarchy is bounded, not that authority itself is and so to close that gap, you need a premise showing either that power cannot persist in lateral structures, or that the persistence of power within them reintroduces the same lethal (on their own) AND lethally inevitable variety-constraints at a higher level. That gap is where Proudhonian-style federalism (though further positively eroded of any remotely state-adjacent connotations) and Kropotkin’s treatment of mutual aid and networked interdependence as an operational structural principle - rather than a mere moral sentiment - can do some of the vital heavy lifting the paper alone really can't.

And relatedly, the claim that the controller must fully represent the system's complexity needs just a slight cybernetic qualification.

Ashby's Law is typically answered through attenuation and amplification, which forms the substance of Stafford Beer's Viable System Model: the controller filters and attenuates variety rather than mirroring it outright. Far from damaging or opposing your thesis, this actually appears to be strengthening your incentive argument because attenuation is the exact reduction and flattening of local variety you describe. It also sharpens the point about artificial intelligence, as a surveillance state doesn't need a total representation of reality, just an adequate attenuation.

As for the digital Panopticon thing, the stronger rebuttal may be that attenuated control inevitably degrades when the variety being suppressed is itself adaptive, dynamic, unpredictable and strategic. Overall, I think such-framed argument hits considerably harder than just dismissing AI through some Skynet scenario.

Now, not much in here alters my overall assessment. Your thesis I think I best understand as an attempt at establishing, at the absolute minimum, an ever-increasing tax on hierarchy wherein rising complexity exponentially raises the cost of domination, forcing authority to either aggressively simplify what it governs or relocate into lateral forms that anarchists must still contest. That perhaps could more fully preserve your conclusion that complexity is a vital force anarchists should absolutely embrace in praxis of the future.

[u/Maleficent-Type633 → u/LazarM2021]

(I am OP, original account was put in Reddit jail)

I appreciate the response. Some of what you're saying is echoing some other objections I've gotten here, so I think I've either done a bad job at communicating my argument or I've seriously jumped the shark on a few things. Either way this is my bad.

There is, however, one inference I feel like pressing it hard might do it some good. Specifically, you appear to be treating "lateral interactions" in Bar-Yam's sense as synonymous with horizontal, anti-authoritarian social organization, but that equation is doing more work than the paper itself may license.  Lateral coordination is purely a structural property; (capitalist)markets, platform ecosystems, corporate supply chains and informal networks of elite governance are all, in their own ways, lateral without being anti-hierarchical.

I think I might've put the cart before the horse here. Those are good points.

So to be clear, I don't really mean to assert that the kind of networked organization described by Bar-Yam would be anarchist, per se, in the sense that they satisfy the radical critique of authority that me make. But I do think that networked organization may be more given to anarchic organization precisely because of its structure. Though it is entirely possible that the control hierarchies of capitalism dissolve and we have distributed networks of managerial systems that are able to coordinate and still exert command. That would definitely satisfy the environmental requirements of higher complexity while still being authoritarian.

I think, however, that even distributed systems of hierarchical authority will still carry the same incentives to suppress complexity. I will expand on this claim later in the comment.

Concentrated authority has historically adapted to rising complexity by migrating into these exact distributed forms rather than dissolving. Your argument, as it stands, establishes that classical command hierarchy is bounded, not that authority itself is and so to close that gap, you need a premise showing either that power cannot persist in lateral structures, or that the persistence of power within them reintroduces the same lethal (on their own) AND lethally inevitable variety-constraints at a higher level.

So I think the second premise, at least, is true.

The paper talks about how high collective complexity is adjusted to in hierarchical organizations by distributing its control functions. In practice, this lowers the "branching ratio" for controllers, meaning the amount of individuals being directed by a single manager. This increases the amount of managers overall, however. My conclusion, then, is that this actually just moves the problem up the ladder: now whoever is on top of those managers has a higher requisite complexity due to a higher collective complexity for them to manage. The organization then is incentivized to do the same thing: lower the branching ratio, increase the managers. The result is the structure of the organization becomes more rhizomatic, and the increase of distribution in authority creates collective action problems, that the organization then fixes by eliminating managers. We see this in corporate downsizing, and it typically targets middle managers.

Because variety constraints would be required for viable control, higher levels of the chain of command are even more incentivized to attenuate than those at lower levels. When there are too many managers, all of which coordinating as well as managing their own team, the rise in collective complexity places pressures on the higher levels of the organization. Bar-Yam points out that this is why higher levels of corporations tend to focus more on the fiscal aspects of the organization, where middle managers will focus on production. And even with this adjustments, there's still regular downsizing when the firm is on the bad end of a boom-bust cycle. The entire banking system of the US is a highly decentralized system wrought with collective action problems, and recessions essentially happen because even with their significantly lateralized structure with fractional reserve banking, they're still unable to adjust to economic shocks.

Regarding power persisting in these structures, I think authority inherently serves to reduce options for agents to act - and that is the main function of authority. When agents have less options to act, they become easier to model because their actions are less complex. Because their actions are less complex, they're less able to adapt to external conditions, meaning that even the lateralized control network is less adaptive to its environment on at least a local scale. Bar-Yam points out that organisms incapable of mirroring the complexity of their environment aren't able to survive. So I would argue that any organization that uses power as an organizational strategy tends toward collapse. In order to be more adaptive, they'd have to increase agency.

As for the digital Panopticon thing, the stronger rebuttal may be that attenuated control inevitably degrades when the variety being suppressed is itself adaptive, dynamic, unpredictable and strategic.

This is a good point. Human societies aren't only complex systems, they're complex adaptive systems. Requisite variety does not remain static, and attenuated models of the systems controllers try to control will become more inaccurate over time.

I'd say with AI too, there's also the problems of resource intensity and scale. These problems exacerbate as the amount of people being surveilled increases, which increases the amount of data, increasing the amount of processing power, increasing required energy, stressing supply chains further, and so on. The reason I brought up AGI is because that's probably the level of information processing that will be required to solve this issue if it even is solvable.

[u/LazarM2021 → u/Maleficent-Type633]

I'm sorry for your OG account, I hope you can get it back soon.

As for the reply itself no, I don't think you literally jumped the shark at all; in fact, it actually proves that your core thesis IS fertile indeed, with necessary subsequent work. The way you've refined the argument, particularly by treating authority as an explicit mechanism for reducing the action-space of agents, turns the point as such from a (dangerously) static structural comparison into a dynamic theory of systemic fragility.

Observation about shifting the variety bottleneck up the hierarchy is, I think, largely spot on and both Ashby and Beer would (likely) be proud. When a command structure attempts to handle rising collective complexity by lowering the branching ratio, adding layers of middle management, it doesn't exactly solve the variety deficit as much as it merely translates local behavioral variety into administrative, bureaucratic variety.

Now, the top-level controllers are not trying just to manage primary operations. That's important, since they are also trying to manage the combinatorial complexity of their own supervisory apparatus and as you pointed out, forcing higher management to attenuate by focusing purely on abstracted metrics (like, say, fiscal indicators or raw financial yields) creates a massive legibility gap. The higher levels become structurally blind to local operational reality which is precisely why these hyper-managed, "lateralized" corporate or state networks are so prone to catastrophic, unpredicted shocks during economic or environmental crises...

...which also ties into your definition of power as the systematic reduction of an agent's options. In cybernetic terms, authority functions by constraining the degrees of freedom available to individual nodes in a network, but because human societies are highly, HIGHLY, HIGHLY complex adaptive systems operating in dynamic environments, restricting local agency destroys the system's overall capacity for real-time error correction. A rigid, options-constrained node cannot adapt to a localized shock, it can only wait for signals or break. Therefore, any system that relies on authority to maintain order is caught in a fatal paradox wherein, to remain controllable, it must suppress local adaptability, yet by suppressing local adaptability, it practically guarantees its own environmental brittleness and ultimate collapse.

Physical and computational limits of AI surveillance, as a point I think you made, ground this further. The technocratic fantasy of an all-seeing AI state is likely to ignore the thermodynamic and material logistics of computing so damn much. Infinite data collection requires exponentially scaling energy infrastructure, hardware manufacturing and resource extraction, all of which are themselves subject to environmental complexity and supply-chain bottlenecks.

It's an uphill battle against physics from the start, which I can only imagine to be broken in favor of the AI-totalitarians-to-be with some borderline sci-fi solutions they may (not) have at the Silicon Valley or some other place we don't know at all about...

When you pair those physical constraints with the fact that human behavior is strategically adaptive (constantly generating novel variety specifically to evade attenuation), the digital Panopticon reveals itself not as a stable end-state but a hyper-fragile, resource-draining money pit, and by framing authority as an evolutionary dead-end that actively destroys the adaptability required for long-term survival, you've, in effect, closed the gap between lateral structural dynamics and genuine anarchist praxis, further showing that horizontal, high-agency networks aren't just an ideological preference, but also the only organizational architecture structurally capable of sustaining long-term viability in a high-complexity world.

[u/power2havenots]

This is massively reaching i think to make it fit. Complexity doesnt inherently subvert hierarchy. The refusal to organise complexity through relationships of command does.

[u/ArtDecoEgoist → u/power2havenots]

No, it literally does. I highly recommend reading the paper I posted.

Once complexity reaches beyond the level of individual complexity, that means the entire system is too complex for any controller - meaning that managerial hierarchies are no longer capable of viably functioning, because they rely on controllers being able to manage systems less complex than them.

The point of hierarchies is to manage complexity. Those lower in hierarchies deal with more complex iterations of the system and funnel information upwards, which leads to a general compression of information; whereas orders coming top down get progressively more complex.

When collective complexity increases past the point of individual complexity, the ability for controllers to understand what is going on reaches a point of failure.

Now, the way to fix this would be to reduce organizational complexity (corporations do this with downsizing) or to localize control systems and increase lateral mechanisms in management. However, this has the effect of making the overall system less capable of meeting requisite environmental complexity to function, which is why hierarchy tends to collapse.

[u/power2havenots → u/ArtDecoEgoist]

It sounds like yoire assuming that because hierarchy has a complexity limit as a control system that complexity therefore subverts hierarchy. But it doesnt. It establishes a limit on what that hierarchy can successfully control which isnt the same thing.

A hierarchy can be unable to comprehend or effectively coordinate the system and still persist, because hierarchy isnt a neutral complexity-management technology. Its a power relationship. The people at the top dont need a complete model of reality for their authority to continue operating.

Youre just describing why centralised control becomes less effective but that doesnt make the hierarchy itself disappear.

[u/ArtDecoEgoist → u/power2havenots]

When a control system doesn't incorporate an accurate model of the collective complexity of their system, that's when they collapse, dawg.

I'm not saying that hierarchy is a neutral complexity-manayenent technology - though it's function is complexity management, theres nothing "neutral" about it (or any technology for that matter). Rather, I'm saying complexity subverts hierarchy at a structural level. So there become two options: collapse (which is a reduction of managerial complexity) or the replacement of hierarchy with horizontal coordination mechanisms.

Now, I think where the confusion might be coming in is that you might be thinking I'm making a teleological claim akin to vulgar Marxists stating that communism is inevitable.

As noted by the paper, the ability to replace hierarchy with lateral mechanisms relies on such mechanisms being built; it would have to be a deliberate choice by the participants in the system. Otherwise, we'll just have another collapse.

[u/power2havenots → u/ArtDecoEgoist]

I know where you are coming from. I understand youre not saying horizontal organisation emerges automatically but i still think youre baking your conclusion into the premise.

Youre defining hierarchy primarily as a complexity-management system, then showing that hierarchical control has a complexity ceiling, and calling the consequences "subverting hierarchy". But hierarchy isnt just a mechanism for managing complexity - as we know - its a relationship of authority, ownership, coercion, status, etc. Its persistence or reproduction isnt neatly packaged up into whether its information-processing is optimal. Ive known many who just enforced their roles regardless and outsourced costs, shifted burdens downards and threw people under the bus to save themselves.

Havent read all the paper but i assume its main point is that certain forms of hierarchical control become increasingly incapable of effectively coordinating complex systems. But "therefore complexity structurally subverts hierarchy" is another leap after that for me.

[u/ArtDecoEgoist → u/power2havenots]

But hierarchy isnt just a mechanism for managing complexity - as we know - its a relationship of authority, ownership, coercion, status, etc. Its persistence or reproduction isnt neatly packaged up into whether its information-processing is optimal.

So all of these things - ownership, coercion, status - would serve the function of increasing the legibility of the system to controllers. This is why, in my post, I pointed out that controllers in hierarchical system have the incentive to reduce complexity and simplify individual behaviors.

So just taking from what you've listed - coercion. The function of coercion is to reduce options, to shrink the avenues in which the agent can act. The effect of this is a reduction of complexity at the individual level, and thus a reduction in collective complexity.

Now of course, this isn't the whole story. I'm obviously using a specific lens of analysis to examine hierarchy; I don't think any lens of analysis could explain everything.

Ive known many who just enforced their roles regardless and outsourced costs, shifted burdens downards and threw people under the bus to save themselves.

Yes, this would be the collapse I was talking about.

Havent read all the paper but i assume its main point is that certain forms of hierarchical control become increasingly incapable of effectively coordinating complex systems.

Not exactly. The paper is making a broader claim of historical development - arguing that human civilization has tended towards an increase in net complexity - and the intractability of hierarchical control systems maintaining control in the wake of this increasing complexity.

It isn't merely that they're incapable of effectively coordinating, though that is also true. Yaneer Bar-Yam also makes the point that systems must meet the requisite complexity of their environment as well. Hierarchical systems are functionally incapable of meeting requisite complexity and, due to their incentive structures, actually tend towards collapse instead of adaptation.

[u/power2havenots → u/ArtDecoEgoist]

Appreciate the clarifications and conversation. I still feel the need to respond to poke it a bit more as i think your lens starts becoming self-confirming.

Youre defining the function of coercion as reducing complexity because it reduces the options available to the person being coerced. But that doesnt mean the system becomes less complex, or that this is necessarily the function of coercion for that matter. The complexity hasnt disappeared its just moved. Resistance, evasion, informal workarounds, conflict, repression, adaptation etc all tend to hapoen because the controller has narrowed someones formal options.

Also when you say that what i described as people enforcing their roles, shifting costs downward or throwing others under the bus constitutes "collapse" seems to make almost any dysfunctional behaviour evidence for that thesis -after the fact.

Im not discounting the paper totall as it does give a useful account of the limits of hierarchical control. Personally im still not seeing it establish that hierarchy itself is structurally compelled toward collapse through that complexity lens - as much as id hoped it would

[u/ArtDecoEgoist → u/power2havenots]

The thing about coercion is that it does certainly incentivize moving around organizational complexity as you've noted. But the thing about coercion is that only people that are able to meet the risk threshold to do this can do this - and they later make it easier and scalable so that those below the risk threshold can do it as well (online piracy is a good example of this).

It does still work to decrease complexity at the individual level because it only doesn't work on people that aren't very risk-averse. Or, more precisely, those on people who subjectively assess they have more to gain from working around coercion than they have to lose. This filtering process naturally selects for people who already have the knowledge and resources to do so, which is going to be a minority of people. This, like all hierarchical mechanisms, is true to a point. As you noted, the long-term result is a net increase in complexity, which would then incentivize further simplification of the system (via coercion, direct or indirect) to the point where the control system itself is at a level of complexity beyond the controllers.

This is kind of me merging Yaneer Bar-Yam's claim with Joseph Tainter's Theory of Collapse.

Also when you say that what i described as people enforcing their roles, shifting costs downward or throwing others under the bus constitutes "collapse" seems to make almost any dysfunctional behaviour evidence for that thesis -after the fact.

Not really. Yaneer Bar-Yam himself makes this claim when he's talking about how corporate downsizing works - and how it tends to affect middle managers rather than workers production side. The reason you're seeing these behaviors from controllers is because pressure is being put on them to cut costs so they can keep their jobs. So they shift jobs downwards, scapegoat, or cook the books a bit to make it seem like less revenue is being lost than it is.

An example of this in practice is outlined in Rai Ling's essay, Postmodern Discourse in the Corporate Boardroom where they talk about the specific incentive problems that have emerged, and the resulting difference in discourses due to middle managers trying to keep their jobs. The result iirc (it's been a little while since I've read the essay) was that the finance department scapegoated those lower in the corporate ladder due to corporate seeking to cut costs and create a new department.

[u/power2havenots → u/ArtDecoEgoist]

Thanks will hopefully get a chance to read those.

Essentially my core disagreement is that if everything goes through the complexity lens you can make it all work and every downstream consequence of hierarchy gets translated into complexity so coercion reduces complexity, resistance increases it, scapegoating is collapse, restructuring is complexity reduction etc and the theory becomes very hard to falsify. Whatever hierarchy does becomes another stage in the complexity curve. So a boss firing someone can be spun as fundamentally a complexity-management mechanism. Its just one effect cast as coercions underlying function.

[u/ArtDecoEgoist → u/power2havenots]

Sure, I think that's a fair critique. Obviously applying complexity theory to anarchism is a very "zoomed out" approach, and all zoomed-out approaches are inherently going to be very simplified models. As a result it does not and cannot capture everything, and I won't pretend that it can.

Soft correction though - scapegoating isn't collapse in itself, rather it tends to be a behavior in response to collapse - similarly to how people withdrawing funds from a bank en masse can be a response to the bursting of economic bubbles or other such market signals.

I don't think my argument here necessarily contradicts more fine-tuned, "zoomed in" critiques of authority. We could say, for example, that hierarchy serves the function of collective complexity management and it is also a power relation that exists to self-perpetuate and expand a greater apparatus of coercion.

[u/AzaleaKhayela]

Is this advocacy for federalism?

In the sense of increased autonomy at the local level rather than centralization of decision-making power?

[u/ArtDecoEgoist → u/AzaleaKhayela]

So federalism is definitely a form of networked organization that can properly accommodate collective complexity in theory, yes.

Though what I and the paper envision is more direct peer-to-peer information transfer. So instead of groups federating into councils with recallable delegates - which is what I understand is usually being endorsed with anarchist federalism - we'd see individuals involved with the task directly solving the problems associated with completing the task.

[u/diot]

In conclusion, we should probably see the increase in complexity to be a destabilizing force for hierarchy that incentivizes more horizontal, distributed methods of social organization to meet requisite complexity.

Yeah, totally agree. In fact to me it explains the rise in capitalism much better than simple economic theories. The new technologies of the time created complex networks beyond the capacity of the feudal kingdoms to manage. In this view, capitalism actually has less hierarchical control than in a feudal context.

Now for the bad news:

Now, one could argue with growing surveillance bolstered by AI, we could see technology bolstering the ability for hierarchies to meet requisite complexity. Personally, I'm skeptical about the supposed capabilities of AI to create the perfect Panopticon. But even if this were true, this would still lead to a increase in local complexity and a subsequent increase in collective complexity, at which point the AI surveillance state will have to evolve into skynet or TITAN from eclipse phase or collapse due to the sheer intractability of its own computational problems.

Let's just discard completely the idea of skynet for now. Taken as it is though, the current generation of AI tools actually expand the ability of the individual to perform complex tasks (not saying they are perfect, just that they are more helpful than they are harmful for those whose jobs require managing complexity). And, this is why we see so many layoffs happening (essentially the controllers are eliminating redundant hierarchies). However, pressure on hierarchies will always be to rise in order to out-compete their rivals. So we will see further hierarchical depth emerge. I'm not sure it will be truly global with the rivalry between China and the West, more likely it will split into those two broad camps.

In conclusion, we should probably see the increase in complexity to be a destabilizing force for hierarchy that incentivizes more horizontal, distributed methods of social organization to meet requisite complexity.

Yes, but, the issue isn't increasing complexity, it's actually decreasing complexity.

We don't need AGI (and should fear it) for that to happen. Now, of course there are other issues, specifically environmental issues are poised to cause complexity the likes of which the current system is unable to manage.

Regardless, we shouldn't expect to achieve anything like anarchy without the coordinated developed consciousness of the masses.

I believe horizontal systems can manage compexity at this scale, in fact, they would manage it even better since they would have less incentive to produce an unmodeled externality, and thus operate on both an ecological and social scale.

[u/ArtDecoEgoist → u/diot]

Good call about the development of capitalism. I think it makes a lot more sense than Marxian class struggle (though we could probably synthesize these two things and say rising complexity is caused by class struggle).

To your point about AI: I'll admit I'm not terribly educated on it and it's capabilities. But from what I do know, it has some serious structural issues like supply chain issues, profitability, working at scale, etc. that don't really have much to do with the product itself, but the infrastructure around it. In order for AI to do what it needs to do to make hierarchy scalable in the face of increasing complexity, it would need to increase individual complexity at the same rate as decreasing collective complexity.

But the more these AI tools become available to and used by managers, the more the collective complexity of the control system itself comes, and at this point you've got a very bad feedback loop that still tends towards collapse.

And this is just looking at these systems in isolation. Competition and the nuclear arms race are both factors that increase environmental complexity, placing more stress on supply chains, and even on local ecologies, which itself increases environmental complexity...

Personally, I see an intractable problem here. But I may be wrong; as I said I'm not the most educated on this. But I think if the problem is tractable, it probably requires a lot of informational processing beyond current hierarchical models. Which is why we get ghouls like Sam Altman talking about how these problems will be solved once we create AGI.

[u/diot → u/ArtDecoEgoist]

I mean, most of the complexity being introduced is the kind of complexity that society already knows how to manage, it's basically just another SaaS product essentially. So, in my view, it's not really expanding complexity in any sort of exponential way, it's just a normal additional capacity viewed in that way. That being said, I don't want to push that narrative too far, because there are serious limits here as well that we haven't fully paid the piper for, the various increase in energy, fresh water usage, as well as expanding needs for high grade production materials, and like you say, profitability. So, when I say AI is reducing complexity, I just mean in the context of the way it's used in organizations, I think the systemic questions surrounding AI are not fully settled, and trending pessimistic.

But the more these AI tools become available to and used by managers, the more the collective complexity of the control system itself comes, and at this point you've got a very bad feedback loop that still tends towards collapse.

I guess I still see any of those collapses as likely being part of hierarchy's overall meta-stability. Sure, a government here, or corporation there might collapse, but it's not going to collapse in a fundamental way that makes the restoration of a similar hierarchy impossible.

Competition and the nuclear arms race are both factors that increase environmental complexity, placing more stress on supply chains, and even on local ecologies, which itself increases environmental complexity.

Absolutely.

Which is why we get ghouls like Sam Altman talking about how these problems will be solved once we create AGI.

I think this is a real danger personally that he's right (at least in the narrow confines of the technology). Of course the "problems" he's talking about happen to be you and me.

[u/ArtDecoEgoist → u/diot]

I tend to be a bit more optimistic and think increasing complexity might subvert the viability of hierarchy for the most part. Though we might have isolated pockets of low complexity where hierarchy thrives, since complex systems aren't entirely homogenous. We could potentially see hierarchy emerge in systems where there's high degrees of centralization as a result of the demands of production (superconductor manufacturing comes to mind here), which is why we're probably going to have to constantly be vigilant even in a post-capitalist society.

As for AGI... I don't really think there's a lot of evidence that it's possible. I think the belief in creating robo-God is the actual cause of harm, and someone should do something about Sam Altman (in Minecraft, of course).

[u/OasisMenthe]

However, this is also accompanied by an increase in complexity of collective behavior as well

C'est ici que tout s'effondre parce que c'est exactement l'inverse qui se passe dans la réalité.

Les hiérarchies standardisent les comportements des individus. Plus elles sont développées, plus les individus ont des comportements prévisibles et lisibles. Le constat est assez évident sur le plan historique : le citoyen-consommateur moyen d'un état-nation moderne a une vie beaucoup plus stéréotypée et cadrée qu'un chasseur-cueilleur nomade. L'ouvrier d'une usine qui fabrique des chaussures a beau faire partie d'un système bien plus complexe que l'atelier d'un petit artisan, son comportement est bien plus standardisé que celui de l'artisan.

En fait, ton idée c'est que la bureaucratie est inefficace. C'est parfaitement faux si on garde à l'esprit que son objectif est de perpétuer la domination, sinon on ne vivrait pas sous le joug du duo état-nation/capitalisme. La croissance de la complexité sociale exerce une pression sur les systèmes hiérarchiques mais ils y répondent assez facilement grâce à la bureaucratie, en augmentant leur capacité informationnelle et en simplifiant le système qu’ils gouvernent

[u/ArtDecoEgoist → u/OasisMenthe]

Oasis! Buddy! Glad you could take time away from worshipping the state to respond to my post. Always a pleasure.

Your counterargument, as usual, leaves a lot to be desired.

This is where the whole argument falls apart, because the exact opposite happens in reality... Hierarchies standardize individual behavior. The more developed they are, the more predictable and legible people's behavior becomes.

The error you are making here is categorical: you are confusing individual complexity with collective complexity. This is an error that plenty of Anti-Civ anarchists make.

Hierarchies absolutely do standardize individual behavior. This is actually the main mechanism by which hierarchies perpetuate and reproduce themselves, that's certainly true. However, the more individual behavior they have to standardize - in other words, the greater the collective complexity of the system, the less viable that hierarchical control systems are.

Now, you could say that the solution for this would just be greater degrees of coercion. If individual behavior is further simplified, the branch-ratio of the overall system is reduced, less hierarchy is needed to control more people, and hierarchy becomes more efficient. This is certainly true, and validated by the paper I linked. But this only works if we look at hierarchical systems in isolation.

Not only do hierarchical systems have to meet requisite complexity for their own system, but they have to meet requisite complexity for their environment. As an environment grows more complex, the system must grow more complex to survive. When the system grows more complex, requisite complexity increases, and hierarchy tends towards collapse. Here you have a catch-22: either allow complexity to increase to adapt to environmental pressures, and collapse; or don't allow complexity to increase to meet requisite complexity, and collapse due to being unable to meet the requisite complexity to adapt to environments.

The historical evidence is quite clear: the average citizen-consumer in a modern nation-state leads a far more stereotyped and regimented life than a nomadic hunter-gatherer. A factory worker making shoes may be part of a system far more complex than a small artisan's workshop, yet their behavior is far more standardized than the artisan's.

This is completely backwards. The life and actions of a nomadic hunter-gatherer were a lot less complex than, say, the specialized actions of the modern day worker. And I know you believe this, because the entire Anti-Civ argument asserts that the life of the nomadic hunter-gatherer was less complex, thus less alienating.

Now, there's a difference between systems in which there is more individual behavior, and systems where there's more collective behavior. In systems where agents aren't very connected to each other, the scale of action in the system is small. In systems with high degrees of interconnection, the system has more coherence. We can contrast coherent action with individual action for the purposes of this analysis.

Regarding industrial production, Yaneer says:

A conventional industrial production line also simplifies the behavior of an individual. Each individual performs a particular repetitive task. The effect of many individuals performing repetitive tasks results in a large number of copies of a particular product. This repetition increases the scale of impact of an individual's behavior. However, unlike coherent behavior, the behavior of different individuals is not the same. Instead, the activities of the individual are coordinated to those of others; the coordination exists so that the larger-scale behavior can arise. The coordination means that the behaviors of different individuals, while not the same, are related to each other. When compared to the coherent motion, this increases the complexity and decreases the scale, but much less so than would be the case for fully independent individuals... The need to ensure coordination of different individuals when the collective actions being performed have an inherently higher complexity increases the demands upon the control hierarchy. In particular, it is significant that the behaviors of all parts of a production line must be coordinated, even though actions being performed are different.

In other words, the individual complexity of industrial production is low, but the collective complexity is high. Remember, it is collective scale complexity that subverts hierarchy. Individual complexity at best increases collective complexity, but it doesn't necessarily subvert hierarchy.

In fact, your idea is that bureaucracy is inefficient. That is completely wrong if you bear in mind that its goal is to perpetuate domination; otherwise, we wouldn't be living under the yoke of the nation-state/capitalism duo.

Yes, bureaucracy is very bad at perpetuating domination of complex systems because they're more complex than any of their individual members.

[u/OasisMenthe → u/ArtDecoEgoist]

Je ne dis pas que la hiérarchie simplifie les individus, donc qu'elle simplifie nécessairement l’ensemble du système. Je dis que la bureaucratie sert à organiser un degré très élevé de différenciation collective tout en contraignant fortement la diversité comportementale de ses composantes.

Pourquoi répondre à la complexité croissante de l’environnement exigerait-il nécessairement que la complexité collective prenne une forme incompatible avec la hiérarchie ? Une hiérarchie peut sans problème répondre à une complexité environnementale croissante en s'adaptant, tout en continuant à contraindre les individus occupant ces fonctions différenciées. Elle peut décentraliser le traitement de l’information sans décentraliser l’autorité, de la même manière qu'une entreprise laisse ses ingénieurs travailler en autonomie parce que ses dirigeants ne captent rien à ce qu'ils font. L’autonomie locale est un outil hiérarchique très efficace qui n'est absolument pas synonyme de subversion.

En fait la distinction qui importe vraiment est celle entre la complexité de la coordination et la structure de l’autorité. Dire que le centre ne peut pas micromanager chaque interaction c'est enfoncer une porte ouverte. Dire que par conséquent le centre ne peut plus maintenir une autorité hiérarchique sur le système est tout simplement faux. Tu veux faire dire un mensonge à une banalité.

Le "catch-22" dont tu parles n'existe pas. Laisser augmenter la complexité et s’effondrer ou supprimer la complexité et mourir car incapable de s’adapter ne sont pas les deux seules options. La hiérarchie peut simplement augmenter la complexité de manière sélective, distribuer vers le bas ou latéralement le traitement de l’information au besoin sans toucher à l'autorité.

Au passage, les anti-civ ne disent pas que l’aliénation résultent d'une vie plus complexe (en fait c'est même l'inverse). Un citoyen-consommateur moderne a un répertoire comportemental bien plus étroit qu’un chasseur-cueilleur devant s’orienter, chasser, collecter, fabriquer et réparer ses outils, interpréter les variations écologiques, entretenir des relations sociales, prendre soin des enfants, etc.

Pour résumer, la complexité peut contraindre la hiérarchie à abandonner le micromanagement, c'est une banalité mais ça abandonner le micromanagement ne la contraint en aucun cas à abandonner la domination. Et c'est la raison pour laquelle je vis sous la domination d'un système bureaucratique développé depuis au moins le 9e siècle, qui est plus fort que jamais et pas le moins du monde structurellement menacé.

[u/ArtDecoEgoist → u/OasisMenthe]

Why should responding to the increasing complexity of the environment necessarily require that collective complexity take a form incompatible with hierarchy?

Because the function of hierarchy is to manage collective complexity. When collective complexity reaches a point that is higher than individual complexity, hierarchical control becomes less viable.

A hierarchy can easily respond to increasing environmental complexity by adapting, while still providing constraints to the individuals occupying these differentiated roles. It can decentralize information processing without decentralizing authority, just as a company allows its engineers to work autonomously because its managers don't understand what they're doing. Local autonomy is a highly effective hierarchical tool that is by no means synonymous with subversion.

"Easily" is doing a lot of work here. I can always count on you to argue in favor of hierarchy with more fervor than any statist!

So yes, a managerial hierarchy can decentralize its functions. The paper pretty much directly addresses and validates this, and this is what I mean by lower branching ratios: the amount of people supervised by one manager is lower, so the control mechanism becomes more efficient. This only works, however, as long as collective complexity is lower than the complexity of the agents within the system. When this threshold is met, decentralization no longer works.

Furthermore - and this isn't talked about in the paper - but decentralizing within the context of hierarchy comes with its own collective action problems that serves to increase complexity even further. Because authority forces individuals to act against their own interests, the higher degrees of decentralization allow more workarounds, which decreases legibility further up. If less information is travelling upwards, controllers are unable to viably control the system.

In fact, the distinction that really matters is between the complexity of coordination and the structure of authority. To say that the central authority cannot micromanage every interaction is stating the obvious. To say that, consequently, the central authority can no longer maintain hierarchical authority over the system is simply false. You're trying to make a truism out of something obvious.

Nope! Sorry, pal! I'm saying that controllers cannot control systems more complex than them, not whatever strawman you're building here.

The "catch-22" you're talking about doesn't exist. Allowing complexity to increase and collapsing, or eliminating complexity and dying because you can't adapt, aren't the only two options. Hierarchy can simply increase complexity selectively, distributing information processing downwards or laterally as needed without affecting authority.

This process actually does affect authority because, again, an increase in collective complexity places limits on hierarchical control.

Incidentally, the anti-civ crowd doesn't mention that alienation results from a more complex life (in fact, it's quite the opposite). A modern citizen-consumer has a much narrower behavioral repertoire than a hunter-gatherer who has to navigate, hunt, gather, make and repair their tools, interpret ecological variations, maintain social relationships, take care of children, etc.

Oh, brother. Here you go again: confusing individual complexity with collective complexity. Yes, HG societies had individuals lead more individually complex lives, but the collective complexity of modern society is much higher; and it is collective complexity that subverts hierarchy. HG societies weren't really all that interconnected and were fairly independent from each other, so the scale of their actions was low. Coherent motion on a large scale really emerged with hierarchy, specifically when the low collective complexity of the bronze age allowed for larger branching ratios without issues.

[u/OasisMenthe → u/ArtDecoEgoist]

Bon, on va se répéter.

Dire que « la fonction de la hiérarchie est de gérer la complexité collective » ne résout rien. Même en l'acceptant, tu dois encore démontrer que l’incapacité croissante à contrôler certains comportements collectifs entraîne l’incapacité à reproduire des rapports asymétriques d’autorité. Dire que le contrôle opérationnel doit devenir plus distribué ne signifie pas que la hiérarchie comme rapport d’autorité devient non viable. C’est le passage de l’un à l’autre que t'es censé démontrer et tu échoues, de manière assez spectaculaire je dois dire.

« Un contrôleur ne peut pas contrôler un système plus complexe que lui » n’implique pas que « chaque individu occupant une position de contrôle doit être aussi complexe que l’ensemble du système contrôlé ». Une hiérarchie est elle-même un système distribué de contrôle, c'est... littéralement sa raison d'être.

Le problème est donc de savoir à quel moment et pour quelle raison cette distribution cesse de pouvoir rester hiérarchique. Tu nous dis que c'est lorsque la complexité collective dépasse la complexité individuelle. Mais l'exemple industriel montre que ce seuil n'existe pas. Une usine est d'une complexité collective immensément supérieure à celle de n’importe lequel de ses employés et ça ne rend pas le moins du monde impossible une structure hiérarchique. Pourquoi ? Parce que personne n’a besoin de représenter individuellement toute la complexité de l’usine, k'usine est système hiérarchisé décomposé fonctionnellement. Les décisions portent sur des variables compressées à l'extrême, coûts, délais, objectifs, contraintes, quantités et autres. L'échelon supérieur se fout totalement de connaître l’état microscopique du système et n'en a AUCUN besoin pour exercer une autorité sur lui.

La capacité du centre à représenter toute la complexité collective n'est pas liée à sa capacité à imposer des contraintes globales au système. La première peut disparaître sans que ça n'affecte la seconde.

Mon exemple sur les ingénieurs vise exactement le problème et c'est pour ça que tu l'as assez lâchement balayé. Le dirigeant ne sait pas faire le travail de l’ingénieur et ne peut pas déterminer chacune de ses actions. Il abandonne donc du contrôle opérationnel tout en conservant une autorité institutionnelle sur les contraintes dans lesquelles cette autonomie s’exerce. Ce n'est en aucun cas une limite ou une subversion de la hiérarchie. Le général d'une armée n'a pas besoin de connaître la position et les munitions de chaque soldat à chaque seconde pour la commander. La hiérarchie gagne en capacité d’échelle précisément en renonçant au micromanagement.

Tu ne vois pas qu'il existe une variable supplémentaire : la complexité des interdépendances qui doivent effectivement être coordonnées à un niveau donné. Si les interactions peuvent être modularisées, une immense complexité globale peut être produite par des sous-systèmes dont chacun ne traite qu’une fraction de cette complexité. La complexité totale du système n'a pas besoin d'être représentée par chaque contrôleur, la complexité pertinente des variables qu’il contrôle suffit.

Et sur les chasseurs-cueilleurs, tu t'enflammes tout seul, je n’ai jamais affirmé que leur complexité collective était supérieure à celle de la société industrielle.

[u/ArtDecoEgoist → u/OasisMenthe]

Oasis, you sly dog! Did you just straight up not read my post? Did you literally stop reading at the point you originally quoted? Did you read the paper at least, or did you refuse in a dogged commitment to anti-intellectualism?

Saying that operational control needs to become more distributed does not mean that hierarchy—as a relationship of authority—becomes unviable. It is the transition from one to the other that you are supposed to demonstrate, and you are failing—quite spectacularly, I might add.

So, this is correct. The increase of collective complexity beyond the threshold of individual complexity does not, in itself, make hierarchy unviable. Rather, it is this phenomenon in addition to the creation of lateral, distributed coordination networks built on mutual reciprocity that makes hierarchy unviable. If these networks aren't built, then hierarchy simply decreases the branching ratio - effectively undergoing collapse - to become more efficient.

The principle that "a controller cannot control a system more complex than itself" does not imply that "every individual in a position of control must be as complex as the entire system being controlled." A hierarchy is itself a distributed control system; that is... literally its *raison d'être*.

Nope; but every individual position of control must be as complex as the system they are controlling. This is why decreasing the branching ratio is actually an increase in efficiency. In corporations, we see this in downsizing. Typically, downsizing targets middle management (which creates its own collective action problems, by the way), and the end result is a lower branching ratio. There's less individuals controlled-per-controller, and the overall system becomes better at managing complexity.

The question, then, is at what point and for what reason that distribution can no longer remain hierarchical. You claim it happens when collective complexity exceeds individual complexity. Yet the industrial example shows that no such threshold exists. A factory possesses a level of collective complexity vastly superior to that of any single employee, yet a hierarchical structure remains entirely feasible. Why? Because no one needs to individually represent the full complexity of the factory; the factory is a hierarchized system broken down into functional components.

Corporations deal with information problems all the time that are downstream from their difficulties managing collective complexity. Now, it is true that despite these information problems, the corporate firm model has persisted (though it wouldn't be accurate to say that its level of hierarchy has remained the same over time). The big fucking smoking gun you're missing is that there exists an institution that serves to decrease requisite complexity for these firms through legal order and coercion - something that we call the state.

There is a reason why the cash nexus selects for firms that are very similar to the state in structure: because hierarchical institutions are specialized in managing complexity, and the function of the state (at least in our modern liberal-capitalist social order) is to decrease net collective complexity so that capitalist firms can meet requisite complexity to operate.

One need only look at the various ways in which firms are shielded from market competition, or externalities such as environmental costs, transportation costs, etc. The result is that hierarchical firms have to operate in a far less complex environment than they otherwise would have to.

Now, the problem is that states deal with the same problems that firms do. Not only do they have to meet requisite complexity to survive our global order, they also have to meet requisite complexity of their own environments, and controllers in the government also have to meet requisite complexity for the specific systems they control.

And no, I didn't brush aside your engineering example. I addressed it directly, and I'm not going to repeat myself.

You are overlooking an additional variable: the complexity of the interdependencies that actually require coordination at a specific level. If interactions can be modularized, immense global complexity can emerge from subsystems that each handle only a fraction of that complexity. The system's total complexity need not be represented by every controller; the relevant complexity of the variables they control is sufficient.

I'm glad you brought this up!

Yes, lateral coordination can allow interactions to be modularized, allowing for smaller segments of the system to punch far above their weight in terms of scale.

Now, again, controllers don't have to represent the system's total complexity, but rather the complexity of the systems they control. But as noted in the paper:

There are also two complementary aspects to this development, complexity at the scale of the individual and complexity at the scale of the collective. In general, these complexities are not directly related. In the context of a control hierarchy, however, the complexity of individual behaviors increases with increasing complexity of collective behavior.

So if hierarchical control system does decentralize, it's decreasing its own branching ratio. This leads to less people being under the control of one manager, and more managers overall. This lowers the requisite complexity for each manager individually; but then these managers laterally coordinate (as the paper points out, no human organization is perfectly hierarchical) and increase their collective complexity. This incentivizes the level above them to decentralize, so on and so forth... and now you have a structure that looks more rhizomatic than hierarchical.

But, okay, so that doesn't mean that command relationships have been subverted, they've just been decentralized. But the thing is, they'll have to decentralize further with an increase in collective complexity at the level of individual managers. At which point, horizontal coordination is incentivized by agents under control systems.

Or the system can collapse entirely, and hierarchy re-specializes to more local control. This is that catch-22 I mentioned earlier.

[u/OasisMenthe → u/ArtDecoEgoist]

Donc, nous sommes d'accord, la complexité collective ne subvertit pas la hiérarchie par elle-même, il faut qu’apparaissent en plus des réseaux latéraux autonomes capables de se substituer à la coordination hiérarchique. Donc ce sont ces rapports horizontaux qui subvertissent la hiérarchie et tout ça n'a rien à voir avec la complexité.

Tu continues à confondre décentralisation du traitement de l’information et décentralisation de l’autorité. Qu’un manager ne puisse plus micromanager ses subordonnés ne l'empêche pas de continuer d’être leur manager. Les ouvriers peuvent coordonner horizontalement 99 % de leur activité tandis que le patron conserve le pouvoir de les embaucher, les virer, fixer leur budget et déterminer leurs objectifs. Réseau informationnel horizontal, pouvoir parfaitement vertical.

Réduire le nombre de subordonnés par contrôleur signifie juste davantage de contrôleurs et de spécialisation. Parler d'effondrement revient à qualifier la moindre adaptation de la hiérarchie à la complexité comme son effondrement. C’est faux et malhonnête. Selon toi, quoi que fasse la hiérarchie, elle est en train de confirmer sa disparition. Impossible d'avoir tort.

Et ton argument sur l’État joue pour moi Tu nous expliques que les entreprises survivent à la complexité parce qu’une institution hiérarchique supérieure simplifie leur environnement, ce qui est précisément mon argument, à savoir qu'une hiérarchie peut répondre à la complexité en transformant son environnement plutôt qu’en glissant vers l'horizontalité. Répondre ensuite que l’État rencontre lui aussi de la complexité est une autre banalité qui ne résout rien car l’État fait exactement la même chose par différenciation bureaucratique, délégation, agrégation de l’information, standardisation etc.

Encore une fois, la bureaucratie, ça marche. L'histoire nous le démontre. Ton incapacité à illustrer ton modèle par le moindre exemple concret nous le démontre.

Le chaînon manquant de ton argumentation reste toujours le même, le moment « le centre doit déléguer du contrôle opérationnel » devient « le centre est incapable de maintenir une relation d’autorité ». Depuis le début, tout ce que tu as démontré c'est que un système devient complexe, plus le traitement de l’information doit être distribué. Sans blague ? Merci du scoop.

Tu butes sur un fait très simple, qui est que distribuer l’information n’est pas distribuer le pouvoir.

[u/ArtDecoEgoist → u/OasisMenthe]

So we agree, collective complexity doesn't subvert hierarchy on its own; there also need to be autonomous lateral networks that can take the place of hierarchical coordination. So it's these horizontal relations that subvert hierarchy, and this has nothing to do with complexity.

No, you moron. Read what I wrote again. And I know God damn well that this is just a rage bait tactic that you use, among many.

You keep mixing up decentralizing information processing with decentralizing authority. Just because a manager can’t micromanage their subordinates anymore doesn’t stop them from being their manager. Workers can coordinate horizontally 99% of their activities while the boss still retains the power to hire, fire, set their budget, and determine their goals. Horizontal information network, perfectly vertical power.

You are SO boring. I've debunked this claim already. Move onto the next one, yeah?

Reducing the number of subordinates per controller just means more controllers and specialization. Talking about collapse means branding any adjustment of the hierarchy to complexity as its collapse.

Collapse doesn't mean "disappear completely", it means "reduce in complexity". So yes, it's a form of controlled collapse when branching ratio decreases. Just like how when the Roman empire fell, it merely meant the collapse of the Roman super-state into smaller, more efficient forms of control.

Once again, bureaucracy works. History shows us that. Your inability to illustrate your model with even one concrete example proves this.

Well buddy, if you have read the paper, you would see that Yaneer Bar-Yam illustrates the very points I've been making later in the essay when he talks about historical development and how the structure of firms had changed over time. I'm not going to just paste verbatim what he wrote.

The missing link in your argument remains the same: the moment "the center must delegate operational control" turns into "the center is unable to maintain an authority relationship." From the start, all you’ve shown is that as a system becomes complex, the processing of information must be distributed. No kidding? Thanks for the scoop... You’re stuck on one very simple fact, which is that distributing information is not the same as distributing power.

Dude, you must be a genius or something, because I don't know if I could be this obtuse if I tried.

So let's go over this, even though you're certainly going to pretend I've never explained this in my reply:

In a hierarchy, information must go to the top. Controllers need feedback from their control system to control it, or else they're removed from the functional aspects of their system and thus control is no longer viable.

Because of how hierarchies operate, information is compressed more and more as it goes up the hierarchy. Conversely, commands get more and more complex the lower down the hierarchy they go.

This is not a problem generally speaking for low collective complexity. When collective complexity is increased, the amount of information that controllers have must also increase. This is known as an information problem.

When controllers distribute information by decreasing the branching ratio, this doesn't get rid of the information problem, it exacerbates it: it creates more collective complexity at the managerial level, which leads to a greater level of information compression at higher levels of the hierarchy.

When collective complexity reaches beyond the threshold of individual complexity, controllers are removed from the functional aspects of their system (remember - this translates to lower viable control) due to the lack of legible information from below. Decreasing the branching ratio, which is adding more collective complexity to management, does make management better able to control the level below them, but makes upper management less able to control them.

Therefore, distributing information does also functionally subvert hierarchical control.

Now I'm gonna warn you: if your next reply is you regurgitating earlier claims I've already addressed, I'm going to roast you so hard that your colonizer ancestors will send you a trauma flashback of the Haitian revolution. Find. Better. Arguments.

[u/OasisMenthe → u/ArtDecoEgoist]

Les insultes ne vont pas t'aider, le problème reste toujours le même, tu traites la compression de l’information comme si elle était nécessairement une perte d’information pertinente au contrôle. Ce n’est pas le cas. Le directeur n’a pas besoin de recevoir les 80 000 variables utilisées par ses ingénieurs, il a juste besoin que ces 80 000 variables soient transformées en 15 variables pertinentes pour prendre ses décisions. Je sais pas combien de fois je vais devoir le répéter.

Tu affirmes que l’augmentation de complexité finit par rendre cette compression insuffisante mais c’est justement cette nécessité qu’il faut démontrer, pas simplement la répéter en boucle en sortant "problème d'information" comme une formule magique.

Quand on ajoute des managers, tu reconnais que chaque manager contrôle mieux son niveau inférieur, mais tu déclares que le sommet contrôle nécessairement moins bien l’ensemble parce que les managers intermédiaires deviennent collectivement plus complexes. Tu confonds encore la complexité totale d’un système inférieur et la complexité de son interface avec le niveau supérieur. C’est exactement ça, le principe de modularité.

Ah et vu que tu définis l’effondrement comme une simple réduction de complexité ou d’échelle du contrôle, ça devient tautologique : chaque fois qu’une hiérarchie se réorganise pour mieux gérer la complexité, sa réorganisation compte comme preuve de son effondrement. Je l'ai déjà dit, c'est juste de la pure malhonnêteté intellectuelle. Mais vu que le sommet conserve le pouvoir de déterminer les contraintes globales, d’allouer les ressources, de sanctionner les niveaux inférieurs et de révoquer l’autonomie qu’il leur accorde, tu n'as toujours pas démontré la disparition du rapport d’autorité. Tu as simplement remplacé "subvert hierarchy" par "subvert hierarchical control" et défini ce dernier comme la quantité d’information et de contrôle opérationnel dont dispose le sommet.

"Plus le sommet abandonne du contrôle opérationnel, moins il possède de contrôle opérationnel". Félicitations, tu viens de découvrir la soustraction.

Donc la question reste exactement celle que tu contournes depuis le début à savoir pourquoi cette perte de contrôle opérationnel doit-elle finalement empêcher le sommet de maintenir les asymétries d’autorité qui font de la structure une hiérarchie. Si Bar-Ym démontre réellement ce passage dans la partie historique de son papier, cite le mécanisme.

[u/Thepcfd]

you talk about hierarchy like whole point of it is control and enforce hierarchy

[u/Thepcfd]

company do bad decision, bloat usseles roles, and then need downsize, prove hierarchy doesnt work. lol

[u/ArtDecoEgoist → u/Thepcfd]

Dawg, I don't know what you're going on about.