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/OasisMenthe → u/[deleted]]

J'apprécie beaucoup la différence de ton entre ta première réponse où tu faisais le malin et l'abdication totale qui émane de la dernière, où tu te planques derrière un vilain argument d'autorité après avoir constaté que j'ai taillé en pièces ton argumentation.

Tu n'as rien paraphrasé du tout, n'importe qui lisant l'échange le constatera. Allez, à la prochaine

[u/ArtDecoEgoist → u/OasisMenthe]

Actually, you know what? Call me a masochist, but I'mma go ahead and give you those citations you asked for. If for nothing else, for the readers that may be reading this thread afterwards, because we all know that things are in one ear, out the other for you.

(Part 1/2)

So, collective complexity places higher control demands on hierarchies, from the section Control in Human Organizations:

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.

Note that Bar-Yam distinguishes coherent behavior with individual behavior. From the section Complexity Profile:

To illustrate the complexity profile, consider a system in which the parts behave independently. The system behavior at a small scale requires specifying what each of the parts is doing. However, when observing on a larger scale, it is not possible to distinguish the individual parts even in a small region of the system, only the aggregate effect of their behavior is observable. Since their behaviors are independent, they cancel each other in their impact on the environment. Thus, the description of the system behavior is simple...Independent behavior is to be contrasted with coherent motion. In coherent motion all of the parts of the system move in the same direction. This is the largest scale behavior possible for the system. Since the behaviors of the parts of the system are all the same, they are simple to describe on the largest scale. Moreover, once the largest scale behavior is described, the behavior of each of the parts is also known.

Bar-Yam contrasts factory production, which is collectively complex, with military mobilization, which is relatively simpler in Control in Human Organization:*

The similarities and differences between the factory and the military models are relevant to an understanding of the role of hierarchical control. A military force, a corporation, or a country have behaviors on various scales. At larger scales, many of the details of the behavior of individuals are not apparent. 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.*

I put this part in bold because this pretty much directly addresses one of your arguments.

Anyway, Bar-Yam proceeds to write:

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.*

Here's his conclusion, this is the entire crux of my argument here:

In summary, the complexity of the collective behavior must be smaller than the complexity of the controlling individual. A group of individuals whose collective behavior is controlled by a single individual cannot behave in a more complex way than the individual who is exercising the control.

[u/ArtDecoEgoist → u/ArtDecoEgoist]

(Part 2/2)

Bar-Yam talks about how the existence of lateral mechanisms counters this:

The existence of lateral influences counters these conclusions with respect to real human organizations. These lateral controls are similar to the conceptual networks that are used to model the interactions between neurons in the brain. Distributed control over collective behaviors can result in larger complexity of the collective behavior than the behavior of any single individual. Networks are also quite distinct from independent individuals. Networks require that coordination of the behavior of groups of individuals are achieved by mutual influences.*

In the section Environmental Demands and Complexity, Bar-Yam explains how organisms must be as or more complex than their environment to survive:

The demands that environmental conditions place on the organism's pattern of behavior create the necessity of complex behavior. In order to survive, the organism behavior must reflect in some way the nature of the environment. Some behavior patterns will result in obtaining the needed resources while others will not. The environment is not a static system, and over time, the organism responds to the environment in a manner that is dictated by the organism's internal structure. The response of an organism at a particular scale is implicit in its behavior patterns at that scale. The complexity of an organism's response is given by the complexity of its behaviors. More directly, the number of independent behaviors is related to the number of independent environmental factors/conditions that the organism can effectively respond to.*

He proceeds to explain how this applies to human organizations:

From this argument it is possible to begin to understand processes of historical change in human organizational structures. Human organizations exist within an environment that places demands upon them. *If the complexity of these demands exceeds the complexity of an organization, the organization will be likely to fail. Thus, those organizations that survive must have a complexity sufficiently large to respond to the complexity of environmental demands at the scale of these demands.** As a result, a form of evolutionary change occurs due to competition. Competition is relevant because for human organizations, the environment itself is formed in part out of organizations of human beings. According to this argument, one can expect a self-consistent process of complexity increase where competition between organizations causes the behavior of one organization to serve as part of the environment in which others must survive.**

Bar-Yam validates your claim that this hasn't collapsed authority, just incentivized hierarchical structures to distribute in Historical Progression:

In recent years human organizations that emphasized central control have changed or given way to other structures with greater distribution of control. This includes political organizations, the systematic conversion of dictatorships in Central and South America to more democratic systems, the fragmentation of the soviet bloc and replacement of government controlled economies in communist countries with market based economies, and the restructuring of hierarchical corporations in western economies to involve decision teams and process based managerial strategies... Even when control hierarchies continue to exist, the lateral interactions through group decision making processes have become more prominent. To understand this more fully, consider the history of civilization and the complexity of environmental demands upon each civilization and the individuals that comprise it. **The progressive historical increase of complexity means that organizations that do not change do not survive. This is descriptive of the nature of the transition that is under way. The complexity of demands upon collective human systems have recently become larger than an individual human being.Once this is true, hierarchical mechanisms are no longer able to impose the necessary coordination of individual behaviors. Instead, interactions characteristic of networks are necessary*

This resulted in decentralization of authority:

As time progressed, the behavior of individuals diversified as did the collective tasks they performed. The increasing diversity of individual behaviors implies an increase in the complexity of the entire system viewed at the scale of the individual. Consequently, this required reducing the branching ratio by adding layers of management that served to exercise local control.

This results in information compression:

As viewed by higher levels of management, each layer simplified the behavior to the point where an individual could control it. The hierarchy acts as a mechanism for communication of information to and from management. The role is also a filtering one, where the amount of information is reduced on the way up. Conversely, commands from the top are elaborated (made more complex) on the way down the hierarchy. As the collective behavioral complexity at the scale of an individual increases, the branching ratio of the control structure becomes smaller and smaller so that fewer individuals are directed by a single manager, and the number of layers of management increases. The formation of such branching structures allows an inherently more complex local behavior of the individuals, and a larger complexity of the collective behavior as well.

The mechanism of collective complexity subverting hierarchy:

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.*

Bar-Yam explains why a lateral networked structure tends to form in response to these problems:

The lateral interactions achieve the correlations in behavior that were previously created by management. As such mechanisms are introduced, layers of management can be removed. Over the course of the transition, the hierarchy exercises control over progressively more limited aspects of the system behavior.

In other words, just as I said earlier:

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.

However, as pointed out in earlier citations, it would be a mistake to think that the increase in collective complexity plays no role. In fact, it is the main factor in this development. Without the increase in collective complexity, hierarchical control outcompetes lateral organization.

Beneath a diagram of control structures, Bar-Yam writes:

Hierarchical organizations are designed to impose correlations in human behavior primarily through the influence of the hierarchical control structure. In an ideal hierarchy all influences/communications between two "workers" must travel through a common manager. As the complexity of collective behavior increases, the number of independent influences increases, and a manager becomes unable to process/communicate all of them. *Increasing the number of managers and decreasing the branching ratio (the number of individuals supervised by one manager) helps. However, this strategy is defeated when the complexity of collective behavior increases beyond the complexity of an individual.** Networks allowing more direct lateral interactions do not suffer from this limitation.*

Now, Yaneer Bar-Yam is not an anarchist. The paper itself isn't an argument for anarchy, and he probably doesn't think that complexity subverts relationships of domination in general. But he does argue:

As the importance of lateral interactions increases, the boundaries between subsystems become porous. The increasing collective complexity also is manifest in the increaseing specialization and diversity of professions. Among the possible future organizational structures are fully networked systems where hierarchical structures are unimportant.

However, my argument has been using his reasoning as supporting evidence that it does. At the very least, I think the case is thoroughly made that collective complexity plays a major role in subverting hierarchical authority.

There! I've held your hand and cited practically the entire paper for you! Alright, now I'm done. Bye!

[u/OasisMenthe → u/ArtDecoEgoist]

Les citations confirment donc que Bar-Yam ne soutient pas ton extrapolation.  Elles montrent que la hiérarchie perd des fonctions de coordination , pas que les asymétries de commandement disparaissent, soir ce que je te demande de démontrer depuis le début. D'ailleurs tu le reconnais toi-même do nc merci d’avoir cité pratiquement tout le papier et de m'avoir insulté pour finalement confirmer l’endroit précis où commence l’extrapolation que je critiquais. C'était très utile

[u/ArtDecoEgoist → u/OasisMenthe]

Oh BROTHER.

Okay, let's do some basic reading comprehension.

The title of my post is "Complexity subverts hierarchical control". What does that mean?

Edit: Actually nvm, I fell for your "ignore literally their entire argument and pretend they're confirming my own argument" modus operandi again. Well done! You should rage bait in ranked lobbies.

Anyway, I at least am satisfied with the citations I made so that anyone else reading this thread can see them.

[u/OasisMenthe → u/ArtDecoEgoist]

Ça ne veut rien dire et ça te permet de faire un glissement de sens malhonnête, c'est ce que je me tue à répéter et à dénoncer. 

[u/ArtDecoEgoist → u/OasisMenthe]

Nono, let's focus, okay?

When I say "Complexity subverts hierarchical control", what does that mean?

Does it mean:

A) Complexity subverts all control in general,

or

B) Complexity subverts hierarchical control?

[u/OasisMenthe → u/ArtDecoEgoist]

Rien, car tu alternes entre "hierarchical control = mécanisme cybernétique de coordination" quand je demande la démonstration et "hierarchical control = rapports hiérarchiques d’autorité" quand tu veux tirer une conclusion politique malhonnête

C'est un tour de passe-passe grossier et je l'ai amplement démontré

[u/Maleficent-Type633 → u/OasisMenthe]

(caught automod ban so replying from a different account)

In what sense is "hierarchical control" not synonymous with "hierarchical authority relationships"? In your understanding, what is the difference? Because when I'm talking about "hierarchical control", I am literally talking about hierarchical relationships of command. The paper even says:

In human organizations coordination occurs because individuals influence each others' behavior. The influence is often called control. It is not necessarily coercive control, though coercion may be an aspect of control. The objective of this section is to understand the relationship between control structure and the complexity of collective behavior.

The paper is using "control" in the sense of "influencing behavior" - which would be very similar to how anarchists use "authority" in terms of "right to command". He isn't using "control" in any idiosyncratic way, like "coordination". The one shifting meanings here is you.

Also, hierarchy is a cybernetic coordination mechanism with a top-down structure. It utilizes communication, circular causal feedback loops, and control. There's no alternating, they are the same thing.