Saturday, July 25, 2009
Rational Ants
Ants are more rational than humans? As a self-organizing group, it turns out that, yes, they are. Each individual ant is terribly ill-informed. But all the ants together, providing to the group the local information they each have, contributes to rational behavior to the ants as a whole. Why are humans not able to act more rationally? Well, we keep having individuals with the ability to control others' behaviors interfering with and, subsequently, disrupting the spontaneous formation of order. The result of this is less rational human behavior. If the ants had some idiot without enough sense to know that he can't possible know everything trying to control their actions, they would act as irrationally as humans do as well. The natural emergence of spontaneous order makes people more rational.
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"...it's at least worth entertaining the possibility that some strategic limitation on individual knowledge could improve the performance of a large and complex group that is trying to accomplish something collectively."
This reminds me of the Monty Python sketch in which special teams of soldiers have to learn the funniest joke in the world piecemeal so as to not understand it all at once and laugh themselves to death.
Another way of putting it: the last thing in the world you want are experts to muck up the works. As they alway seem to do by insisting that they know enough to control the group. Which they never do.
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