This is an odd paper. It reads like a so-so experimental game theory paper written by an anthropologist. The task was designed to produce Nash equilibria that would fit story they wanted to tell. And they as though they are surprised to see "the behavior of the two partners is only qualitatively similar to" the behavior the game was designed to elicit.
I think that the most interesting finding is buried halfway down.
"Another interesting observation is that for greater rank differences (lower k), the higher ranked individuals are prone to share an amount larger than the Nash prediction." This means that the player in the dominate position behaved more fairly then they needed to.
Given that finding I think this would be a better titile: "Hierarchy is Not as Detrimental for Human Cooperation as You Might Expect"
"This means that the player in the dominate position behaved more fairly then they needed to"
I'd be careful saying more than they "needed" to. If the dominant player had behaved only as fairly as the Nash prediction then human beings would not see that as fair. We all know this intuitively, and we know that other people know it, etc.
As I understand it, modeling human behaviour in regards to reciprocity and judgements of fairness with game theory isn't particularly useful given that this is engaging our evolved behaviour as highly social animals.
It's not my field so I could be completely wrong, but I am under the impression this is very well established.
They rediscovered what Nietzsche wrote about 100+ years ago. High-ranking individuals in any society cooperate with each other more readily than with lower ranked individuals (The Gay Science, Book 1 Aphorism 13 - and many others)
> The task was designed to produce Nash equilibria that would fit story they wanted to tell.
Unfortunately, this kind of malarkey is common in the social sciences today. In fact, more than half of the results are non-reproducible[1][2]. Whether published in Nature or a lesser journal, the current research climate forces me to treat social science results as noise, especially when the results happen to fit one of the major ideologies currently vying for political domination.
Sure, this heuristic is unfair to well-designed, dispassionate studies, but since I'm not qualified to evaluate the merits of each study, I have to make conservative assumptions.
The issue I have with these kinds of narratives is they conflate structural and social/power hierarchies. People have spent alot of time rallying against the former thinking it's the latter. The two often correlate in the case of human organizations but are not equivalent. Structural hierarchy also seems to be an intractable problem. It's smarter to construct hierarchies that are more inclusive then to be categorically against the idea.
I believe hierarchy is not detrimental at all (indeed, it is a pre-requisite) for cooperation. Humanity spent the vast majority of its history in loose bands of tribes with no clear inter-tribal hierarchy. Thus we spent thousands of years murdering each other on contact. You may think you are "peers" in the US / West etc, but in fact you are peers in that you've accepted an overarching higher authority in the form of the government - in particular, it's ability to enforce laws by coercion and violence. Thus instead of wondering if the other guy is about to bash your skull, we coexist in relative peace.
International relations, however, lack clear hierarchy - it is a semi-structured anarchy of might-makes-right. Thus we fail to cooperate on many "tragedy of the commons" type problems, such as climate change. Chronic warfare is a defining feature of the 20th century due to this lack of hierarchy.
At the micro level, try running a startup with no hierarchy. You'll find that this will fester conflict, as engineers endlessly argue with no mechanism to bring decisions efficiently and move forward. Indeed, hierarchy is emergent, and tolerated for its virtues by humans because when it does not emerge, the "company" of people dissipate and fail their mission.
"Given a longer sequence of repeated interactions, it might be possible that members of a hierarchically organized group would partially overcome mistrust of higher ranked individuals in those that establish generous reputations and these individuals might be able to elicit more contributions from their lower ranked partners. "
To be clear about the implications of this study: Society = longer sequence of repeated interactions. This study is not relevant to thinking about organizing society. It acknowledges it has zero relevance to whether hierarchy is good or bad for human society.
My research group is currently writing up the results for a study where we experimentally studied cooperation that took place over an entire month. We found the very interesting result that cooperation was basically maintained at a high level instead of declining over the course of a 1-hour lab session, as predicted by much previous work.
On a related point, this experiment is a little worrisome because each player only had "9 rounds" to interact with others due to the concern of extended reputation effects. In my experience running this type of experiment, that is not even enough to understand the rules within which people play. (In our case, we had people play 400 ten-round games, 4000 rounds total, and a steady state was reached after about 60-80 games.)
While not completely an "organized society", it does address the generalization limitations of behavioral labs in one important way: the time and span of participation. As you mentioned, this is one fundamental respect where society differs from experiments.
Exactly, the paper also expresses hopes that people continue to study of human social interaction:
>> Moving forward, experiments in artificial social contexts like ours appear to be a very powerful tool to examine strategic behavior in socially relevant situations. We hope that our work will stimulate further work along these lines.
It is clear it will be nearly impossible to account for all the factors in one controlled experiment. Note that such "total experiments" in the other scientific fields is challenging as well. Usually one first tries to understand certain fundamental processes, then they move on to the interactions between them.
Undoing hierarchy at every turn is in the zeitgeist. We need to take some time to appreciate when it is useful. My belief is that it is useful for quick action and inevitable when human systems scale.
The problem doesn't seem to be hierarchy, but that it's expected to climb it.
Some people are good in management, some aren't.
But if you're long enough in a job, you have to take on a management position to get paid more or to make decisions in your favor.
Yes the payment thing isn't a big problem in the IT sector, senior engineers often get paid as much or even more than managers. But the decision part is still a problem. Often you end up with stupid ideas you have to execute and the only way to change them is to get rid of the manager, because he won't consider he failed...
> Undoing hierarchy at every turn is in the zeitgeist.
Question for folks: Do you really think this is happening or are people just talking about it? I've worked for people who talked a big collaboration/flat structure game, but when it comes down to important projects, all of the sudden, one guy is the decider, and he is only giving responsibility to his lieutenants, who have direct command over the people below. He can count on his hand the number of people who have true control over real resources, which makes it easy for him to reason about where costs are going.
Everyone tries to be nice about it, but my sense is that almost no one actually believes in giving serious responsibilities to a wide range of people. They have their go-to people, and everyone else has to prove themselves by following directions well and maybe they can get a position in that structure at some theoretical later date.
I haven't worked in very many different companies though, so I would love to hear if that's actually becoming a bigger thing in other places. I know Valve is different, but they seem more and more like an outlier to me.
I read something very interesting a while ago, which I'm not completely unable to find, about feminist movements rejecting, and then embracing, explicit hierachies.
The thrust of it was that without an explicit hierachy, informal hierachies in social structures always emerge. Those informal hierachies are much harder to navigate and much more likely to opress than explicit ones.
Hierarchical systems do NOT scale well. If you want to scale something it needs to be distributed and in human terms that means equality, action by consensus, local decision making. The properties of the system must emerge from the global rules.
It's in the Zeitgeist because people are coming to understand how monumentally stupid it is to continue operating in this horrific way - both in terms of overall efficiency and in terms of human suffering.
The experiment seems poorly designed if the purpose is to simulate the real world:
"In the cooperation phase, both players ... contribute simultaneously ... to a common pot, unaware of the partner’s contribution." The higher-ranked player then gets priority in determining how the payoff is split.
Who goes to work without agreeing on a salary?? Who co-founds a company without agreeing to an equity split??
The connotation for the so-called "lower ranked player" is also misleading, as in the real world the employer is more similar to their "lower ranked player": the employer usually commits to paying the employee around three months' worth of salary first. The employee then gets to choose to slack off or work hard. So, in a sense, the employee gets to choose how to divide the payoff: the employee always gets the salary, while the employer gets (output - salary). Of course, in the real world the game is then iterated, as the employer gets to choose to fire the employee or continue the relationship.
Any experiment in game theory that doesn't involve iteration is highly unrealistic -- the fact that we have a reputation to keep and have to deal with each other over and over again is pretty darn important! Frankly I'm a little bit disappointed that Nature has chosen to publish this paper, as I don't see what insight it offers.
> Who co-founds a company without agreeing to an equity split??
Lots of people! This is the normal state of affair in many spin-offs where the product happens before the company and the "ownership" must be divided after most of the work is done.
I remember reading a study recently about the health aspects of power disparity. It concluded hierarchical social structures impose significant physical and mental health risks on those at the bottom. Unfortunately I can't find the source.
An interesting observation related to this is posture.
The posture that show higher status, straight back, looking to the front and not down, relaxed muscles, etc.. need less energy and is better for your health.
Another interesting though is how good food makes you bigger an taller.
So, however is low in the hierarchy, is always less strong and in worst shape, what makes them to get less food, and so on.. It's easy to see how a feedback of this kind begins.
Of course, all this is carry on to the next generation by several dynamics.
I try to remember all this when I hear how some communities are hopeless or just 'don't want to work'.
On the other hand, in my experience absolute equality can also result in stressful situations because of things like diffusion of responsibility and communication difficulties. Sometimes it's just more efficient to outsource decisions to decision makers rather than worryig about them yourself. I think the Goldilocks principle applies here.
Hierarchy may be bad for cooperation, but it is great for quick decision making. Further, I would argue that the decrease in "investment" shown in lower-level members of a team is not a symptom of hierarchy, but a symptom of bad leadership--the appoonted leader doesn't know how to lead, and the decision to make him leader seems unfair.
I think you miss what, in my opinion, is the most relevant point:
The collaboration phase doesn't change the splitting phase, they are independent.
That means that never mind what you did in the collaboration phase, what decide the result in the splitting phase, is your place in the hierarchy.
Of course, that leads to those low in the hierarchy investing less, as they know that, never mind what they invest, what decide what they will get is the hierarchy that is already decided.
It really isn't. It's great for quick bad decision making, but so is rolling a die. It takes so much time and effort for information to flow up and down the hierarchy that it takes a long time for informed decisions to get made, let alone good ones.
> Hierarchy may be bad for cooperation, but it is great for quick decision making.
Not really. Its good for applying established processes and resisting change, which includes being good at making quick decisions on situations that have been anticipated (but, also, often very bad at making quick decisions outside of the realm of pre-considered possibilities.)
Hierarchy is defined as priority of access to resources and probability of winning competitive encounters
...and cooperation is some game that sounds like the lower-ranked participant will have a negative expected return (double a common pot -- as long as it's above threshold -- and let the higher-ranked person take more than half).
.
I'm thinking this won't apply very well to situations where everyone has a positive expected return. Like most real-world organizations, companies, etc.
Ultimately, what this paper means to me is that there is evidence (based on simplified conditions, granted) that people collaborate better when they believe they will receive a fair share of the outcome. This makes a lot of sense to me, especially when comparing to real life.
For example, why is it that in many cases it is the small startup that creates innovative new technologies compared to large and well funded established players? I guess there are many factors at play, but I would argue that at least one factor relates to a more successful collaboration within the smaller environment, which in part is sourced upon the fact that there is promise of a higher payout in the case of success (equity as part of the salary).
When I think of hierarchy - in the context of a shared task - I think of who gets to make decisions about how a task is done, but here it seems to be about who gets to decide how the bounty is split when the split happens after the task is complete and bounty already earned. So, testing hierarchy of post result bounty splitting rather than hierarchy of task co-ordination.
What does this relate to in the world? How is it a test of a relevant type of hierarchy? Am I missing something (I would not be surprised, we all have mental blindspots)?
I wonder if they controlled for specific relationships like the participants never have met prior to the trials or anything of that sort. I can't find anything the article to indicate that.
Neither of those categorical statements are true. The world is a heterogenous overlaying of all possible political systems working simultaneously. There is capitalism (money), there is delegation (hierarchy), there is anarchism... often in the same room.
Linear hierarchy may have been effective for quick decision making in the age of paper and print but as Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt point out in their book Take Today: The Executive as Dropout (1972)[1], in the age of electric media distributed networking and flat hierarchies become the most effective organizational form and "Johnny on the spot" is the one who makes the quickest and most accurate decision as opposed to the executive:
McLuhan: Take today means that at the speed of light, today includes all the past that ever was, and all the future, it's here now.
Nevitt: That is we can retrieve the past, we can be in touch with the present, and the future of the future is the present, so we are in touch with all times now, today.
McLuhan: But let us notice that in a world of simultaneous information, you have basically an acoustic world, not a visual world with a point of view, not a positional world from which to look at the future or the past, but an acoustic world in which you are bombarded simultaneously by every kind of data from every direction ... the simultaneity of information means that you live in a world which is simultaneous in terms of its information structure. From every direction you have information electrically. Now this creates a new kind of space.
Nevitt: Yes, it is a new kind of space for us and yet an old kind of space for humanity.
McLuhan: Well, for pre-literate man.
Nevitt: Yes.
McLuhan: The space in which we live is identical to the space of pre-literate man, pre-visual man, it is acoustic space.
Nevitt: Post-literate space and pre-literate space are similar.
McLuhan: Yes but the question that seems not to have entered most minds is, what is the structure of acoustic space? In fact, most psychologists have never heard of acoustic space and they don't understand its properties. Its properties are those of a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose margin is nowhere.
Nevitt: That is, no boundaries, and no single center, but centers everywhere.
McLuhan: centers everywhere, margins nowhere.
Nevitt: No points of view. ...
McLuhan: The old structure was made up of fragmented specialist jobs.
Nevitt: Exactly, and hierarchies of responsibility which were delegated from the top down and channels of communication which were supposed by the organization chart upon which they flow from top to bottom, and bottom to top.
McLuhan: So the theme of our book is that you cannot use an organization chart with electric services added.
Nevitt: So that "the executive is drop out" means three things, it means first of all: the man who finds himself as top executive in a large organization, gets out of touch with the action, that is, he gets so far out of touch with what's happening, that as a human being, he has no more satisfactions in the process. That’s the first thing it means. The second thing is that specialism as a means of coping with this acoustic space, doesn't work, that is it has dropped out, it is no longer effective. And the third thing is, that in a knowledge environment, that is where the information is everywhere, like acoustic space with centers everywhere and margins or boundaries are nowhere, then every man knows how to be an executive, and "johnny on the spot" is the man who really makes the decision.
McLuhan: Oh, the hijacker is a nice case of a man who wants to be an executive and wants to take over an operation but he also wants coverage, he wants part of that global theatre for himself, he wants to be in the center of the show.
Nevitt: And the global theater itself becomes possible, and the hijacker becomes possible only in a world which is such that you are on camera.
>flat hierarchies become the most effective organizational form
Luckily, as folks with an understanding of data structures we can see this is a very naive approach. 'Electric services' must have seemed very new and frightening to inspire this scattered response.
Can explain why Republicans are less empathetic towards their fellow citizens, as they tend to be more about libertarian self empowerment, where they are kings of their own world.
Example: If you have a gun, you are placing yourself above others in order to gain power over them, and are therefore less likely to cooperate with your fellow citizens by offering to pay for their health care through taxes.
[+] [-] tdaltonc|10 years ago|reply
I think that the most interesting finding is buried halfway down.
"Another interesting observation is that for greater rank differences (lower k), the higher ranked individuals are prone to share an amount larger than the Nash prediction." This means that the player in the dominate position behaved more fairly then they needed to.
Given that finding I think this would be a better titile: "Hierarchy is Not as Detrimental for Human Cooperation as You Might Expect"
[+] [-] freshhawk|10 years ago|reply
I'd be careful saying more than they "needed" to. If the dominant player had behaved only as fairly as the Nash prediction then human beings would not see that as fair. We all know this intuitively, and we know that other people know it, etc.
As I understand it, modeling human behaviour in regards to reciprocity and judgements of fairness with game theory isn't particularly useful given that this is engaging our evolved behaviour as highly social animals.
It's not my field so I could be completely wrong, but I am under the impression this is very well established.
[+] [-] zenogais|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rewqfdsa|10 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, this kind of malarkey is common in the social sciences today. In fact, more than half of the results are non-reproducible[1][2]. Whether published in Nature or a lesser journal, the current research climate forces me to treat social science results as noise, especially when the results happen to fit one of the major ideologies currently vying for political domination.
Sure, this heuristic is unfair to well-designed, dispassionate studies, but since I'm not qualified to evaluate the merits of each study, I have to make conservative assumptions.
[1] http://www.socialmatter.net/2015/09/18/whats-to-be-done-abou...
[2] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-repl...
[+] [-] evv555|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkural|10 years ago|reply
International relations, however, lack clear hierarchy - it is a semi-structured anarchy of might-makes-right. Thus we fail to cooperate on many "tragedy of the commons" type problems, such as climate change. Chronic warfare is a defining feature of the 20th century due to this lack of hierarchy.
At the micro level, try running a startup with no hierarchy. You'll find that this will fester conflict, as engineers endlessly argue with no mechanism to bring decisions efficiently and move forward. Indeed, hierarchy is emergent, and tolerated for its virtues by humans because when it does not emerge, the "company" of people dissipate and fail their mission.
[+] [-] golemotron|10 years ago|reply
The most productive OSS projects all seem to have benevolent dictators, don't they?
[+] [-] rubidium|10 years ago|reply
To be clear about the implications of this study: Society = longer sequence of repeated interactions. This study is not relevant to thinking about organizing society. It acknowledges it has zero relevance to whether hierarchy is good or bad for human society.
[+] [-] mizzao|10 years ago|reply
On a related point, this experiment is a little worrisome because each player only had "9 rounds" to interact with others due to the concern of extended reputation effects. In my experience running this type of experiment, that is not even enough to understand the rules within which people play. (In our case, we had people play 400 ten-round games, 4000 rounds total, and a steady state was reached after about 60-80 games.)
While not completely an "organized society", it does address the generalization limitations of behavioral labs in one important way: the time and span of participation. As you mentioned, this is one fundamental respect where society differs from experiments.
[+] [-] davidovitch|10 years ago|reply
>> Moving forward, experiments in artificial social contexts like ours appear to be a very powerful tool to examine strategic behavior in socially relevant situations. We hope that our work will stimulate further work along these lines.
It is clear it will be nearly impossible to account for all the factors in one controlled experiment. Note that such "total experiments" in the other scientific fields is challenging as well. Usually one first tries to understand certain fundamental processes, then they move on to the interactions between them.
[+] [-] golemotron|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k__|10 years ago|reply
Some people are good in management, some aren't.
But if you're long enough in a job, you have to take on a management position to get paid more or to make decisions in your favor.
Yes the payment thing isn't a big problem in the IT sector, senior engineers often get paid as much or even more than managers. But the decision part is still a problem. Often you end up with stupid ideas you have to execute and the only way to change them is to get rid of the manager, because he won't consider he failed...
[+] [-] erikpukinskis|10 years ago|reply
Question for folks: Do you really think this is happening or are people just talking about it? I've worked for people who talked a big collaboration/flat structure game, but when it comes down to important projects, all of the sudden, one guy is the decider, and he is only giving responsibility to his lieutenants, who have direct command over the people below. He can count on his hand the number of people who have true control over real resources, which makes it easy for him to reason about where costs are going.
Everyone tries to be nice about it, but my sense is that almost no one actually believes in giving serious responsibilities to a wide range of people. They have their go-to people, and everyone else has to prove themselves by following directions well and maybe they can get a position in that structure at some theoretical later date.
I haven't worked in very many different companies though, so I would love to hear if that's actually becoming a bigger thing in other places. I know Valve is different, but they seem more and more like an outlier to me.
[+] [-] peteretep|10 years ago|reply
The thrust of it was that without an explicit hierachy, informal hierachies in social structures always emerge. Those informal hierachies are much harder to navigate and much more likely to opress than explicit ones.
[+] [-] pasquinelli|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dsfsdfd|10 years ago|reply
It's in the Zeitgeist because people are coming to understand how monumentally stupid it is to continue operating in this horrific way - both in terms of overall efficiency and in terms of human suffering.
[+] [-] codeismightier|10 years ago|reply
"In the cooperation phase, both players ... contribute simultaneously ... to a common pot, unaware of the partner’s contribution." The higher-ranked player then gets priority in determining how the payoff is split.
Who goes to work without agreeing on a salary?? Who co-founds a company without agreeing to an equity split??
The connotation for the so-called "lower ranked player" is also misleading, as in the real world the employer is more similar to their "lower ranked player": the employer usually commits to paying the employee around three months' worth of salary first. The employee then gets to choose to slack off or work hard. So, in a sense, the employee gets to choose how to divide the payoff: the employee always gets the salary, while the employer gets (output - salary). Of course, in the real world the game is then iterated, as the employer gets to choose to fire the employee or continue the relationship.
Any experiment in game theory that doesn't involve iteration is highly unrealistic -- the fact that we have a reputation to keep and have to deal with each other over and over again is pretty darn important! Frankly I'm a little bit disappointed that Nature has chosen to publish this paper, as I don't see what insight it offers.
[+] [-] RobertoG|10 years ago|reply
The stated purpose is to try to reproduce the same experiments and behaviors that observed in other primates.
Some insights I get:
1. In those conditions, our behavior is very similar to other primates.
2. The splitting phase is not influenced by the collaboration phase (I can't avoid to note that you don't choose to apply this insight to start ups).
3. There is some component that we don't understand that account for the difference with the Nash equilibrium.
4. When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail
[+] [-] acveilleux|10 years ago|reply
Lots of people! This is the normal state of affair in many spin-offs where the product happens before the company and the "ownership" must be divided after most of the work is done.
[+] [-] hyperdunc|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RobertoG|10 years ago|reply
The posture that show higher status, straight back, looking to the front and not down, relaxed muscles, etc.. need less energy and is better for your health.
Another interesting though is how good food makes you bigger an taller.
So, however is low in the hierarchy, is always less strong and in worst shape, what makes them to get less food, and so on.. It's easy to see how a feedback of this kind begins.
Of course, all this is carry on to the next generation by several dynamics.
I try to remember all this when I hear how some communities are hopeless or just 'don't want to work'.
[+] [-] sawwit|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tdaltonc|10 years ago|reply
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitehall_Study
[1] http://www.bmj.com/content/351/bmj.h6424
[+] [-] ryankuykendall|10 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitehall_Study
[+] [-] dawnbreez|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RobertoG|10 years ago|reply
I think you miss what, in my opinion, is the most relevant point: The collaboration phase doesn't change the splitting phase, they are independent.
That means that never mind what you did in the collaboration phase, what decide the result in the splitting phase, is your place in the hierarchy.
Of course, that leads to those low in the hierarchy investing less, as they know that, never mind what they invest, what decide what they will get is the hierarchy that is already decided.
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragonwriter|10 years ago|reply
Not really. Its good for applying established processes and resisting change, which includes being good at making quick decisions on situations that have been anticipated (but, also, often very bad at making quick decisions outside of the realm of pre-considered possibilities.)
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tbrownaw|10 years ago|reply
...and cooperation is some game that sounds like the lower-ranked participant will have a negative expected return (double a common pot -- as long as it's above threshold -- and let the higher-ranked person take more than half).
.
I'm thinking this won't apply very well to situations where everyone has a positive expected return. Like most real-world organizations, companies, etc.
[+] [-] davidovitch|10 years ago|reply
For example, why is it that in many cases it is the small startup that creates innovative new technologies compared to large and well funded established players? I guess there are many factors at play, but I would argue that at least one factor relates to a more successful collaboration within the smaller environment, which in part is sourced upon the fact that there is promise of a higher payout in the case of success (equity as part of the salary).
[+] [-] sfg|10 years ago|reply
What does this relate to in the world? How is it a test of a relevant type of hierarchy? Am I missing something (I would not be surprised, we all have mental blindspots)?
[+] [-] norea-armozel|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MarlonPro|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sjg007|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] galfarragem|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erikpukinskis|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] laotzu|10 years ago|reply
McLuhan: Take today means that at the speed of light, today includes all the past that ever was, and all the future, it's here now.
Nevitt: That is we can retrieve the past, we can be in touch with the present, and the future of the future is the present, so we are in touch with all times now, today.
McLuhan: But let us notice that in a world of simultaneous information, you have basically an acoustic world, not a visual world with a point of view, not a positional world from which to look at the future or the past, but an acoustic world in which you are bombarded simultaneously by every kind of data from every direction ... the simultaneity of information means that you live in a world which is simultaneous in terms of its information structure. From every direction you have information electrically. Now this creates a new kind of space.
Nevitt: Yes, it is a new kind of space for us and yet an old kind of space for humanity.
McLuhan: Well, for pre-literate man.
Nevitt: Yes.
McLuhan: The space in which we live is identical to the space of pre-literate man, pre-visual man, it is acoustic space.
Nevitt: Post-literate space and pre-literate space are similar.
McLuhan: Yes but the question that seems not to have entered most minds is, what is the structure of acoustic space? In fact, most psychologists have never heard of acoustic space and they don't understand its properties. Its properties are those of a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose margin is nowhere.
Nevitt: That is, no boundaries, and no single center, but centers everywhere.
McLuhan: centers everywhere, margins nowhere.
Nevitt: No points of view. ...
McLuhan: The old structure was made up of fragmented specialist jobs.
Nevitt: Exactly, and hierarchies of responsibility which were delegated from the top down and channels of communication which were supposed by the organization chart upon which they flow from top to bottom, and bottom to top.
McLuhan: So the theme of our book is that you cannot use an organization chart with electric services added.
Nevitt: So that "the executive is drop out" means three things, it means first of all: the man who finds himself as top executive in a large organization, gets out of touch with the action, that is, he gets so far out of touch with what's happening, that as a human being, he has no more satisfactions in the process. That’s the first thing it means. The second thing is that specialism as a means of coping with this acoustic space, doesn't work, that is it has dropped out, it is no longer effective. And the third thing is, that in a knowledge environment, that is where the information is everywhere, like acoustic space with centers everywhere and margins or boundaries are nowhere, then every man knows how to be an executive, and "johnny on the spot" is the man who really makes the decision.
McLuhan: Oh, the hijacker is a nice case of a man who wants to be an executive and wants to take over an operation but he also wants coverage, he wants part of that global theatre for himself, he wants to be in the center of the show.
Nevitt: And the global theater itself becomes possible, and the hijacker becomes possible only in a world which is such that you are on camera.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTyzjC_s-kk
[+] [-] clavalle|10 years ago|reply
Luckily, as folks with an understanding of data structures we can see this is a very naive approach. 'Electric services' must have seemed very new and frightening to inspire this scattered response.
[+] [-] MarlonPro|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mozumder|10 years ago|reply
Example: If you have a gun, you are placing yourself above others in order to gain power over them, and are therefore less likely to cooperate with your fellow citizens by offering to pay for their health care through taxes.