Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Information flows are information flows whatever the medium.

Hierarchies are efficient, that is why they exist.

If we want to know what branch of a tree structure to find information we examine a node after gathering info on how that data structure is put together and work our way down. If we want to know who is responsible for some aspect of an organization we ask the boss after gathering some basic info on how that organization is structured and work our way down.

As much as electronic signals have reduced friction, having a complete lack of hierarchy will quickly eliminate any efficiency advantage that provides as long as there is any communication friction whatsoever.




Just to reiterate, the study we are discussing and my original post are about inefficiencies in the design of human social hierarchies and not inneficiencies in data structures.

>Hierarchies are efficient, that is why they exist.

They exist because they are legacy systems that were once efficient or at least practical.

>If we want to know who is responsible for some aspect of an organization we ask the boss after gathering some basic info on how that organization is structured and work our way down.

This is exactly what is now inneficient. When information was centralized due to the constraints of paper and print media this may have been efficient. But now that information is decentralized and distributed it becomes much quicker to simply query the information instantaneously yourself rather than having to go through a third party.

Centralized information leads to pyramid shaped social hierarchies.

Distributed information leads to flat or spherical internetworked social organization.


> it becomes much quicker to simply query the information instantaneously yourself rather than having to go through a third party.

But we are still going through a third party to make that query. We are not doing it ourselves. Information is more centralized than ever. Google itself organizes it into a hierarchy. It may be more fluid than a bunch of people shuffling papers in an office or government building but the basic structure is still there. Besides, raw information is only one small part of the story. The other half of information is generation which is still boxed by responsibility (a long term information store in human form) that is most often, even today, most easily navigated to through a hierarchical organization. It might not look like the old hierarchies but that doesn't mean they are not there.


You seem to be equating the absence of hierarchy (which is critically about authority) with the absence of structure for communication, but the common alternative to hierarchical organization -- network organization -- still has that, it just detaches it from authority structures (and communication lines tend to be shorter, because paths which would be lateral on a hierarchical org chart and require steps up and down the chain of command are, instead, direct connections.)


Sure, but if you have a general graph (network) of more than a few nodes all trying to communicate meaningfully with each other you quickly run out of bandwidth.


If they are communicating through a heirarchy, you've got the same total communication volume over a smaller number of channels; either you don't get as much information integrated where it needs to be, or you do so on a slower best-case path; in addition, each non-leaf node in a heirarchy is a single-point-of-failure for all communication (and decision-making) involving the leaves underneath it.

Heirarchy is both more failure prone and has worse best-case communication time between nodes than network, which is why many nominal hierarchies end up routing around those limitations and acting like networks, where formal authority follows the hierarchy, but much practical communication and decision-making is done on a network model, because real humans are pragmatic and route around the failures that inevitably arise in a hierarchical organization. This ends up compromising the ability of the hierarchical command structure to impose uniformity.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: