Re:The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)
by rmah on Wednesday January 22, 2025 @11:48AM
(#42794737)
That people almost always self-organize into structured organizations gives me hope for humanity. Social structures provide people with means to make life easier. They provide support and a guide on how to accomplish things without having to worry about all the details or the "big picture". And, of course, no organization is perfect. Hoping for perfection is not only folly, it is the enemy of good.
Re:The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)
by KineticLensman on Wednesday January 22, 2025 @11:56AM
(#42794841)
Check out Dunbar's Number [0] (you might already know this). It's a theoretical constraint on the size of successful human groupings where everyone knows of everyone else, and is approximately the size of company-sized (in the military sense) subunits. Of course, these have very explicit structure, even if they contain 'characters'
Re:The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)
by bokoharambe on Wednesday January 22, 2025 @12:21PM
(#42795172)
Definitely read the criticisms section of this article, because it shows how strange and unsound the whole notion is.
Re:The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)
by nonrandomstring on Wednesday January 22, 2025 @12:50PM
(#42795490)
A group with superpowers is one that can spontaneously and optimally
reconfigure structure. Including dissolving and spontaneously
re-emerging. Group dynamic arrangements grow quickly, combinations for
without rank, permutations for ordered ones, both factorial. Then
there's distributing N tasks over M people. Lots of unique and special
ways build a team, if it's able to change.
Re:The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)
by IshKebab on Wednesday January 22, 2025 @12:11PM
(#42795028)
That's not the case. There are plenty of very functional groups of people. They usually aren't flawless, but I don't see why "people aren't perfect" would make you lose faith in humanity.
Re:The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)
by gunian on Wednesday January 22, 2025 @07:16PM
(#42799022)
because the chasm between people aren't perfect and the fourth reich is very tiny
Re:The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)
by sethgoodluck on Wednesday January 22, 2025 @12:06PM
(#42794954)
I think it more imperative that we are mindful of the natural evolution of groups and consciously put structures in place at the right time.
Knowing that initial structurelessness is good and eventually becomes bad can help us preempt failures
Re:The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)
by heymijo on Wednesday January 22, 2025 @11:56AM
(#42794852)
This was a key insight Alexander Hamilton had after growing up in the West Indies seeing the worst of slavery and then moving to the American colonies and receiving a classical education.
The American democracy he sought to co-create was one that could reign in humanity's worst impulses while enabling our better ones.
Re:The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)
by jmcqk6 on Wednesday January 22, 2025 @11:50AM
(#42794759)
It's almost like you can't really make generalizations about what good human groups look like.
Re:The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)
by quotemstr on Wednesday January 22, 2025 @11:41AM
(#42794661)
The best you can do is at least make the badness legible so you can fix and optimize your structure in an intelligent way instead of getting randomized default primate settings.
Re:The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)
by awongh on Wednesday January 22, 2025 @01:01PM
(#42795645)
The issue is assuming that your dogma of organization building is correct and that it absolves you from actually resolving inevitable issues between people and between people and the organization.
If you don't take on this assumption I think it will go smoother than if you're relying on structure or lack of structure to save you from actually taking on each issue (where each issue will, each time, have their own sets of tricky, subtle and thorny trade-offs).....
Re:The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)
by keybored on Wednesday January 22, 2025 @03:31PM
(#42797156)
Have you heard of people who need to have a very clear structure to their lives in order to live a good life? Does that make you lose faith in existence?
Well some commenters here are about a hair-width away from declaring losing faith in humanity. Anyway.
Hierarchical, flat, or structureless (as pointed out by this article); with a rigid procedure, without a rigid procedure. Doesn't matter how the group is organized, it's going to be bad in some way.