Thread by @LucasVB

@prathyvsh I've seen this before and it was a pretty disappointing take, to be honest, especially due to its unnecessarily anti-anarchist intrusions.

But there's an immensely important formal counterargument to heterarchies provided by Stepehen Omohundro here:

selfawaresystems.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/nature…

@prathyvsh The bottom line is this: if any abstract organization structure of any sort is heterarchical, then it can be driven to cycles where losses can accumulate arbitrarily for everyone, and it's also seen as "logical" for the agents to participate in that cycle of losses.

@prathyvsh You can think of it as Ponzi scheme kind of situation with A>B>C>A, where I make deals with A, B and C in turns, always getting money from each to do something to the next in the cycle, and it always benefits me and penalizes ABC.

@prathyvsh So it basically establishes that preference cycles are inherently exploitable, and likely self-destructive.

A stable, non-exploitable structure would then appeal to something either hierarchical and dictatorial, or anarchical and democratic/utilitarian.

@prathyvsh Since any "social ranking" fundamentally induces such cycles (Condorcet paradox), and even an individual's ordinal utilities (ranked preferences) may themselves be non-transitive, Omohundro's result is another fundamental, general argument against ranked preferences as framework.