Decision Making in Groups

[spuriousmonkey]

i was browsing an old 'Nature' a bit and my eye fell on an interesting paper entitled 'Group decision-making in animals.'

 

They modelled the 'fitness-consequences' for 2 basic decision making principles. Despotism and democracy. As you can see this sort of information could also be useful for us to know. Which social model would actually result in the most favourable decisions for everybody.

 

guess what? The costs were considerably higher for the groupmembers under the despotism model.

 

The democratic decision model was more favourable not because every individual has influence on the decision, but because they tend to produce less extreme decisions.

[blike]

Sounds interesting, you have a link to the paper?

[spuriousmonkey]

here you are:

 

 

Group decision-making in animals

 

L. Conradt, T. J. Roper

SUMMARY: Groups of animals often need to make communal decisions, for example about which activities to perform, when to perform them and which direction to...

CONTEXT: ...extensive literature on decision-making by animals acting alone, group decision-making processes have been largely neglected from a theoretical point of view. Two extreme mechanisms whereby a group could in principle reach communal......

Nature421, 155 - 158 (09 Jan 2003) Letters to Nature

[DocBill]

As those who know me will tell you, instead of going "someplace" for sabatical, I go "something." What that means in Feynian is, I take a course or two in a research area that is not my field. A few years ago I enetered into a graduate program in "Evolutionary Bio" and it was cool how when organisms decide to pool their colective brain cells what they can do. For example, we played around with ants.

 

We found that 10 ants, 20 ants, 30 ants..nothing. They wandered about and straved in a day or so. But 50 ants: something happened. Suddenly they had direction. One of the researchers I was working with postulated that their tiny brains acted like a set of neurons and that when these total collections reached a "threshold" (using feremones rather than Neuro transmitters) they were able to function as a unit.

 

It was pretty cool.

 

Bill

 

 

[spuriousmonkey]

interesting...

 

but what if it was not the brain size threshhold that mattered, but what if you need a certain sized group of ants before you can subdivide the workload meaningfully and therefore creat some order...

Before the group reaches a certain size there is no point to organize the group...when you reach a certain size an equilibrium is created (maybe based on chemical/pheromone equilibria) in which functions become clear to an ant.

 

i probably made myself totally unclear now...

 

anyhoo...just a thought...

[Radical Edward]

I saw a very simple program based on this... essentially it was an evolutionary program that had these little creatures that ate resources, and wandered round according to some rules. if you had a low limit on the population, the behaviour was randome, but if you increased the limit, they all developed into waves of these little things that walked up the length of the screen. it was quite interesting to see.

[fafalone]

Sounds like Lemmings.

[fafalone]

blah

[JaKiri]

It depends what kind of government in both cases.

 

Obviously, we can't have a pure democracy where everyone makes every decision, and the best form of government remains a benign dictatorship.

[spuriousmonkey]

Originally posted by MrL_JaKiri

It depends what kind of government in both cases.

 

Obviously, we can't have a pure democracy where everyone makes every decision, and the best form of government remains a benign dictatorship.

 

do animals have governments?

[fafalone]

It's never best to let all the power lie in the hands of one person.

[YoungStrife]

And also best not to have it rest in the hands of an entire population of uneducated idiots...democracy works so well, if opnly everybody was educated we would move so much faster then we do now.

 

How about we make a special anti-ignorance test for citizens to vote...that should weed out the idiots.

[Skye]

Of course the despot in a group of animals usually has a big reproductive advantage, which is probably why they do it.

 

Bill: did the ants just start gathering food to eat, or did they start doing all the ant stuff, like building a nest? There's a group studying the genetics of ant social structure at my uni, I should giv them an email.

 

From what I know only older ants forage, probably because it's a high risk activity and it's better to keep the young healthy ants safe in the nest. Maybe you just had young ants to start with.

[spuriousmonkey]

Originally posted by YoungStrife

And also best not to have it rest in the hands of an entire population of uneducated idiots...democracy works so well, if opnly everybody was educated we would move so much faster then we do now.

 

How about we make a special anti-ignorance test for citizens to vote...that should weed out the idiots.

 

the research seems to not favor your opinion though.

[Dudde]

Originally posted by YoungStrife

 

How about we make a special anti-ignorance test for citizens to vote...that should weed out the idiots.

 

I doubt it, there would be some complete idiot who would pass it somehow..there always will be....

"you can never make something truly fool-proof, for they will always make a better fool"

[Radical Edward]

Originally posted by fafalone

It's never best to let all the power lie in the hands of one person.

 

 

never is rather absolute. If the person in control, has the interests of the society and future at heart, then what ultimately is the point of democracy? The vast majority of peoples day-to-day lives does not change regardless of the government in power (can you really say there is any massive change in what you do during the day between now and under clinton? I suspect not alot) but by various events, that at large, are not controllable by government - such as september 11th, Enron and so on. Granted governmnet policy will influence it, but having a changing government every 5 years is, if anything, counterproductive, since a good few years of each governments reign will be spent undoing the work of the previous government (such as all the time in the UK spent removing things like the minimum wage, and NHS controls by the tories,m only to have Labour put them back again when they got in power)

[Radical Edward]

Originally posted by YoungStrife

How about we make a special anti-ignorance test for citizens to vote...that should weed out the idiots.

 

excellent plan. however who designs the test?

[spuriousmonkey]

did we confuse politics with science suddenly?

[Radical Edward]

it does seem to have wandered off at a tangent.... but in my defence:

 

It wasn't me, it was the one armed man!

[spuriousmonkey]

ok..i will digress a bit into politics to make you all feel better.

 

isn't it strange that we have now the model in which they show that the democratic model works best for making decisions in animals groups, but still people would like to reduce the amount of voters for several reasons. One of which is that most voters in their opinion are stupid.

But it seems that to have a succesful society you should maybe not only include even more voters (children for instance), but maybe we should also let everybody vote on everything. The effect is that all the radical decisions are buried, or as one might see it, that no real decisions are made ever. And not making decisions might be best for everybody (scientifically speaking)