Pecking Order and Flight Leadership

Temple cults are another important method for separating expertise from dominance: in order to ensure some material support for and deference to the priesthood, priests will orient their stories around a large dominant animal (usually depicted via statuary ambiguously identified with the body of the god) which demands to be fed large amounts of food, and obeyed. A large amount of food for a huge statue may be just the right amount to feed the priests and their families, and worship/submission is not directed at the priests themselves, so they preserve their access to information.

Do people hate prophets, or hate being prophets?

Making decisions (and owning those decisions, esp. taking responsibility for them) is very costly and effortful. It's great for having a sense of agency, but is still stressful.

One reason people sometimes found startups or organizations is because they just want the organization or product to exist. But often they do so because they expect an outsized payout if they do a good job.

Someone commented last year "being a leader sucks, and lately there's been a bunch of egalitarian forces that push against many of the benefits you traditionally get for being a leader."

This framework very specifically fits farmers, not foragers, so it's not invariantly true across humans. The prophet model seems more workable in more forager-like conditions.

Let's note differences of degree here. Political systems differ massively in how easily decisionmakers can claim large spoils for themselves, and these differences seem to correlate with how pro-social the decisions tend to be. In particular, the dollar amounts of graft being alleged for politicians in liberal democracies are usually small compared to what despots regularly claim without consequence. (Which is not to say that it would be wise to ignore corruption in liberal democracies!)

Pigeons have stable, transitive hierarchies of flight leadership, and they have stable pecking order hierarchies, and these hierarchies do not correlate.

one of the things you can do with the power to give instructions is to instruct others to give you more goodies.

It occurs to me that leading a flight is an unusual instruction-giving power, in that it comes with almost zero opportunities to divert resources in your own direction. Choosing where to fly and when to land affects food options, but it does not affect your food options relative to your flight-mates. Most leadership jobs give many more opportunities to turn the position into zero-sum personal benefits.

I suspect this is not a coincidence. Can anyone think of a case where the pecking order and the leadership hierarchy are uncorrelated in a situation where the leadership is exploitable for pecking opportunities?

One obvious problem with your predicted "good king" scenario is that a high rank in the "pecking order" inherently attracts bad actors to it - which in turn are precisely the agents who will use that rank to do the most damage, both to other actors within the group and indeed to the organizational goal itself! Separating "pecking order" and "decision-making order" would seem to be the right answer - except for another wrinkle, that is; it seems that, among the few ways we know about of semi-reliably screening off bad actors, (1) requiring proof of having reached good decisions recently, especially on non-trivial and long-term matters; and (2) giving a boost to "prophet" types who can provide strong, complex signals of pro-sociality, not just momentarily but on a somewhat long-term basis (And yes, these reliable signals do seem to exist. For example, sound goal analysis that does not reduce to mere politicking and is based on a principled assessment of the group - this very blogpost provides us with a fine example! - impressive art, high-quality work in general - even something as simple as humour, perhaps!), are especially important. And both of these concerns would seem to push into the other direction, of commingling the "pecking order" and "decision-making" hierarchy to some extent!

I think it would be interesting to try and design honeypot hierarchies, that are expressly intended for bad actors to have harmless fun in, without dealing extensive damage to others. But a pecking order is not that; being low in the pecking order, especially with someone malicious at the top, is really bad. Thus, arguably, this is a goal that's best pursued by the market system as a whole, not by a small-scale social structure that - like all social structures - comes with inherently "soft" and "pliable" incentives that will never manage to keep the most toxic agents on the shortest leash.

I worry that it's way too easy to overgeneralize the roles we're talking about. The fact that pigeons have a different flight leader than food dominator does _not_ imply that one is the decision-maker and the other is the highest status. It only implies that the social organization for different activities can be different (still a very important observation).

One possible important distinction is how rivalrous the decision topic is. "who gets to eat this" is not just a different decision, but a different type of decision than "how high should we fly in order not to tire before we reach our destination".

And since humans went and invented language and self-modeling, now you get both the strongest and the best navigators trying to convince each other that the two are related.

I think saying that people hate prophets is like saying that people hate ads. They hate the bad ones, because those are the ones they consciously notice, whereas the best ads/prophets probably exert their influence without people even thinking of associating them with those categories.

Besides, if "low rank in the pecking order but high decision-making power" applies to people who exert substantial influence with their ideas but don't have a correspondingly impressive amount of wealth or shiny credentials, it's not difficult to think of examples who are very far from hatable.