Cardinal Rankings Are Essential For Society
When we think about the factors that make large-scale human societies possible, it’s easy to focus on technologies, agriculture, metals, machinery. But the cultural practice of measuring status with quantifiable metrics might be just as important.
The book starts off with a discussion about animals, and how animals spending time on stuff like beautiful markings and rituals, to establish a pecking order, are super important for the functioning of society, because otherwise every time there’s a conflict between two animals who haven’t fought before, there would have to be a fight to resolve it, as compared to people already knowing their place, and preemptively avoiding the fight.
This is important for humans as well - the fact that we have so many cardinal metrics to rank each other, while seemingly obvious, is pretty important to our (conflict and disagreement-laden) way of life.
Created from: Book review: Algorithms to Live By 202005302204
uid: 202006110153 tags: #insights