You realize pretty quickly that hierarchies (then and now) are often deliberately constructed to funnel surplus upward, not just accidentally emergent

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maxglute 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Hierarchies and funnelling behavior seems to be emergent from people desiring more, and some securing it.

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danaris 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I disagree, though only slightly:

I would say that it's rare that a hierarchy is deliberately constructed to funnel surplus upward.

Rather, many hierarchies emerge organically, but those at the top seek to eliminate any that do not funnel surplus upward.

It's less a process of deliberate construction, and more a process of deliberate curation. Something like cultural bonsai.

	▲	dleeftink 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		The continue the bonsai metaphor: would its inevitable demise tell us about how hierarchies can be uprooted? Or conversely, that existing hierarchies that are well tended to rarely meet their end?

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martin-t 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And that's why I say power must always come from the bottom.

Many people have anti-social traits which manifest by seeking power and then using it to extract value from other people at their expense.

Meanwhile the people doing real work are almost always pro-social but are too busy to play these power games, unless the power imbalance gets too large.

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anon191928 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Even YC is designed that way, they fund people that can get into MIT or stanford or harvard maybe? Others with great records are rarely accepted, this is a known fact

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93po 4 days ago | parent [-]

this is easily shown to not be true? from 2025 numbers I think:

University of California, Berkeley - 26 founders Stanford University - 21 Massachusetts Institute of Technology - 17 Cornell University - 10 Georgia Institute of Technology - 7 Carnegie Mellon University - 7 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - 7 Harvard University - 6 University of Oxford - 6 University of Cambridge - 6 University of Pennsylvania - 5 University of Washington - 5 Columbia University - 5 Johns Hopkins - 4 Yale - 4 Caltech - 4 UCLA - 4

YC is, last I heard, largely an in-person thing. And it makes sense for CA schools to be highly represented because of that.

	▲	Yizahi 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Doesn't that list consist entirely of the top of the top world universities, with small-ish admittance numbers and sky-high tuition price per year? I think you are kind of proving the point of the top commenter :)

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bestouff 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

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cantor_S_drug 4 days ago | parent [-]

There is in one sense the king and the pawn are similar. Pawns are many, kings are few. If one pawn sacrifices itself to sacrifice the king, then kings ought to fear pawns and not take undue advantage.

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crossroadsguy 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

The power (access to tools, system, and opportunity) to sacrifice an individual by another individual has become immensely disproportionate of late among individuals of different social and economic strata.

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bell-cot 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If you look at history, that's really not how elites react to violence (or its threat) from the 99%. Regicide is a Crime against God - meaning the social order which puts the elites on top. Vs. peasants are expendable at scale if the elites feel that they need to violently defend their elite status.

And this ain't chess, where Pawn x King is just another move. Nor 1960's America, where Mr. Oswald could buy a rifle and 4X scope by mail order, then get a job in a convenient book depository. If an assassin manages to kill a king, then 100:1 that it's an inside job - the perp is either another one of the elite, or acting his behalf.

	▲	BoxFour 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		This is an odd thing to say given the events of the past few days and even last couple years: “Nor 1960's America, where Mr. Oswald could buy a rifle and 4X scope by mail order, then get a job in a convenient book depository” Your broader argument still holds that those in power often don’t tend to view isolated threats from the public as truly existential threats (until they do, like we just saw in Nepal). But it’s a bit hard to agree that even in America things are truly that much different.