I'm just beginning to discover this. It doesn't seem very nice, does it?
Eventually I just get really annoyed with other people dithering. This is the problem with the concept of nonhierarchical communal living or organisations, viz. someone like me will start running everything just to keep other people from pissing us off.
(Tangentially, an important essay on emergent social hierarchies: The Tyranny Of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman. Originally about feminist activism, but I've found it widely applicable to the sort of self-organising groups one sees all the time on the Internet. tl;dr: if you penalise the formation of explic...
During a discussion today about the bizarre "can't get crap done" phenomenon that afflicts large fractions of our community, the suggestion came up that most people can't do anything where there is a perceived choice that includes the null option / "do nothing" as an option. Of which Michael Vassar made the following observation:
And if you're not the leader, it is not good for your reproductive fitness to act like one. In modern times the penalties for standing up are much lower, but our instincts haven't updated.
Interesting to reconsider the events of "To lead, you must stand up" in this light. It makes more sense if you read it as "None of those people had instincts saying it was a good idea to declare themselves the leader of the monkey tribe, in order to solve this particular coordination problem where 'do nothing' felt like a viable option" instead of "nobody had the initiative".