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asr comments on Why officers vs. enlisted? - Less Wrong
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I don't see how your evidence proves your conclusion. Militaries and many corporations choose to invest agency in some small fraction of their employees. That doesn't make agency a natural kind.
My impression is that this sort of two-layer hierarchy is much more about history than about any philosophy of how organizations should run. You mention the possibility that this is social/historical but I think don't really rebut it adequately.
Right, it doesn't.
But my conclusion was not that agency is a natural kind, but rather that "these organizations [implicitly] agree with LessWrong that [agency] is a natural kind."
Indeed it is. But why do all the armies in the world, as far as I know, have a two way distinction, including armies with roots in different cultures? Even ragtag rebel armies generally have a two-rank system of soldiers and "commanders."
Why has no one experimented with a straight one-ladder hierarchy?
Even the wacky Japanese Self-Defence Forces, which pretend to be a completely civilian organizations do it this way.
I have a suspicion that during meatgrinder wars (e.g. WW2) the two hierarchies if not merged then became a lot closer. Survivors who showed skill were promoted up including from sergeants to lieutenants.
I also wouldn't be surprised to learn that the Soviet military in the 1920s and 30s was close to a one-ladder deal.
Interesting. Yes, there were battlefield commissions.
Note that such promotions were given rarely and usually with a "brevet" designation to keep it from being exactly like the "real" thing.
But to the extent that this existed, it might fit into the framework of this post as a recognition of extreme and exceptional agentiness. Battlefield commissions were not, officially, given for skill, hard work, nor for filling the slot -- the usual reasons for a promotion -- but rather for "outstanding leadership on the field of battle."
Do you have a reference on that?
I recall reading that Napoleon promoted enlisted men who showed conspicuous bravery to officers (I believe continuing a practice started by the French army during the revolution). The historian I read who discussed this practice said that the lack of education of these officers did prove a hindrance to the French at times, but there were also definite advantages to the practice; it produced officers who were conspicuously brave, and set a good example, and it gave the enlisted men incentive to try harder if promotion was possible. But perhaps the biggest benefit was that it guaranteed Napoleon could replace his losses; in most European countries at the time, only aristocrats could be military officers, and losses in the Napoleonic wars were high enough that some countries ran short of remotely suitable aristocrats to employ as military officers.
Enoch Powell rose from Private to Brigadier during the course of the Second World War., though this was very rare.
He was commissioned because he was educated, so I don't think that's a good example.
Nope, and I am too lazy to go search, but it would be consistent with the early Soviet emphasis on egalitarianism and their need to construct an army almost from scratch.
When you mentioned different cultures I was imagining cannibals in the jungles of Borneo, or something. The JSDF is a completely ordinary western-style military, patterned after other modern armies. I don't think it counts as evidence that this is a human universal.
From what I have read in the recent book by Jared Diamond, fighting in New Guinea, is of a completely different type -- quite non-hierarchical. Can there be hierarchical armies without the two-ladder hierarchy?
Is the fighting in New Guinea on a large enough scale to require a hierarchy of any kind?
A group of just a few hundred men, without strongly segregated roles that need coordination (they all fight together in the same way), is just a warband. It doesn't need a complex command structure to coordinate; it might help, but doesn't have the training and regulations to enforce it. It's easier to be egalitarian than to have to worry about political infighting during actual fighting.
That's part of Diamond's point: These societies are organized on a small scale. Other similar societies scaled up and moved to a chieftain system.
But in any case, even small, elite, independent army units have the usual officer/enlisted dichotomy, even if in the elite units this is a less clear distinction.
Possibly, if the line of this post is correct and I am not taking it too far, this is because the SEALS, Sayeret, etc are implicitly expected to be agenty in a way that most soldiers are not.
Their recruits with any experience in other, "real" armies naturally try to emulate them. The desperate situation of a new rebel army probably doesn't encourage experimentation with new ways to organize.
If a rebel army has no-one with actual military experience, then it probably doesn't survive long enough to become a data point - or it just looks like a huge mob or a set of independent bands.