Hidden complexity in brains and ogregores

Susan Tonkin gave me an intriguing reason why it’s hard to “see” ogregores for what they are, in response to my post Bad Outcomes make it easier to see group agency. She noted that while it’s simple to delimit an organization’s make-up (listing the employees, for example) and easy to see its outputs (like products, jobs, and stock price), we have great trouble thinking through the complexity in the middle. 

If we struggle to grasp the complexity of an organization it’s very tempting to focus on the things we can see—the employees on the one hand, and CEOs making decisions on the other—rather than the way the organization as such is functioning.

Her point reminded of a recent paper by Zheng and Meister claiming that the brain processes information at a surprisingly slow rate of 10 bits per second, in stark contrast with the vast amount of sensory data our bodies gather—approximately one billion bits per second from various stimuli (ScienceAlert summary). Our experience of cognition is slow, about 10 bits per second, and the huge parallel processing of the sensory-motor system is invisible to our conscious minds. It’s easy to associate our agency with conscious cognition and ignore the complexity that underlies it. 

Image: DALL-E-3

It’s not a straight comparison, since Susan is talking about our inability to comprehend the vast complexity of a corporation’s processes, while Zheng and Meister focus on the huge data condensation between sensory input and behavioral output. However, both address hidden and ignored processes. Our personal experience of producing simple outputs from vastly complicated inputs might account for our habit of explaining organization behavior by reference to a single leader. 

A tangent for later: what is the information rate for organization behavior? Zheng and Meister use an information-theoretic measure. There are papers (cf. Google Scholar search) looking at information entropy in organizational systems, so presumably someone has already calculated the information rate.

It’s also likely humans’ perceptual apparatus, optimized for sensory input, is not suited to perceiving let alone processing the activities of tens of thousands of mostly invisible employees.

Susan also observed that while it might be possible for a few special people to directly perceive the constituent activity of organizations, the best the rest of us can do is to calculate. This reminds me of the highly cited Epstein et al. paper on intuitive-experiential and analytical-rational thinking styles. Those of us who don’t have intuitive-experiential perception of organizations have to fall back on analytical-rational methods like data collection and organizational studies. There is an intuitive-experiential method too, though: mythology.