The author presents the idea that "you may be born into a culture with social practices that you don't understand but that work for your benefit; they may work better if you don't understand them!"
I find this idea a little repellant, but it's something Friedrich Hayek wrote about too. (In my mind Hayek is the person most associated with distributed knowledge.) ~"You may not understand the forces that have led society to be organized the way that it is, but you should respect that sometimes the order of things reflects knowledge you may not have."
One of his essays on this topic was "Individualism: True and False":
"""This brings me to my second point: the necessity, in any complex society in which the effects of anyone’s action reach far beyond his possible range of vision, of the individual submitting to the anonymous and seemingly irrational forces of society—a submission which must include not only the acceptance of rules of behavior as valid without examining what depends in the particular instance on their being observed but also a readiness to adjust himself to changes which may profoundly affect his fortunes and opportunities and the causes of which may be altogether unintelligible to him."""
I'd recommend thinking a little about the algorithms involved in efficiently assigning a nearby task to each dwarf and then planning a path for each dwarf to its destination.
It gets interesting pretty fast and a PhD would not hurt. :)
Would you maintain a roadmap telling you how to get from place to place, or just constantly replan? What happens when you change the available paths by building a wall or locking a door?
I find this idea a little repellant, but it's something Friedrich Hayek wrote about too. (In my mind Hayek is the person most associated with distributed knowledge.) ~"You may not understand the forces that have led society to be organized the way that it is, but you should respect that sometimes the order of things reflects knowledge you may not have."
One of his essays on this topic was "Individualism: True and False":
"""This brings me to my second point: the necessity, in any complex society in which the effects of anyone’s action reach far beyond his possible range of vision, of the individual submitting to the anonymous and seemingly irrational forces of society—a submission which must include not only the acceptance of rules of behavior as valid without examining what depends in the particular instance on their being observed but also a readiness to adjust himself to changes which may profoundly affect his fortunes and opportunities and the causes of which may be altogether unintelligible to him."""
https://fee.org/articles/individualism-true-and-false/