EP 151 Daniel Mezick on Ritual and Hierarchy

Jim talks with Daniel Mezick about two books on leadership & social coherence, Michael Suk-Young Chwe's Rational Ritual and Christopher Boehm's Hierarchy in the Forest. They discuss ritual as a mechanism for large-scale coordination, mimicry in beer choice and Super Bowl ads, fragmentation of audiences through microtargeting, the relationship between common knowledge & ritual, China's management of common knowledge, America's weak-sauce rituals, meetings as games, how egalitarianism increases group decision quality, role-based vs position-based leadership, anti-puffing-up mechanisms, social values of hunter-forager groups, how weapons may have enabled egalitarianism, personal sovereignty as careful authorizing, Jim's guest selection algorithm, authority information as social glue, rapid adaptability of informal authority systems, Graeber & Wengrow's critique of Boehm, egalitarianism as a game, making role-based leadership scalable, leadership invitation, and much more.