Quick Thought on Hierarchies
[Editor's Note: The following thoughts are inspired by On Intelligence.]
I’ve been thinking about where hierarchies fit in a lot lately and I just had a thought about it that needed to be written down.
Maybe the problem is that hierarchies don’t work well as a primary information organization model, however, they could be a great secondary organizer. In other words, there might be a place for hierarchies withing a network architecture. I haven’t completely fleshed this out, but check this quote from On Intelligence:
Computer memory does not normally store sequences of patterns. It can be made to do so using various software tricks (such as when you store a song on your computer), but computer memory does not do this automatically. In contrast, the cortex does store sequences automatically. Doing so is an inherent aspect of the necortical memory system.
So what if we could use a network to store patterns (inherently hierarchical)? What kind of patterns would we store? Why would it be useful?
I’m not quite sure I know the answers to those questions quite yet, but it seems important to bring hierarchies back into the equation. The fact is, I never really thought about them as anything but top dog, however, they could definitely find a place somewhere in a network.
There are at least lessons we can take from hierarchical organizing. Look at tabs, for example, although they now seem to sit at the top of every application, tabs scream folders, which in turn, scream hierarchies.
Ahhhhhhh!
Interesting?
Seriously, I’m not sure . . . let me know.
Hi, I'm 
Why are patterns inherently hierarchical? I don’t think of patterns that way at all; I think of them more as structurally repetitive. Think about chaos theory. We think about chaos as random and disordered, but the theory itself is all about how some predictable patterns (e.g., weather) can be significantly altered by even a small thing (the famous butterfly wings.) So I think the use of the word hierarchical may be problematic — how about substituting something like ‘structural orders?’
But isn’t structural order hierarchical in a way? Here’s the definition of hierarchy: ” A series in which each element is graded or ranked: put honesty first in her hierarchy of values.” A patterns puts certain elements in a certain order, while they’re not necessarily ranked by importance, they are ranked in a way.
Maybe you’re right that structural orders are a better word, but my big point still remains that I’m thinking more and more that there’s a place for hierarchy somewhere within an organizational framework.