[perihelions]

Everything is silly, and consensus reality on these kind of things is just a glorified Reddit thread IRL. There's at least four plausible metrics. Everest is tallest from the local mean sea level (the smoothed gravitational equipotential—what a stationary water surface hugs); McKinley-Denali from its local terrain base; Mauna Kea from the local terrain base inclusive of underwater terrain; and Chimborazo, in equatorial Ecuador (it's Ecuador because it's equatorial), as measured from this planet's center-of-mass (the planet bulges out approaching the equator because of its spinning—"oblateness").

Like a Reddit thread, it's best not to argue too much with what the hive-mind decides. People literally died climbing what they believed to be the correct answer. Let them have their thing. :)

[dredmorbius]

Following up on your pedantism: Chimborazo isn't in Ecuador because it's equatorial, but rather, it's equatorial because it's in Ecuador.

(Or, perhaps, because it lies near or on the equator.)

There are non-Ecuadorian equatorial locations.

:-)

(I do like, appreciate, and was previously aware of the various claims to "highest mountain". Interesting also to contemplate that the early Rockies, and perhaps Appalachian mountains (themselves older than dirt, literally), may once have exceeded thirty thousand feet (approaching 10,000 m). Though the Rockies figure might be an ambitious reading of the Teton Fault having experienced 20,000 -- 30,000 feet of vertical displacement. This is possible without peaks reaching such heights, given erosion. Estimates of the original height of the Appalachians is even more tenuous and indirect.)

[tracerbulletx]

Enjoyed your clear description but I don't know that framing it as some kind of hive mind group think issue is that accurate. It's just taxonomy and ontology, it's ok to have different taxonomies for different contexts. The same issue exists for everything. planets, temperature, oceans, species..

[brtio2]

What is being called hive mind, that used to be called cargo cult, is a real thing on HN, though.

There’s this fantasy that there are a bunch of geniuses that can adequately cover any topic here and that discussion will be inclusive and enlightening, but, no, it’s just a frustrating cauldron of wannabes and bad info that periodically hit upon things.

[dredmorbius]

Hive mind, cargo cult, and a third phenomena, groupthink, are somewhat related but probably more usefully considered as distinct.

A hive mind in its original form is a form of emergent intelligence most especially associated with social insects (e.g., ants, bees, and termites), where collective behavioural patterns emerge which are independent of, and not fully explained by, any individual behaviours or intelligence. The term is of course also applied to humans, perhaps most famously as "the madness of crowds", as popularised by the book of the same title.

Groupthink, to skip over cargo cults for a moment, is a case where individual beliefs and/or behaviours are influenced by a group, often as an otherwise poorly-substantiated set of beliefs or actions, usually in agreement with some leader. Why groupthink emerges and what possible social/psychological evolutionary advantages it might convey (compensating for the cost of beliefs at odds with reality and empirical evidence) are hotly debated. Unlike the hive mind, groupthink isn't emergent, in the sense that individuals express specific beliefs or exhibit specific behaviours, though generally associated with the group context.

Cargo-cults are a form of groupthink. My own view is that cargo cults emerge in response to highly complex phenomena, either entirely beyond the grasp of individuals, or pushing the limits of scientific or technical knowledge. The original form, emerging on Pacific islands during and following WWII were a case of a non-technological culture (the native island inhabitants) trying to attain the benefits of a technological society (the various military belligerants of WWII) by emulating airstrips and the hope of the cargo (goods and services) these apparently brought the advanced society. Air-borne transport is knowable by humans, but only in a given social-technological context, which the islanders lacked.

In other instances, cargo culting tends to resemble fads and fashions where indicia or characteristics of some complex concept are adhered to, sometimes to achieve their ends, sometimes to indicate adherence to or alignment with a group. Fashion, language, dress, management trends, and software development practices (3GL, structured code, Agile, ML, and the like may all be examples in at least some cases). Often the foundations are more than purely technical, e.g., management or investors may feel a need to follow the crowd / leaders, often to avoid scapegoating or accountability in the event of failure.

All of which of course is distinct from the false-competence delusion of an expert within one domain presuming expertise in others, e.g., Nobel Disease <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease>.

[RHSman2]

Humans measuring stuff and getting pedantic is a sport for the ages.