It was intentional! :) After all, the title of the post we're commenting on is contrasting human behavior to bees.
No, I don't believe ants are actually acting with intelligent, social behavior in an attempt to win over their fellow ants. They're just little statistical robots searching for optimality.
That said, there have been times that I've been frustrated when I feel I am working harder than my peers and, in those moments, it's been easy for me to feel justified by looking at what's optimal for me rather than extrapolating to what's optimal for the greater good. I thought adding a little anthropomorphism to my descriptors would be a gentle way of helping others reflect on similar situations.
Social behaviour doesn’t imply intelligence, or at least conscious intelligence. Most ants will never reproduce. Their life has no meaning beyond the wellbeing of the colony. It make sense that what is statistically optimal for the ant is social behaviour.
It's always been at risk and always will be. Maybe you learned about previous mass extinctions and that a big eruption is all you need to wipe us out. Earth will still be here though. I throughly agree with you regarding the lack of meaning, but I disagree there's meaning in the colony. There's no meaning, there's just nature.
What about our nature? I don’t believe there isn’t meaning, only what we as humans apply. If an ant applies meaning, it still counts. Just might be less than we can perceive.
There are indeed only two categories: either we say there's no meaning at all (and at the scale of the universe it definitely looks so) then there's no difference between a human and an ant, we're all nothings. Or, we say there is a meaning in humans, then we must give meaning also to smaller critters like you suggested, just don't look at the scale of the universe :) Or of course, we accept meaning as a very local thing then everybody can redefine their own, even the ants which would surely say "what a meaningless thing is that hooman colony New York".
I believe that meaning is derived by the living organism.
I imagine ants to have a form of OCD where they feel the fear if they don’t do what they are compelled to do.
Humans think they have free will. I don’t think so, we all do what we are compelled to do (and that could just be follow the herd)
Yes, there needs to be a statistical distribution of effort for intrinsic reasons --in this case of physics. Even if it wasn't needed, it would exist. The workers can console themselves with the thought that when times get hard, the idlers will be nice, tender, succulent food.
"in in an effort to prove they're working hard to the other ants"
"all ants to be comfortable allowing some of their ant peers to work less"
Or maybe on some instinctive level they realize they just literally cannot work in the crowd and wait until they can and that's that.