Let's assume humans are indeed "designed" to work in small groups of only 10 people, then at the bottom level of the company tree groups should only consist of 10 people each. So far so good.
But why has a company of 1000 a three-level tree structure with 10 groups of 10 groups of 10 each rather than a two-level structure with 100 groups of 10 each? You assert the reason is the 100 bosses couldn't work together as that group size would be too big. But the bosses don't form a "workgroup" in this sense anyway. They may meet occasionally but spend most of their time with their own groups. The reason for the additional tree level seems more that the supreme leader of the company wouldn't be able to oversee all 100 groups himself.
The distinction matters because for the purpose of being overseen, groups can be represented by their bosses without having to act as one person (as they might have to if their bosses formed a workgroup subject to size limitation due to humans' innate design), so the inverse relationship between freedom of the leaves and company size can't be deduced.
Interesting point, aside from capitalism/wealth/zero-sum etc:
The game created a classic case of cognitive disequilibrium: Either the system is skewed and unfair, or the winners played unfairly. To resolve this by deciding that the system is unfair would call everything into question; young children are committed to rules and rule-making as a way to organize a community, and it is wildly unsettling to acknowledge that rules can have built-in inequities. So most of the children resolved their disequilibrium by clinging to the belief that the winners were ruthless — despite clear evidence of Liam and Kyla's compassionate generosity.
The game was patently unfair, so why did the children blame the winners rather than the system? I suspect there is a general tendency among people (not only children) to blame other people, as opposed to abstract causes. That's more important here than any positive commitment to rules and rule-making.
As you say, systems are abstractions, and people are tangible. It takes a greater maturity to be able to look at a system and find fault with it, rather than with the people involved in the system. There are a lot of adults walking around that never reach that particular maturity, and certainly it's not something you'd see in a lot of 8-year-olds.
Being able to blame a person for something comes back to a peculiar kind of satisfaction: you can confront the problem!
"Since joining Mr. Fujita's school, I have had five successful relationships," says Hachioji Robocop, a 27-year-old civil servant who has been taking the course since 2004. "I lost my virginity six months into the course, and now I can now communicate with women. I'm very grateful."
I don't think it's such a big deal, and maybe I'm the only one, but I don't like it if people have every reason to believe I wrote something that I didn't write. For example, the title of my most recent submission now contains the term "reproductive output", and I hate that term because it somehow seems to associate people with factories. (This is not to say the term is incorrect, and anyway it's taken from the story header.) But such things are very subjective.
Oh, so YOU'RE the insensitive prick that thinks people are factories?
LOL, I think you're putting too much thought into it. As long as the titles are derived from the story and the headline fairly accurately, nobody is likely to judge you for a mis-applied opinion. Hell, nobody is likely to remember you for any given average story in the first place.
I think the six-principles approach is great, and it really shows why the initial reaction will always be contemptuous and therefore doesn't mean anything.
Of course, not everyone can easily copy the approach, you need to be an original thinker in order to not overlook overlooked problems.
I don't understand the last part of the essay about reddit as a classic example. "Tell people what was new", was that an overlooked problem? News agencies have been around for a long time. "Stay out of the way" was only possible because of the user-submission-and-voting system, which seems to me a clever and non-obvious idea. What I like most about this idea is the voting part, it tells me what's interesting, I don't care about whether it's new.
I agree with you that the original wording should have rigorously ensured common knowledge among the islanders of their logicality and devoutness, since common knowledge (of a different fact) is what the puzzle is about. But that's a subtle point and not the source of the previous disagreements here.
But why has a company of 1000 a three-level tree structure with 10 groups of 10 groups of 10 each rather than a two-level structure with 100 groups of 10 each? You assert the reason is the 100 bosses couldn't work together as that group size would be too big. But the bosses don't form a "workgroup" in this sense anyway. They may meet occasionally but spend most of their time with their own groups. The reason for the additional tree level seems more that the supreme leader of the company wouldn't be able to oversee all 100 groups himself.
The distinction matters because for the purpose of being overseen, groups can be represented by their bosses without having to act as one person (as they might have to if their bosses formed a workgroup subject to size limitation due to humans' innate design), so the inverse relationship between freedom of the leaves and company size can't be deduced.