thumb|right|The mediaeval scala naturae as a staircase, implying the orthogenesis|possibility of progress: [[Ramon Llull's Ladder of Ascent and Descent of the Mind, 1305]]
A hierarchy is a system that arranges people, things, or ideas in ranked levels, with some positioned above others in order or importance. Hierarchies matter because they help organize complex groups and structures, though the image suggests they've long been imagined as pathways for progress or ascent through different levels.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
thumb|right|The mediaeval scala naturae as a staircase, implying the orthogenesis|possibility of progress: [[Ramon Llull's Ladder of Ascent and Descent of the Mind, 1305]]
A hierarchy (, ) is an arrangement of items (objects, names, values, categories, etc.) that are represented as being "above", "below", or "at the same level as" one another. Hierarchy is an important concept in a wide variety of fields, such as architecture, philosophy, design, mathematics, computer science, organizational theory, systems theory, systematic biology, and the social sciences (especially political science).
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).