Dunbar's Number
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Some things in life weren't meant to scale, and there are a lot of companies trying to do the literally impossible; causing far more damage to their users than they'd ever do good.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22331913-thinking-big
Similarly, hard-coded limits to contact lists, e-mail address books, etc. It'd never work, but I'm curious what the effects would be.
http://service.path.com/customer/portal/articles/257552-why-...
You can do this on your own if you so care - I use Twitter in pretty close to this way (I follow 158 accounts as of today, and ~10 of them are service status accounts). Anything over that I might also be interested goes on a List and I check them whenever I'm bored (and I also cap lists at ~150 or so accounts, but none of them are even close to that).
I'm of the opinion that software shouldn't build limitations, it should only be a tool for how users want to use it. (It could be a better tool by instead telling users "Hey, you're following a lot of users, things are probably pretty noisy for you huh? Maybe you want to use a list for {these similar accounts} or something?")
Better yet, come up with a platform that naturally incentivizes users to engage in more sophisticated interactions with a smaller number of people instead of shallow interactions with large numbers of people.
Also, Path [1] was social network app that had these kinds of limits back in the day.
> ...which might explain why there wasn't as much benefit from it as one might have hoped.
I think you've got this the wrong way around. The users probably didn't like being constrained to an arbitrary number. My main point was that any service that tries to impose such limits is going to feel pressure to raise/abolish them.
That makes it quite different, as what you think are your closest friends won’t be forced to choose between you and somebody else in their size-limited friend list.
Because of that, I doubt it would be very similar.
>What's so unnatural about working for a big company? The root of the problem is that humans weren't meant to work in such large groups.
>Another thing you notice when you see animals in the wild is that each species thrives in groups of a certain size. A herd of impalas might have 100 adults; baboons maybe 20; lions rarely 10. Humans also seem designed to work in groups, and what I've read about hunter-gatherers accords with research on organizations and my own experience to suggest roughly what the ideal size is: groups of 8 work well; by 20 they're getting hard to manage; and a group of 50 is really unwieldy. [1]
>Whatever the upper limit is, we are clearly not meant to work in groups of several hundred. And yet—for reasons having more to do with technology than human nature—a great many people work for companies with hundreds or thousands of employees.
That way, it doesn't matter if you work for a company of 20 or 2000 because you only interact with a manageable subset of all employees.
So it works well as long as your teams don't interact. And if they don't interact, why do you have a 2000 person company?
My number is about 8 by that metric.
I think the optimal quality:quantity balance is very different across one's friendly acquaintances, professional network, and inner circle.
https://www.psy.ox.ac.uk/research/social-and-evolutionary-ne...
Even though 150 is pretty small, you typically "know" somebody based on how they relate to the others you know about, every permutation of who knows who, who likes who, who is similar to who and so forth. That number could be expressed as a power: 150^2 = ~22K. Most people have a vocabulary size of around 10k-30K words. It's probably a coincidence, but it's a number range that pops up a lot for medium/long term memory.
Let's call Dunbar's number 100. Have every group of 100 people elect their own L1 representative. Have every group of 100 L1's elect an L2. L4 is 100 people who represent 100,000,000, larger than most countries and any of the US states, and L5 represents 10 billion, the whole world population for some time to come.
Each L representative can have meaningful relationships with all of their immediate constituents and about half the people of their own level.
I think it would make more sense go with the smaller category, and perhaps use a number around 49. Keep it odd to avoid a tie.
L3 represents 117 thousand, L4 represents 5.7 million, L5 represents 282 million, L6 represents 13.8 billion
At current population of 7 billion: 144 million L1 representatives. 2.9 million L2 representatives. 60 thousand L3 representatives. 1,225 L4 representatives. 24 L5 representatives
My (possibly naive) fix is to allow people at each level to join any group-of-100, as long as the size remains at 100. (For one to join, one has to leave.)
http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/i-know-more-than-1200...
And you also know some facts about at least 12,000 people, and probably many more.
Just think of your favorite music bands. You can probably list 100 bands easily. And if they average 3 people per band, that's 300 people that you know something of.
Knowing the upper limit on how many people we know is crucial for understanding the complexity of human society.
If I am going to go and say kill a Water Buffalo or tile a bathroom, then I want some people with the skills who can also work together well. That's a lot more than knowing their name and hobbies.
Ultra weak ties have importance in practical ways. If I were hiring a high level software architect, I would expect them to have opinions about some of the big names in the history of software, maybe John McCarthy or Allan Kay or Guido von Russom or Rich Hickley. Neither of us would necessarily have any personal connections to those people, but they operate like the stars in the sky, the give us points by which we can navigate the whole entirety of the human social universe.
I have tried very hard to internalize appeal to authority as meaningless so I have mostly divorced ideas from those who had them. As such, I have never looked into big names in any field because I feel it's not just worthless but actually harmful.
I know many reasonably competent people who take the opposite approach and still get stuff done.
If you want to talk about people that's different from getting things done. Lebron James is for example irrelevant when talking about Collage basketball so he does not impact the sport directly.
> Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.
When you're hearing "stable social relationship", you might think of the relationship to your parents, brothers, sisters, children or partner. However, the definition of "stable social relationship" also applies to your doctor, your boss, your coworkers, the lady next door who waters your flowers when you're on vacation, etc. Putting that number around 100-150 average sounds reasonable to me.
> Dunbar explained it informally as "the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar"
In other words - while your brain may have the potential ability to maintain numerous connections, your life circumstances have limited the number of actual connections to only a few.
I’m in the “5” camp, btw.
Most of humanity are still living in rough conditions also.
Only a small percentage of humanity would die off and the rest would re-acclimate. There hasn't been all that much 'evolution' aside from some selection for intelligence.
Anyway, no way the current ecosystem supports the current human population. Its only thru intense civilized effort that we've built these hives of humanity. The die-off would be immense.
And because of competition, those who are fit will dominate. So the glasses-wearing insulin-needing people will be first to go.
Nothing more.
Philip Lieberman argues that since band societies of approximately 30–50 people are bounded by nutritional limitations to what group sizes can be fed without at least rudimentary agriculture, big human brains consuming more nutrients than ape brains, group sizes of approximately 150 cannot have been selected for in paleolithic humans.
Evolutionary psychology/nutrition is based on a lot of guesswork. We don't really know how people lived, or what timescales are important.
A lot of the early conjectures about historical developments are based on philosophical thought expirements of 19th century intellectuals. Others based on hunter-gatherers in modern times. These theories tend to be "economic" (like Malthus) and resource focused. "Agriculture created surplusses, which enables specialization..etc. underpants.. Greek temples"
In eastern Turkey there are fascinating sites from the paleo/neo-lithic transition period. Interestingly, the massive & seemingly ritual/civic site (gobleki tepeh) predates the agricultural sites. Ie, it seems a large complex pre-agricultural society existed, with many people cooperating in ways we thought were first developed by advanced agriculturalists.
One could reasonably (though not conclusively) interpret this as large-scale culture giving rise to agriculture, not the other way around.
Humans are behaviourally diverse. I imagine one would find groups of various size at all prehistorical times. For analogy, wolves are somewhat behavioural diverse. Many are solitary. Some hunt mostly rodents, and live in small packs. Some hunt mostly large game, and live in large packs. Some scavange more. There is a negotiation between wolves' inherent behavioural range and the "economics" of their lifestyle that dictates group size. Humans have a much wider range.
We don't really know much about early humans, even what they ate. We can guess though, that this varied more than it does in wolves.. at least I think so.
I recently heard a lecture on archaic sapiens in the Levant. One theorist argues they ate mostly elephants which (I imagine) required and supported large group size. We don't really know.
In any case... the reason I bring all this up is that group size, and our ability to cooperate effectively in different group sizes is just interesting. It remains (imo) central to key mystery of human origins, possibly explaining the sapiens ascention.
Yuval Noah Harari basically narrates all human history as an increasingly developing ability to cooperate in ever larger groups. This is the underlying difference between language, writing, myth, religion.. The communism-capitalism cliche is basically a debate about mechanisms of cooperation in large groups. What we are doing now (on hn) is coordinating across a large group, so we can think* together.
I think Dunbar's number (or another similar one) gives us the maximum group size for spontaneous coordination, without formalization. This is good to know.
More research please :)