Dunbar’s number and how speaking is 2.8x better than picking fleas
interconnected.org
interconnected.org
The fundamental difference between human society and ape society is that we humans keep track of several thousand people, and apes do not.
I wrote down the results of my experiment here:
http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/i-know-more-than-1200...
I roughly estimate that I know about 12,000 people.
Clearly, language is more than just a three-fold improvement on grooming, but Dunbar's number is plausibly relevant to the origin of language.
a boy you've never met can exist
other people can know a person that you don't know
events happened at different times in the past
other people you don't know can evoke strong emotions in people you do know
all of this can be communicated using sounds
So try and create the longest list where you know how everyone on that list feels about everyone else on that list.
I feel this is an important one to unwind the concepts built on top of it
Their book, Dawn of Everything expands on this
As a society we are currently pretending it is a terrible crime to differentiate, but it strikes me as so at odds with reality as to be a source of unsolvable friction
I can have strong feelings about a cloud and it might change my life, but it doesn’t care.
Still, a lot of people share some culture due to their whatever ... well, if you took the word, you create some other one to fit here... they share with a celebrity. That makes those people related ... but well, I guess "related" is forbidden too... and capable of a different kind of empathy and communication. That phenomenon exists, whatever you decide to call it.
Some call it this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction
A deep link to a Tom Scott video about it: https://youtu.be/leX541Dr2rU?t=33m40s
What gp (Retric) was trying to say is that the terminology of "social relationships" found in the wiki article : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
... is not talking about parasocial relationships. Yes "parasocial relationships" is a real phenomenon but that's not what Dunbar was referring to when correlating "# of maintained relationships" with the primate neocortex size in his research.
Content creators may have strong individual connections to some viewers. However abstracting that to the audience as a whole is like suggesting you have a relationship with the miner who extracted some copper in whatever device you’re using right now. It’s can be meaningful to talk about such weak connections in contexts like economics, but individually most such connections don’t rise to the level of having an emotional response.
Elton John didn't know many of his fans in any meaningful sense, but their existence certainly influenced his life.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/02654075211018...
https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/parasocial-relationships-med...
I think Dunbar's number exemplifies a failing in our social science culture, or maybe our epistemological tendencies. .. or maybe it just shows what happens when MBA texbooks adopt something.
We don't really know what to do with a piece of insight or knowledge like Dunbar's number. When is it "true?" When is it relevant? What does it say about how we should organize? What does it say about how organisations of different sizes function? What kind of successes or failures does Dunbar's nunber suggest we encounter.
I'm not saying that Dunbar's number is wrong. I'm suggesting that for it to be profound in a scientific sense, it needs to have consequences. Prediction, prescription, insight about existing structures, something.
We intuitively agree that working at an 80 person company is different from an 800 person could company. I don't see Dunbar's theories adding much beyond that, no predictions or insights about how such organisations work.
Mostly it's a piece of theory that can be thrown onto slides, in support or objection to something as needed.
Is there a there, there? Do I have this wrong?
Interestingly enough, for me it is based on context. It is ok to have 100 people in the company, 100 people in an online community and 100 people in an off line community, all at the same time, and still keep track and have some kind of relationship. When a context grows too large it doesn’t seem to affect the other contexts.
What I am saying is: After at these years on military/boardroom slides... what does Dunbar's tell us? How has it influenced how we do anything?
What should or shouldn't be organized in smaller/larger groups? How?
It just feels like a lot of popular social science tidbits give us a great introduction with no follow through. What was the point of all those slides?
Not a huge thing, like many things. But it is a useful pice of a puzzle that works, for me.
What becomes different in our approach post-Dunbar's Number is the added perspective of: not only has this been proven to work in millennia of military practice, but in theory we know it is a theoretical barrier in far more social situations than just those that also have confounding factors like top-down management.
My insights actually started from a post made here, where someone talked about post 'weirdness'. There are so many posts that we skim all of the time. If there is a post that is weird, we skip it. If there is a thread that is weird, we collapse it. What I realized however, if that weirdness is coming from the people who are here all the time, at the top of the karma charts, and people see their name all of the time and respect their opinions, that you can become more weird. And so as the community grows and as you communicate with more people, as you see the same person less and less often, the ability to be weird drops. The larger a community, the less it can move as a cohesive unit, the less it can find new ideas.
So what we're really looking at is how Metcalfe's law clashes with the Overton window. That's why Dunbar's number is a thing. As we communicate we subtly change our opinions, and when a group becomes to large, the communication scaling at a factorial rate eventually meets its limit. You end up with a group that believes different ideas, and therefore the best thing to do is split. We don't see the splits in existing social media because even though the Overton Window is smaller and smaller with larger and larger numbers, more and more people are being pulled into it, and exponentially more people are tossed aside.
Why do so many commenters here throw away the many many Dunbar's number studies in favor of what appears to be one clump of new research? What do Graber and Wengrow have that convinces you everyone except for them is making some error?
Dunbar is often taken as meaning that above a certain group size, direct, intuitive or emergent democratic organisation isn't possible. You need kings, presidents, parliaments , courts and whatnot. He's mad at Yuval Noah Harari for similar reasons.
It's somewhat of a straw man, imo.
As for Dunbar, what do all these Dunbar's number studies amount to? I mean sure, they confirm something about how many relationships we can maintain, and such. What does any of that imply though.
Dunbar's number studies haven't really proposed, tested or studied any consequences to their theories. What happens when group sizes increase beyond the number? That makes it pretty empty theory, imo.
Sure, Dunbar has a lot of influence in shallow realms: MBA textbooks, managerial self help books, military slideshows and such.
Re: umwinding... I think most of what Wengrow unwinds is a strawman.
The steelman version of Dunbar is pretty small and unimportant. The strawman is pretty much made up by Wengrow. It all amounts to cheesy discourse, IMO.
It has a "what the media don't want you to know" quality to it.
Been rolled out with great success at much larger organizations too.
As a dev of 20+ years, I got into SAFe because it's IMHO the ideal work environment for developers. It's supposed to put developers in control of the schedule, prevent you from being handed arbitrary deadlines, avoid constant changes in priority by letting teams plan out for a quarter at a time, avoid over planning the time you have (2/3 of time planned per 2 week iteration and 2 full weeks at the end left entirely open) and make sure everybody is clear up front about what the risks are to being able to deliver on the plan.
There's supposed to be 2 backlogs, one for the product side to prioritize and one for the dev side to prioritize without any influence from product so that you can ensure all of the technical stuff that needs to be done can be done without having to spend a ton of time explaining why to the non-technical side of the house.
End of the day you should end up with less meetings and a more realistic schedule that you, the developer, have essentially created.
If leadership won't give up the control to let the process work, everything goes to crap. Every place I've heard of bad SAFe experiences, that's been the cause fwiw. Usually the most frustrated people in a SAFe are the micromanagers (and it's supposed to be that way).
Would you be willing to share why it's going so wrong? My keybase contact info is in my profile.
False. There are a lot of units, one can certainly pick some of them of about 150 size. But there's no reason to call it "basic".
Smallest unit is 1 person. Smallest group you can find is 2 person (e.g. operators of an ATGM).
It's probably also not entirely a coincidence that a lot of military fiction seems to focus on a company or a company-sized unit.
Do you have company and battalion mixed up here? Why wouldn't a battalion, which consists of companies, be capable of independent operation if the individual companies are?
> Professional armies have a basic unit of about 150 men: This was as true of the Roman Army (both before and after the reforms of 104 BC) as of modern armies since the sixteenth century.
And I'm actively against the statement that number 150 is relevant because of all-to-all communication pattern. In army (as well as emergency responders like firefighters) all-to-all communication is actively forbidden, and only possible for groups of 3-6 people of similar ranks/positions. All other communications must go either up or down the authority chain.
150 is part of an "hierarchy" of sorts of numbers.
Roman army example:
The basic infantry fighting unit was a group with 120 men, that during formation-based battles (not all battles were like that) organized themselves in 40 columns and 3 rows. This was called a "maniple" and was led by a "Centurion" (cent of centurion means one hundred).
Inside that group it was normal to have smaller groups of various sizes (having subleaders for 60 men was common for example, and sometimes for 30 too), and informally thre was one guy leading each group of 6 or so people.
With cavalry stuff was similar ,but more formal, the centurions led "decurions", each "decurion" had 10 men under him. the Decurions were a formal position, but elected, chosen by their own men. Then 3 decurions were chosen to work in a group, one of them was the leader, and 2 of them auxiliaries, during battles the leader could lead all 30 men, or if needed the trio could split into 3 groups of 10.
Thing is, all that still matches Dunbar's calculations more or less, and this is mentioned in the article, for example the reason humans limit all-to-all to 3-6 people is because that is how far you can get your voice in a noisy environment.
I would do it myself, but unfortunately, it seems a lot harder to play with experimental concepts today. Or, at least, maybe I'm overthinking the amount of work that would be required to implement something as simple in functionality.
> Dunbar’s number, 150, is the natural size of human social groups.
Presumably human language gives us a 2.8x boost over other primates.
Had to screw with the page to disable it.
Humans have always been the same, both in their individual and group form, and good leaders from 4000 years ago would fare just as well today if given the right context. Ignoring the history of human behavior means actively disregarding the most powerful tool to understand what stuff works for us and what doesn't. We are forgetting that the vast majority of our activities involves other humans, and 100% of what we do involves ourselves. When creating technology used by groups of people or when making up policies we should be more careful about shaping it from a behavioral point of view rather than a purely technical one. If Facebook was designed from a more human perspective and the like button functioned 38% of the times we would be in a much better state than the like button being formally proven to always work and social interactions working 38% of the time
Social systems are chaotic, and extremely multi-casual, and extremely uncontrollable (in the sense of being able to isolate one cause). Under these conditions there is no scientific method. Anything called a science is just a ritualized imitation.
The world does not owe us it being intelligible to us; the success of science in being able to engineer trinkets has fooled us for the past 300 years -- the vast majority of the whole of reality is unknowable -- as in, there is no method which could produce a theory of it (in the strong sense).
I think apparently quantitative or "theoretical" results from social sciences are more like curios which could inspire some speculative designs for social institutions. They arent theories (as in science) by which we can engineer institutions.
Treating anything in social science as more than some ancient form of zoology, that is, some local observations jotted down by an aristocrat -- is a recipe for disaster. Outside the physics lab, the entire world is an infinite zoo with no grand discernable patterns.
Engelbart's team (the one that came up with the personal computer back in 68) was a combination of engineers and psychologists, and I think there's something really powerful about that. It's not about the psychological results specifically, it's more about integrating the psychological perspective during product discovery.
So what is the equivalent 50 years on? Maybe sociologists could be hired as PMs, or anthropologists in R&D (I know Microsoft and Intel are really good at this, but I mean for smaller, sub-1000 person firms). I wonder what those blended teams would come up with.
In fact, this is mentioned in page 6 of Dunbar's paper[1] so I fail to see how that invalidates anything about this theory. Perhaps have I missed something?
[1]: https://pdodds.w3.uvm.edu/files/papers/others/1993/dunbar199...
>The “Personal Social Group” = 150 people (bands of common lineage — what Dunbar believed to be the biggest group of people one person can have close relationships with). The “Clan” = 450-500 people (cohesive sub tribal unit). The “Tribal Group” = 1500 — 2000 people (tribe).
Many people use Dunbar's number to justify why larger societies of humans must necessarily require bureaucracy, coercion under threat of violence, etc. to scale beyond a couple hundred people and that any alternative to the power structures we have today is unrealistic fantasy. It's one key to capitalist realism
It may be true that modern life (be it Industrial age or Information age for your demarcation) is evolutionarily short, remember that the rules of environmentally-triggered gene expression can effectively result in "evolved behavior" faster than actual mutation gathering.
If gene expression is adaptable to social conditions, and social conditions produce the same pattern of gene expression across generations, then the functional organisms: shape, weight, aggressiveness, psychology produced by the pattern of gene expression WILL change on a large scale.
So you could do psychological/anthropological behavioral studies for "modern" humans in "modern" life, if they aren't doing cross-cultural comparisons, and "universal psychological truths" won't be universal.
The big question to me personally is if you have sustained centuries of, let's say, "capitalism-based selection", how much drift is there? Capitalism undeniably rewards certain sociopathic traits that really are only applicable to modern times: plenty of resources, availability of technology, etc. We're probably at the tail end of a long run of "plenty".