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Comment by annowiki | Hacker News Reader

You have me thinking about kind of a cool board idea. 150 person twitter boards. Cap it at 150. People in that group can all vote on their own moderation, they can't interact with groups in other boards through quote tweeting or voting, though obviously they can copy paste.

You might get racist boards, but then its easy to get rid of all of them at once.

150 being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number of course.

I have no way to distribute anything. I tried to do my own annotations board on literature but no one joined. I just think it sounds cool to be in a personable board like that.

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Inventing some protocol around the Dunbar number is interesting.

There was something similar in the Weatherford's book on Genghis Khan [1][2]. This system was described to be very effective for communicating and coordinating the huge military.

> In Genghis Khan's military system, a tumen was recursively built from units of 10 (aravt), 100 (zuut) and 1,000 (mingghan), each with a leader reporting to the next higher level.

Note: I am not aware of how good the Weatherford book is, it felt one-sided to me. So I am not sure how good the civic system that depended on the Tumen was in the mongol era.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mingghan

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumen_(unit)#Genghis_Khan's_or...

Pretty much every effective military in history has had this kind of hierarchical structure, by both imitation and convergent evolution. I'm sure there's a post on https://acoup.blog/ about it.

Makes sense that effective militaries are well-organized like this. Militaries have conducted big engineering projects for civic purposes, all thru history - don't remember the exact anecdote. But found a wiki[1] by quick google search.

I will checkout this blog, maybe it has some posts about non-military initiatives also.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:United_States_Army_Co...

Dunbar’s number is discredited reactionary nonsense, see wengrow/graeber research

Is there some research on a law of 5? As in 5 is the max amount of connections and permutations in a group of people which it's possible for a member to work out the permutations?

For example in a group of 3 me bill and Alice I can model bills view of me and Alice alone, me and Alice together, me Alice and bill together, etc etc

Beyond a certain number it's not really possible.

As far as I can tell the vast majority of the scientific community still consider it valid.

I also discovered in searching that you're talking about David Graeber. I recently read his "Bullshit Jobs" book because someone on here cited it. It was one of the worst books I've ever read. It was clearly a contrived political manifesto (I suppose for "anarchy") with the thinnest veneer of popular science wrapped around it. I think ancient aliens probably got more anthropology correct.

So if you're going to appeal to an authority instead of actually transmitting the argument yourself then David Graeber seems like probably one of the worst you could pick to cite.

oh so you didn’t read the research. googled one of the non graeber papers for ya since you decided you didn’t like the guy for his politics https://twitter.com/davidwengrow/status/1116786595351470080?... you can find the full contents on scihub. I trust you can overcome your appeal to the authority of popularly engrained opinions

> You might get racist boards, but then its easy to get rid of all of them at once.

You don't have to shut them down, you know. The British Government did this all throughout the 1970s to 1990s, where pubs (and later online services) where Republican terrorists hung out were very much left alone. They could have swooped in and scooped the lot up, but they didn't.

Because if they ever did want to scoop them all up, they knew exactly where to look, and why would you disturb that?

I've always thought that was the right way to handle it -- allow people to self-express, however abhorrent they may be. For the worst offenders, dedicate resources to make sure no harm is done (for example, monitor these watering-wells for any activity indicative of planning a terrorist attack, etc).

It also turns into a game of whack-a-mole. You ban the boards and they just immediately come back under a different name.

But that is also a recipe for echo chambers.

Anyway, from a technical point of view, this is what Mastodon instances already can offer.

You can't fight echo chamber effect with technical measures, forget about it.

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