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Comment by balaji1 | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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

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