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Comment by ds_opseeker | Hacker News Reader

Dunbar told me it grows by approximately tripling. And yes, when you cross a Dunbar bound the old tools and techniques fail in surprising ways.

45-50

150

450/500

1500

5000

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I've looked a bit at military history and it is interesting to see how consistent they generally are. They'll have a squad of about 10, though the variance can be up to 50%, grouped into companies of ~100, grouped into legions of ~1000, into armies of ~10,000. It wasn't until the 20th Century that armies could become really huge. But the most all-purpose and independent units tended to be in the 100-150 range. Big enough to have enough people to do everything you typically need to do with adequate redundancy. Dunbar's numbers are good enough rules-of-thumb. Some people have better social memories and so will have larger Dunbar number capabilities, just as others have smaller.

In the bc era Chinese armies routinely had 50000 warhorses let alone ground-pounding infantry. Your data is ... incomplete. I would recommend looking a bit more at military history, quite a bit more.

Anecdotal, I have been using 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500,... as the 'break points' where organizational structures need a rethink. So far, it has worked for me. These also match the lines on a log graph.

I wonder if there is a maximum or plateau, beyond which it doesn't matter. is there a difference between 30 million and 300 million, 3 billion to 30 billion?

Ah! We are entering "paperclip factory" territory here, with your question ... :)

> is there a difference between 30 million and 300 million, 3 billion to 30 billion?

In organizational terms? That is, terms of how you would go about organizing or operating ...

... I would humbly only go as far as saying this: I feel there has to be (some) upper limit beyond which any "structure" other than a "self-organizing" structure will collapse or be unmanageable.-

PS. DAOs (which, sadly, seem (?) to be on the wane), were at (some) end of that spectrum, methinks ...

Most, if not all, human structures are self organizing by definition. They simply differ in their stability depending on scale and conditions.

I wonder if the stability of DAOs benefit or are hindered with scale. It may be implementation specific as well.

The Sci-fi part of my brain finds parallels in feudalism, which used delegation and strict hierarchy to deal with the span of control issue.

> It may be implementation specific as well.

I would posit it is. Totally.-

PS. For all we know, the first thing a superhumanly intelligent AGI might do is "forcibly-self-organize" us into a DAO, doing away with the political system. I, for one, would welcome that :)

> The Sci-fi part of my brain finds parallels in feudalism

Elsethread - when talking abou how the Mongols almost overtook Europe - the claim was made that - to a point - part of the reason the hordes had to stop is that "descentralized" (as opposed to centralized clan-leader-ruled) feudal structures made it hard to make advances.-

... so feudalism came up, as a somewhat advanced form of decentralization. Which was neat.-

Yep, I’ve seen the tripling rule in scale-ups and it was brutal as it kicked in, each time. At a certain point we began to anticipate it.

That feels at least directionally correct. And it even goes up from there. An organization with a few thousand people is quite different from a 20-30K one.

I'm not sure about the math and exact numbers (which probably vary depending upon the situation anyway) but it's pretty clear that things are quite different at different scale points.

(And, should it hold, we get to cities: 100K people, 300K people, 1M people, are different cities to live in - qua size ...

... and different organizations, of course.-

Leaves me wondering - among many things - what the "largest qua payroll" organization worldwide might be.-

US Dept. of Defense, Chinese PLA, Indian railways. Walmart, Saudi Aramco come to mind.-

Voting for a position at the government of my ~3M people city is completely different from voting for a position at the government of my ~300M people country.

Logically, it makes sense that the situation keeps changing. But it still feels weird. How many different kinds of relationship are we capable of?

> How many different kinds of relationship are we capable of?

Kinds? (qualitative) ...

... I think you very much upped the ante there :)

I'd posit a (cheap, easy) guess: Infinite.-

PS. Of course, taking the "cheap" way out in thinking about this of assuming each one-on-one relationship (not to mention one-to-many, and many-to-one and many-to-many, like mentioned upthread) to be a unique "kind", is an easy way out: As many types of relationships as people, because no two people are alike, and so is their relationship. Heck, considering each of the individuals (themselves) involved, might subjectively experience a different relationship, there's even a "two to each pair" pairing of relationship types to participants, to be considered ...

Now, when, IMHO it gets interesting is if we - a bit more rigoroulsy - attempt a "taxonomy" of relationship "types".-

(And, then, again, I am sure anthropology has studied and catalogued those to death ...)

It's complicated by the fact that larger organizations/cities/etc. can be effectively agglomerations of smaller entities with tighter or looser coupling. But, yes, in general.

You can see some of this in your examples.

US DoD is, of course, actually part of the US government but relatively few DoD employees ever really interact with people in other US government branches. Ditto with Walmart store employees and the "mothership."

Entirely good point.-

As a start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers

Thou hittest the nail right on the head :)

PS. Foxconn. Of course.-

PSS. The "tripling" rule seems to hold. 1/1.5MM seems to be a "grouping", peaking at around 3MM on average. 3MM. That is large for an organization ...

This matches my experience.

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