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Dunbar's Number is Quadratic

generativist.falsifiable.com · 3,237 words · saved by 1 readers

Ours is a brand new world of allatonceness. “Time” has ceased. “Space” has vanished. We now live in a global village…a simultaneous happening. We are back in acoustic space. We have begun again to structure the primordial feelings, the tribal emotions from which a few centuries of literacy divorced us. McLuhan & Fiore. The Medium is the Massage (1967, p. 63) Dunbar’s number refers to the claim that people can only manage relationships with around n people. (Most commonly, 𝑛 is a very hand-wavy 150.) It’s one of those ideas that made the leap from academia to popular science and then to cocktail parties. Consequently, I cite it, quote it, and talk about it, as well. But, I’m not a big fan of Dunbar’s number for a few reasons. First, either I continue to misunderstand it or most other people do, and I’m pretty sure it’s the latter. Managing relationships with n people does not entail “knowing” 150 people in the dyadic sense of having had sufficient experience with them to recall who t

generativist / metaverse Dunbar's Number is Quadratic Or, Inference in Relational Space is Human-Hard 2020-09-09 Ours is a brand new world of allatonceness. “Time” has ceased. “Space” has vanished. We now live in a global village…a simultaneous happening. We are back in acoustic space. We have begun again to structure the primordial feelings, the tribal emotions from which a few centuries of literacy divorced us. McLuhan & Fiore. The Medium is the Massage (1967, p. 63) Dunbar’s number refers to the claim that people can only manage relationships with around n people. (Most commonly, \(n\) is a

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