#11: Dunbar's limits; Questioning traditions; The Tail End; Redpilling and the Regime
Aug 15 - Sep 5, 2021
Tom Morgan on Dunbar’s number
“humans find it cognitively demanding to maintain more than 150 social relationships”
I think part of the reason that Dunbar’s approximate limit of 150 friends has stayed constant, even in the social media age, is because authentic trust requires an accurate “theory of mind” of another person. Dunbar found that about 65% of human conversation is gossip. It’s so valuable because it helps us understand the others in our group and effectively punish betrayal and hypocrisy. It’s extremely cognitively demanding and time consuming, and therefore difficult to enhance technologically. Time is a hard limit on our bandwidth. (Source)
In his original piece, Tom talked about Mongolian horse swarms
[Genghis] Khan formed small units of ten men (an aravt), which were then multiplied up in factors of ten to make larger divisions. Each member of an aravt bore the same liability for one another’s actions…The Mongols’ unprecedented swarming tactics repeatedly humiliated armies looking for traditional pitched battles.
and the Brazilian company Semco.
Ricardo Semler divided his company up into small units of 150 people. Then he gave those units unprecedented autonomy and responsibility across almost all areas of the business. As of 2018, Semco had grown at an average rate of 47% for 20 years with less than 2% employee churn.
[Semler] calls the typical management pyramid “the cause of much corporate evil” because the tip is too far from the base. “Pyramids emphasize power, promote insecurity, distort communications, hobble interaction, and make it very difficult for the people who plan and the people who execute to move in the same direction.” Instead they picked a “circular” model with thin management layers and independent teams…Like the Mongol aravt, the individual business units had much more skin in the game.
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My thoughts:
With the Covid-catalyzed leap in remote work, our communication bandwidth has gone down, especially in group collaborations. Even as we adapt and slowly improve that (potentially with the aid of new AR/VR tech), has the Dunbar limit of effective group size significantly reduced in remote/hybrid companies? If yes,
Is there a company size where this breakdown is more catastrophic, since they might already be at or higher than the previous Dunbar limit, and are now much further beyond?
Conversely, does this disproportionately benefit (by not getting hampered) smaller companies that were previously operating much below the limit, and still remain so?
Alternatively, for certain types of work and workers, maybe the benefits of predominantly remote work in terms of lesser interruptions and longer flow states, increase in diversity from a more globalized workforce, and potentially, a forced lowering in actual collaborative group sizes due to communication constraints, might, in the steady state, lead to higher productivity and velocity.
How can we observe this? Speed of execution is likely a good indicator, and teams/organizations could try to measure and understand if their workforce feel that things are getting easier or harder to build.
Questioning traditions
Scott Alexander believes that [most] kids can recover from missing even quite a lot of school, which is an interesting debate with mostly biased data. One set of opposing comments talked about how kids at home were bored out of their minds, and wasting away on social media, etc. Scott’s reply:
It sure is lucky that this institution, created by long-dead Puritans to teach reading and arithmetic, coincidentally ended up having all of these totally different benefits, any one of which would be sufficient justification for keeping it around!
Eliezer Yudkowsky tells a parable about a society where people hit themselves on the head with a baseball bat eight hours a day for some reason. Maybe they believe it drives out demons or something. Then they learn that it does not, in fact, drive out demons. But everyone has great reasons why they need to keep doing it.
“It’s a great way to increase your pain tolerance so that the little things in life don’t bother you as much.”
“It builds character!”
“Every hour you’re hitting yourself on the head with a bat is an hour you’re not out on the street, doing drugs and committing crime.”
“It increases the demand for bats, which stimulates the lumber industry, which means we’ll have surplus lumber available in case of a disaster.”
“It improves strength and hand-eye coordination.”
“It may not literally drive out demons, but it’s a powerful social reminder of our shared commitment for demons to be driven out.”
“It’s one of the few things that everyone, rich or poor, black or white, man or woman, all do together, which means it crosses boundaries and builds a shared identity.”
“It binds us to our forefathers, who hit their own heads with bats eight hours a day.”
“If we stopped forcing everyone to do it, better-informed rich people would probably be the first to abandon the practice. And then they would have fewer concussions than poor people, which would promote inequality.”
“It creates jobs for bat-makers, bat-sellers, and the overseers who watch us to make sure we bang for a full eight hours.”
“Sometimes people collapse of exhaustion after only six hours, and that’s the first sign that they have a serious disease, and then they’re able to get diagnosed and treated. If we didn’t make them bang bats into their heads for eight hours, it would take much longer to catch their condition.”
“Chesterton’s fence!”
None of these are false per se. Banging a bat against your head for eight hours a day does have lots of advantages. They’re just not advantages that would cause us to want to take up the practice if we weren’t already used to it.
Eliezer brings this up as part of his project of teaching rationality, and it’s a great example. What do you do in a world where people can easily generate superficially-plausible reasons for hitting your head with a bat for eight hours? Abandon reason entirely? But then you’re left with social convention, which in this case is hitting your head with a bat. Some kind of really rigorous cost-benefit analysis? I don’t want to say this is impossible, but it would be pretty hard, and I would hate for anything important to hinge on getting it right.
I don’t think we have a great solution yet, which is why we always talk about “the rationalist project” and not “the rationalist solved problem”. But I get nervous when I see a giant institution with lots of really legible costs, whose legible benefits don’t withstand scrutiny, and people proposing a bunch of very diverse, kind of flaky sounding illegible benefits that mean we should still force everyone to participate in it.
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The above reminded me of Ricky Gervais’ appearance on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show
where Colbert asks Gervais why he is an atheist, and Gervais gives two brilliant answers:
You believe in 1 god and deny ~3000 other gods; I deny just one more.
Science is constantly proved all the time. If we take any holy book or any fiction and destroyed it, in a 1000 years time, it won’t come back just as it was. Whereas if we took every science book and every fact and destroyed it, then in a 1000 years, they’ll all be back. So I don’t need any faith [in science or Stephen Hawking].
The Tail End
Old post by Tim Urban that deserves a periodic reminder.
…despite not being at the end of your life, you may very well be nearing the end of your time with some of the most important people in your life.
It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.
Tim’s takeways:
1) Living in the same place as the people you love matters. I probably have 10X the time left with the people who live in my city as I do with the people who live somewhere else.
2) Priorities matter. Your remaining face time with any person depends largely on where that person falls on your list of life priorities. Make sure this list is set by you—not by unconscious inertia.
3) Quality time matters. If you’re in your last 10% of time with someone you love, keep that fact in the front of your mind when you’re with them and treat that time as what it actually is: precious.
Redpilling and the Regime
Introspective essay by Geoff Shullenberger on “the red pill” culture; it covers the evolution from a mostly intellectual critique to something that has been vernacularized by the reach of the Internet by various fringe movements on both the far left and far right — anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers, anti-capitalists...
Geoff’s key insight is that the existence of these fringe movements, plus the cynical bluepillers, actually lend legitimization (without popular support) to the establishment, rather than becoming a real threat to it.
Much like the redpilled, many of the bluepilled likely sense that there is something wrong with the current dispensation. But the opposing responses of the bluepilled and the redpilled may ultimately balance and sustain each other. The fact that there are redpilled available to be labeled extremists and conspiracy theorists, discourages those who wish to hold on to a certain respectability from voicing their misgivings, thus sustaining a stigma that also limits the redpill ranks. The proliferation of misinformation, conspiracy theory and the like, thus plays a necessary function in the current information ecosystem. Official narratives, rather than standing on their own, rely on counter-narratives to demarcate the limits of socially acceptable opinion.
The ubiquity of the red pill today is not, as the redpilled often seem to imagine, symptomatic of a world under the sway of carefully maintained illusions. Rather, it’s the product of a world where the operations of power no longer rely on the maintenance of coherent, collectively shared narratives — where fragmentation can be just as useful.
Mental hack to deal with upsetting comments
…if I mentally sing the comments (that I know would upset me otherwise), it totally removes the emotional impact of other people’s negative writing.
When I was contemplating why this might be so effective, I was reminded that satire of old often involved singing to point out other peoples absurdity. When you think about how much the powerful fear humor and satire, there might be something there.