4 ms·

I hear this a lot, but Dunbar's number is 150. There are about 68 million people in the United Kingdom right now and 308 million in the United States. Dunbar's

I hear this a lot, but Dunbar's number is 150. There are about 68 million people in the United Kingdom right now and 308 million in the United States. Dunbar's number looks to me as something you can apply to village life, or bands of cavemen, but not any national structure from the past few hundred years. Something else must be going on when we move from thinking about "Dave from down the road", to "I identify with citizen X who lives 500 miles away that I've never met, but I don't identify with Non-Citizen Y who lives 501 miles away on the other side of that fence"

smitty1e 6y ago
Indeed, this is my (apparently unpopular) point: > Dunbar's number looks to me as something you can apply to village life, or bands of cavemen, but not any national structure from the past few hundred years. I'd extend your few centuries to all of human history and argue that: 1) humans scale poorly 2) all efforts to scale them tend toward Towers of Babel The counter-example is a military, where healthy young people can be coordinated at scale in an authoriterian system with a significant external threat.
- richardjdare 6y ago
  So are you arguing for an "Ishmael" style neo-tribalism, or maybe small networks of self-ruling villages/poleis rather than advocating for nationalism against possible internationalist structures?
  - smitty1e 6y ago
    The point I'm after tends toward the latter, networked structure. The higher the center of gravity of the bureaucratic/aristocratic structure, and look at what the US has become in the last century, the greater the Tower of Babel risk. The losers of the last Presidential election have declared a soft civil war. Streamlined, simpler systems with higher-frequency, term-limited office-holders, can move toward Nirvana: redistributing power, not wealth.

4 ms·

I hear this a lot, but Dunbar's number is 150. There are about 68 million people in the United Kingdom right now and 308 million in the United States. Dunbar's

by richardjdare 6y ago

smitty1e 6y ago
Indeed, this is my (apparently unpopular) point: > Dunbar's number looks to me as something you can apply to village life, or bands of cavemen, but not any national structure from the past few hundred years. I'd extend your few centuries to all of human history and argue that: 1) humans scale poorly 2) all efforts to scale them tend toward Towers of Babel The counter-example is a military, where healthy young people can be coordinated at scale in an authoriterian system with a significant external threat.
- richardjdare 6y ago
  So are you arguing for an "Ishmael" style neo-tribalism, or maybe small networks of self-ruling villages/poleis rather than advocating for nationalism against possible internationalist structures?
  - smitty1e 6y ago
    The point I'm after tends toward the latter, networked structure. The higher the center of gravity of the bureaucratic/aristocratic structure, and look at what the US has become in the last century, the greater the Tower of Babel risk. The losers of the last Presidential election have declared a soft civil war. Streamlined, simpler systems with higher-frequency, term-limited office-holders, can move toward Nirvana: redistributing power, not wealth.