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I always find it worrying how companies and institutions completely disregard advances in psychological findings. How can anyone in good faith develop a social

I always find it worrying how companies and institutions completely disregard advances in psychological findings. How can anyone in good faith develop a social network after knowing this concrete reality of human connection capacity? How can anyone in good faith defend massive amounts of wealth when phenomena related to hedonic adaptation clearly exist? How can anyone in good faith make their company public after more than 100 years of seeing shareholders take control of the original vision guided by a poor understanding of what a stock's value means (clear example of a metric turned target)? Humans have always been the same, both in their individual and group form, and good leaders from 4000 years ago would fare just as well today if given the right context. Ignoring the history of human behavior means actively disregarding the most powerful tool to understand what stuff works for us and what doesn't. We are forgetting that the vast majority of our activities involves other humans, and 100% of what we do involves ourselves. When creating technology used by groups of people or when making up policies we should be more careful about shaping it from a behavioral point of view rather than a purely technical one. If Facebook was designed from a more human perspective and the like button functioned 38% of the times we would be in a much better state than the like button being formally proven to always work and social interactions working 38% of the time

billfruit 5y ago
Problem may be that there is too much experimental psychology work whose results don't mean anything. To me any argument that is built upon the results of experimental psychology looks rather suspect.
- HidyBush 5y ago
  I am talking about broad foundational results. Of course stuff like "we asked two teams of people to tug on a rope, the first had a prime number of members and had been told their pet dog died last night whereas the other followed a keto diet" don't really matter in the real world. If an analysis on 6 billion phone interactions tells us people don't meaningfully deal with more than 150 other humans then it's something you should actually take into consideration when designing social stuff
  - mjburgess 5y ago
    I dont think there are any broad foundational results, nor do I think there is a social science possible. Social systems are chaotic, and extremely multi-casual, and extremely uncontrollable (in the sense of being able to isolate one cause). Under these conditions there is no scientific method. Anything called a science is just a ritualized imitation. The world does not owe us it being intelligible to us; the success of science in being able to engineer trinkets has fooled us for the past 300 years -- the vast majority of the whole of reality is unknowable -- as in, there is no method which could produce a theory of it (in the strong sense). I think apparently quantitative or "theoretical" results from social sciences are more like curios which could inspire some speculative designs for social institutions. They arent theories (as in science) by which we can engineer institutions. Treating anything in social science as more than some ancient form of zoology, that is, some local observations jotted down by an aristocrat -- is a recipe for disaster. Outside the physics lab, the entire world is an infinite zoo with no grand discernable patterns.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - pawelmurias 5y ago
    How do you imagine this bit of research to be be taken into account? I would be shocked if facebook didn't have specific research on how people interact on facebook rather than having to depend on some vague general observation.
genmon 5y ago
(Post author here) Engelbart's team (the one that came up with the personal computer back in 68) was a combination of engineers and psychologists, and I think there's something really powerful about that. It's not about the psychological results specifically, it's more about integrating the psychological perspective during product discovery. So what is the equivalent 50 years on? Maybe sociologists could be hired as PMs, or anthropologists in R&D (I know Microsoft and Intel are really good at this, but I mean for smaller, sub-1000 person firms). I wonder what those blended teams would come up with.
wahnfrieden 5y ago
Advances in findings have indeed been ignored, since Dunbar's number has been discredited yet people continue to recognize it as legitimate. I think it's an incredibly dangerous idea which has convinced a lot of people to run to their chains. See Graeber and Wengrow research cited here https://twitter.com/davidwengrow/status/1116786595351470080 https://twitter.com/davidwengrow/status/1116786595351470080
- taink 5y ago
  The research cited here seems to follow previous conclusions concerning the fact that the largest groups could go up to 2000 individuals. In fact, this is mentioned in page 6 of Dunbar's paper[1] so I fail to see how that invalidates anything about this theory. Perhaps have I missed something? [1]: https://pdodds.w3.uvm.edu/files/papers/others/1993/dunbar1993a.pdf#page=6 https://pdodds.w3.uvm.edu/files/papers/others/1993/dunbar199...
  - wahnfrieden 5y ago
    Thank you for discussing the actual research (on one side at least). My understanding is that Graeber and Wengrow are saying that the "band" grouping is inaccurate nonsense, that "band" relations can extend to several thousand people without "tribal society" necessarily emerging >The “Personal Social Group” = 150 people (bands of common lineage — what Dunbar believed to be the biggest group of people one person can have close relationships with). The “Clan” = 450-500 people (cohesive sub tribal unit). The “Tribal Group” = 1500 — 2000 people (tribe). Many people use Dunbar's number to justify why larger societies of humans must necessarily require bureaucracy, coercion under threat of violence, etc. to scale beyond a couple hundred people and that any alternative to the power structures we have today is unrealistic fantasy. It's one key to capitalist realism
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
"Humans have always been the same" It may be true that modern life (be it Industrial age or Information age for your demarcation) is evolutionarily short, remember that the rules of environmentally-triggered gene expression can effectively result in "evolved behavior" faster than actual mutation gathering. If gene expression is adaptable to social conditions, and social conditions produce the same pattern of gene expression across generations, then the functional organisms: shape, weight, aggressiveness, psychology produced by the pattern of gene expression WILL change on a large scale. So you could do psychological/anthropological behavioral studies for "modern" humans in "modern" life, if they aren't doing cross-cultural comparisons, and "universal psychological truths" won't be universal. The big question to me personally is if you have sustained centuries of, let's say, "capitalism-based selection", how much drift is there? Capitalism undeniably rewards certain sociopathic traits that really are only applicable to modern times: plenty of resources, availability of technology, etc. We're probably at the tail end of a long run of "plenty".

billfruit 5y ago

Problem may be that there is too much experimental psychology work whose results don't mean anything. To me any argument that is built upon the results of experimental psychology looks rather suspect.

HidyBush 5y ago
I am talking about broad foundational results. Of course stuff like "we asked two teams of people to tug on a rope, the first had a prime number of members and had been told their pet dog died last night whereas the other followed a keto diet" don't really matter in the real world. If an analysis on 6 billion phone interactions tells us people don't meaningfully deal with more than 150 other humans then it's something you should actually take into consideration when designing social stuff
- mjburgess 5y ago
  I dont think there are any broad foundational results, nor do I think there is a social science possible. Social systems are chaotic, and extremely multi-casual, and extremely uncontrollable (in the sense of being able to isolate one cause). Under these conditions there is no scientific method. Anything called a science is just a ritualized imitation. The world does not owe us it being intelligible to us; the success of science in being able to engineer trinkets has fooled us for the past 300 years -- the vast majority of the whole of reality is unknowable -- as in, there is no method which could produce a theory of it (in the strong sense). I think apparently quantitative or "theoretical" results from social sciences are more like curios which could inspire some speculative designs for social institutions. They arent theories (as in science) by which we can engineer institutions. Treating anything in social science as more than some ancient form of zoology, that is, some local observations jotted down by an aristocrat -- is a recipe for disaster. Outside the physics lab, the entire world is an infinite zoo with no grand discernable patterns.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- pawelmurias 5y ago
  How do you imagine this bit of research to be be taken into account? I would be shocked if facebook didn't have specific research on how people interact on facebook rather than having to depend on some vague general observation.

genmon 5y ago

(Post author here) Engelbart's team (the one that came up with the personal computer back in 68) was a combination of engineers and psychologists, and I think there's something really powerful about that. It's not about the psychological results specifically, it's more about integrating the psychological perspective during product discovery. So what is the equivalent 50 years on? Maybe sociologists could be hired as PMs, or anthropologists in R&D (I know Microsoft and Intel are really good at this, but I mean for smaller, sub-1000 person firms). I wonder what those blended teams would come up with.

wahnfrieden 5y ago

Advances in findings have indeed been ignored, since Dunbar's number has been discredited yet people continue to recognize it as legitimate. I think it's an incredibly dangerous idea which has convinced a lot of people to run to their chains. See Graeber and Wengrow research cited here https://twitter.com/davidwengrow/status/1116786595351470080 https://twitter.com/davidwengrow/status/1116786595351470080

taink 5y ago
The research cited here seems to follow previous conclusions concerning the fact that the largest groups could go up to 2000 individuals. In fact, this is mentioned in page 6 of Dunbar's paper[1] so I fail to see how that invalidates anything about this theory. Perhaps have I missed something? [1]: https://pdodds.w3.uvm.edu/files/papers/others/1993/dunbar1993a.pdf#page=6 https://pdodds.w3.uvm.edu/files/papers/others/1993/dunbar199...
- wahnfrieden 5y ago
  Thank you for discussing the actual research (on one side at least). My understanding is that Graeber and Wengrow are saying that the "band" grouping is inaccurate nonsense, that "band" relations can extend to several thousand people without "tribal society" necessarily emerging >The “Personal Social Group” = 150 people (bands of common lineage — what Dunbar believed to be the biggest group of people one person can have close relationships with). The “Clan” = 450-500 people (cohesive sub tribal unit). The “Tribal Group” = 1500 — 2000 people (tribe). Many people use Dunbar's number to justify why larger societies of humans must necessarily require bureaucracy, coercion under threat of violence, etc. to scale beyond a couple hundred people and that any alternative to the power structures we have today is unrealistic fantasy. It's one key to capitalist realism

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

"Humans have always been the same" It may be true that modern life (be it Industrial age or Information age for your demarcation) is evolutionarily short, remember that the rules of environmentally-triggered gene expression can effectively result in "evolved behavior" faster than actual mutation gathering. If gene expression is adaptable to social conditions, and social conditions produce the same pattern of gene expression across generations, then the functional organisms: shape, weight, aggressiveness, psychology produced by the pattern of gene expression WILL change on a large scale. So you could do psychological/anthropological behavioral studies for "modern" humans in "modern" life, if they aren't doing cross-cultural comparisons, and "universal psychological truths" won't be universal. The big question to me personally is if you have sustained centuries of, let's say, "capitalism-based selection", how much drift is there? Capitalism undeniably rewards certain sociopathic traits that really are only applicable to modern times: plenty of resources, availability of technology, etc. We're probably at the tail end of a long run of "plenty".