5 ms·

I'm with you 100% until the last paragraph. We are definitely social creatures, and living lives of increasingly less social interaction is not going to work o

I'm with you 100% until the last paragraph. We are definitely social creatures, and living lives of increasingly less social interaction is not going to work out for us personally or as societies. But I see no reason we can't handle society at a scale of millions or billions of people. It, after all, always is experienced as less than that, even people who live in NYC or Mexico City have regular interactions with a smaller group of 100-200 people at most, even if incidental daily interactions with more people than most of us. But those incidental daily interactions with a huge number of people -- I am pretty sure are actually positive. To the extent that I'd predict that even in the present society with social interaction limited by the social forces we're talking about -- someone living in manhattan who, on the average can't help but interact incidentally with a huge number of people daily (on average, there are exceptions, going up with wealth!) -- is likely on average to be happier, due to those interactions, than someone in a suburb working remotely who has one to two incidental interactions... a week? I think those incidental interactions are in fact key to happiness, the more the better, and there is no problem if due to living in some of the densest places on the planet, they are with a huge number of diverse people. Also I think people seriously under-estimate the extent to which humans have lived in "urban" societies for many thousands of years. Granted, the scale of "urban" was smaller than it is now (a city of 20K people was enormous 500 years ago), but we have always been extremely social creatures, always in fact, in general on aggregate, looking to maximize our number of relationships and interactions. (See eg _Dawn of Everything_). (I also think people way over-estimate the universal cultural homogeniety of "ancient" and "pre-historical" civilizations. Things were not as we assume).

idiotsecant 4y ago
Parent post is right, we are inherantly tribal creature capable of really empathizing and aligning ourselves with maybe 7-10 people. We can find a tribal identity with maybe 30 people. We can productively coordinate with groups of as many as 50-75 people. Any more than that, and we simply can't hold those relationships in our monkey brains and default to 'stranger bad'. Fortunately, at some point we gained an abstraction layer on top of our monkey brains, capable of empathizing with abstract characteristics such as nation, race, religion, etc. These abstractions are socketed right into our monkey layer and are a hack that can simulate the 50-75 people type relationship for billions of people. Unfortunately that layer needs to be trained, and it's even more unfortunately very easy and quite profitable to train in the wrong ways.
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  I suppose we can all keep posting "I'm right", "No, I'm right"! I believe people have in fact been routinely living in groups of far more than 30 people for tens of thousands of years (in some but not all places/times over that span, sure), it's a misconception to think this is new or unusual for humans. We have not only done fine with it, we have thrived with it. (Also having relationships over distance too, for a long long time).
  - idiotsecant 4y ago
    I think if you re-read my post we're saying the same thing.
  - ye-olde-sysrq 4y ago
    Have we thrived, though? If we're talking about monkey brains and evolution, we need to keep in mind that all of the stuff we're talking about is even only a tiny fraction of the time that humans have been anatomically modern (300000 to 100000 years ago depending on exactly how modern you mean, with the 100k years ago mark being where an autopsy wouldn't be able to tell the difference unless it were specifically trying to date the corpse based on things like carbon13 or noting the dental care etc). So all things considered, I don't think we can really say that we've proved out that the stuff we've been up to since the dawn of agriculture (10k years ago) is going to stand the test of time. Maybe let's at least see where global warming goes over the next 100-200 years before we start throwing around words like "thrive".
  - lm28469 4y ago
    > I believe people have in fact been routinely living in groups of far more than 30 people for tens of thousands of years Ok but could they follow 500 influencers, watch people die everyday, get the ever up to date flow of new disease, earthquakes, terrorists attack fed 24/7, compare themselves to the best of the best, see the worst of the worst, &c. ? For people who lived/grew up before the 90s/2000s it is very obvious that things changed in a massive way extremely quickly, a lot due to internet but eve more due to pocket computers. I think you're massively underestimating the scale of the issue. People don't thrive on social medias interactions, they're addicted to them, depending on the survey/study you look at it's anywhere from 4 to 9 hours per day on average.
somenameforme 4y ago
Your prediction is extremely intuitive, but there's a bit of a surprise here. People in rural areas tend to experience substantially less loneliness than those in cities. I'll link to a random study [1] showing this, but I'm not saying this because of that study. It's a well known result that's been repeatedly and consistently demonstrated. I think the probable reason is pretty straight forward. When there are "too many" people in an area there's a really good chance any given person you encounter is someone you'll never encounter again, or sporadically at best. So you start seeing other people as something more like NPCs. We obviously understand other people are other people, but given you'll probably never see this person again any sort of encounter is generally going to be exceptionally superficial. And even if you try to change that, it's probably not going to be reciprocated. If somebody in a small town wanted to kick up a conversation with and get to meaningfully and really know me, I'd happily reciprocate. Go to their house for a beer or even dinner? Sure, why not? If it happened in a large city, I'd expect he's probably a scammer or just not all there. In either case, I'm going to be looking to end the conversation and move along ASAP. So you get this paradoxical scenario where people surrounded by orders of magnitude more people end up lonelier than those with far fewer faces about. [1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30609155/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30609155/
- flangola7 4y ago
  I wonder why rural people have less empathetic world and political attitudes then. That is also paradoxical.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - tomtheelder 4y ago
    I think that one is pretty straightforward: homogeneity. I grew up in a much more rural area than I live in now, and you just don't get your perspectives and views challenged very much (unless you happen to be outside the norm, in which case your life can be extremely difficult).
  - somenameforme 4y ago

idiotsecant 4y ago

Parent post is right, we are inherantly tribal creature capable of really empathizing and aligning ourselves with maybe 7-10 people. We can find a tribal identity with maybe 30 people. We can productively coordinate with groups of as many as 50-75 people. Any more than that, and we simply can't hold those relationships in our monkey brains and default to 'stranger bad'. Fortunately, at some point we gained an abstraction layer on top of our monkey brains, capable of empathizing with abstract characteristics such as nation, race, religion, etc. These abstractions are socketed right into our monkey layer and are a hack that can simulate the 50-75 people type relationship for billions of people. Unfortunately that layer needs to be trained, and it's even more unfortunately very easy and quite profitable to train in the wrong ways.

jrochkind1 4y ago
I suppose we can all keep posting "I'm right", "No, I'm right"! I believe people have in fact been routinely living in groups of far more than 30 people for tens of thousands of years (in some but not all places/times over that span, sure), it's a misconception to think this is new or unusual for humans. We have not only done fine with it, we have thrived with it. (Also having relationships over distance too, for a long long time).
- idiotsecant 4y ago
  I think if you re-read my post we're saying the same thing.
- ye-olde-sysrq 4y ago
  Have we thrived, though? If we're talking about monkey brains and evolution, we need to keep in mind that all of the stuff we're talking about is even only a tiny fraction of the time that humans have been anatomically modern (300000 to 100000 years ago depending on exactly how modern you mean, with the 100k years ago mark being where an autopsy wouldn't be able to tell the difference unless it were specifically trying to date the corpse based on things like carbon13 or noting the dental care etc). So all things considered, I don't think we can really say that we've proved out that the stuff we've been up to since the dawn of agriculture (10k years ago) is going to stand the test of time. Maybe let's at least see where global warming goes over the next 100-200 years before we start throwing around words like "thrive".
- lm28469 4y ago
  > I believe people have in fact been routinely living in groups of far more than 30 people for tens of thousands of years Ok but could they follow 500 influencers, watch people die everyday, get the ever up to date flow of new disease, earthquakes, terrorists attack fed 24/7, compare themselves to the best of the best, see the worst of the worst, &c. ? For people who lived/grew up before the 90s/2000s it is very obvious that things changed in a massive way extremely quickly, a lot due to internet but eve more due to pocket computers. I think you're massively underestimating the scale of the issue. People don't thrive on social medias interactions, they're addicted to them, depending on the survey/study you look at it's anywhere from 4 to 9 hours per day on average.

somenameforme 4y ago

Your prediction is extremely intuitive, but there's a bit of a surprise here. People in rural areas tend to experience substantially less loneliness than those in cities. I'll link to a random study [1] showing this, but I'm not saying this because of that study. It's a well known result that's been repeatedly and consistently demonstrated. I think the probable reason is pretty straight forward. When there are "too many" people in an area there's a really good chance any given person you encounter is someone you'll never encounter again, or sporadically at best. So you start seeing other people as something more like NPCs. We obviously understand other people are other people, but given you'll probably never see this person again any sort of encounter is generally going to be exceptionally superficial. And even if you try to change that, it's probably not going to be reciprocated. If somebody in a small town wanted to kick up a conversation with and get to meaningfully and really know me, I'd happily reciprocate. Go to their house for a beer or even dinner? Sure, why not? If it happened in a large city, I'd expect he's probably a scammer or just not all there. In either case, I'm going to be looking to end the conversation and move along ASAP. So you get this paradoxical scenario where people surrounded by orders of magnitude more people end up lonelier than those with far fewer faces about. [1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30609155/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30609155/

flangola7 4y ago
I wonder why rural people have less empathetic world and political attitudes then. That is also paradoxical.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tomtheelder 4y ago
  I think that one is pretty straightforward: homogeneity. I grew up in a much more rural area than I live in now, and you just don't get your perspectives and views challenged very much (unless you happen to be outside the norm, in which case your life can be extremely difficult).
- somenameforme 4y ago