14 ms·

Intimacy does not scale (2021)

193 points by dredmorbius 3y ago

jagtstronaut 3y ago
The ads on this page make it unreadable on a mobile device.
dredmorbius 3y ago
NB: Archive submitted as the original site is now inactive.
supriyo-biswas 3y ago
This is a great post. People like to take out their anger on Facebook/Tiktok but the bigger issue is that human communication doesn’t work well at scale. Human experience is temporal and locality sensitive (hence the distinctions between us vs them, such as boomers/millenials, west/east), and scaling it to different temporal and local contexts inevitably leads to hostility and tribalism.
- xnx 3y ago
  For hundreds of thousands of years we lived in groups of dozens. Only in the past few hundreds years have larger cities become where most people live. Mass person-to-person communication is only a few decades old. Our ape brains are very adaptable, but the modern world is a lot to ask of them.
  - nico 3y ago
    Checkout the group size theories about humans’ Dunbar number Dunbar figured out that within apes, the one factor that correlates to every species brain size, is group size If you apply the formula to humans (ie. measure brain size and calculate the group size), it gives you a number around 150
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    It was only a few years ago that I realised that every major advance in communications, going back to speech and arguably before, had a profound influence on human (or pre-human) society, culture, and interactions. Shortly after I discovered Elizabeth Eisenstein, who'd pretty much developed that thesis, off the work of Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, and with parallels to Harold Lasswell and other media theorists. More on that / links / references: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33685661 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33685661> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34906482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34906482>.
- 7373737373 3y ago
  It remains to be seen if humans are capable of primarily identifying themselves with the "humanity" tribe
- jancsika 3y ago
  > People like to take out their anger on Facebook/Tiktok but the bigger issue is that human communication doesn’t work well at scale. How long did it take CSS to be able to center something vertically on the page? Going to go out on a limb and say that human communication at scale is at least slightly more difficult than that. Patience!
  - sublinear 3y ago
    > How long did it take CSS to be able to center something vertically on the page? https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1/#vertical-align https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1/#vertical-align "vertical-align" has always been around since the beginning if you're okay with setting the line height to the height of the page. The original model for style might have been text, but that didn't stop anyone from doing what they needed. The question has always been more whether you really want an element vertically centered to the page rather than to a page section.
SanjayMehta 3y ago
Even better, don’t discuss personal issues on a public forum. Worst case use DMs while being aware that screenshots exist.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  I'm using intimate in its sense of mutual relation rather than the content of discussion, though these aren't fully independent. Borrowing from the Online Etymological Dictionary, "intimate" meaning "closely acquainted, very familiar", and which comes from the Latin intimus: "inmost, innermost, deepest". <https://www.etymonline.com/word/intimate https://www.etymonline.com/word/intimate> That is, an intimate relationship or conversation is one in which the participants are both engaging at their deepest and most personal level. This contrasts strongly with a common experience online and in broadcast media of parasocial relationships. Tom Scott has an excellent discussion of this in his 2019 video "There Is No Algorithm for Truth", at 33m36s: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=leX541Dr2rU&t=33m36s https://yewtu.be/watch?v=leX541Dr2rU&t=33m36s>. Well worth watching. Based on Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl, "Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction" (1956): <https://archive.org/details/donald-horton-and-richard-wohl-1956/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/donald-horton-and-richard-wohl-1...>
cheschire 3y ago
Imagine using machine learning to create shadow profiles of users. You don't need to focus so much on the content of their messages directly, but rather you score the replies that come after a user's message. When a user's shadow profile reveals them to be a conflict amplifier, or one who responds to other amplifiers, then the usage of the site is throttled subtly for them in a way that discourages engagement. For example you could lock the reply component for 10 seconds on page load, or don't show replies that are less than 90 seconds old, and other small nuances. All of this is to say, I bet there is a technological solution, contrary to the author's assertions.
- cphajduk 3y ago
  Doesn't have to even be that complicated. Remember when YouTube comments used to be a dumpster fire? I'm pretty sure YouTube is doing sentiment analysis on all comments and artificially promoting the ones that tend to be positive.
  - trustingtrust 3y ago
    Positive or negative ? Positive comments don’t generate interaction. If a comment was positive I’d like and move on not comment. Negative comments in the other had generate a lot of interaction. If I was to guess, Google as a marketing company loves interaction.
    - thejazzman 3y ago
      I believe their point was that we no longer see as much nonsensical hate in YouTube comments anymore - or at least that rings true to me and I've actually wondered about it for awhile
    - wordpad25 3y ago
      You min/max for engagement, but get a local max with negativity, so you increase your variability to find another peak
    - dredmorbius 3y ago
bawolff 3y ago
Talking about intimacy of discussions happening in a public forum is a weird contradiction of terms. Like in real life - if you were giving a conference presentation you wouldn't have any expectations of intimacy. I don't know why people would communicate in public spaces if they don't want to interact with the public. Isn't that the entire point?
- trustingtrust 3y ago
  Anonymity plays a key role here.
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    Speaking as both the original author and someone who's been studiously pseudonymous online for well over a decade (after several decades of generally-public disclosure): anonymity and pseudonymity are exceedingly challenging. I know I've left trails, and that if this were something my life absolutely depended on I'd probably not be writing this now. There are any number of ways to determine who a person is, or even to narrow down the probable set of individuals, often with only the thinnest of data. Given the prevalence of sensors, tracking, and physical-space monitoring (facial recognition, device tracking by WiFi and Bluetooth sensors, license plate readers, purchase and credit card data, and more), odds are pretty good that an online persona could be narrowed down to a few score of potential targets reasonably quickly by a motivated entity. Doing that at scale might be more challenging, but seems to be at least roughly possible by some state-level actors. And that level of surveillance many well not be necessary, only the threat of such actions. For discussion, semantic analysis, time(s) of activity, correlation with other known factors (travel or commute patterns, power or communications outages correlating with non-active periods, and the like), there's a lot of data to go on. The biggest protections seem to me to be far less technical measures such as encryption, obfuscation, and pseudonymity, than they are strong privacy laws, civil rights, legal protections, rule of law, and civil institutions which are strong, robust, highly-trusted and trustworthy, effective, and dedicated to their mission. That's not to say that technical protections aren't necessary; I absolutely believe that they are. However they are not sufficient, and often prove to be highly brittle: affording strong protection until at some point, whether due to a technical fault or lapse in tradecraft, they aren't. At that point the jig is up, and absent the social institutions in my previous 'graph, vulnerability is absolute. We cannot live without trust. An absolute faith in anonymity is the false belief that we can.
laserbeam 3y ago
Great post. I wouldn't be so defeatist about technological solutions though. I can think of a few technologies that we already have which have allowed intimate, important and meaningful discussions to scale (imperfectly) in our past. 1. Parliamentary proceducers. This is a tool that allows debate to scale up to a few hundred/thousand people. It provides rules for how topics can be chosen for discussion, altered, debated and how to reach consensus during a discussion. It's a social technology that is not easy to apply, not obvious, but used by dozens of countries and I've no clue how many large organizations. 2. The judicial and academic systems. Again, not flawless, but these ones show that we can have asynchronous debates over long periods of time where people reference and use old cases and studies. There may be other mechanisms which humans have used to structure conversation, facilitate debate and allow for important expression. All of these require training and only work when participants agree to certain rules. To my knowledge none of these apply to online media. But, who knows, maybe it will take a few hundred years for us to discover some social technology that does. The examples I bring were not obvious to society and took similar timescales to develop.
- high_5 3y ago
  Both 1 and 2 provide good layout for important and meaningful, but not intimate discussions. Most social conversations are not necessarily obliged towards a resolution of a problem as in these two cases. In intimate discussions it's most of the time good enough to be heard.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  Those are two excellent examples, as they're certainly technical, but not based on advanced information technologies, which is a common bias in HN discussions. I've done some informal looking into governmental structures, with one key entity often being some sort of central cabinet, central committee, politburo, or privy council, which can be found in a wide range of governmental systems: representative democracies, parliamentary, Communist, and monarchical. In almost all cases, that group tends to be on the order of 5--9 or so individuals. This would mean that, say, the US Cabinet (28 members) would have a much smaller core group, with the most powerful positions generally being considered as the Secretaries of State, Treasury, and Defence. Along with the National Security Advisor and perhaps the Attorney General, this would give a core counsel of six members, including the President. Parliaments virtually always operate in terms of both committees and parties, with each of these being further subdivided. US House and Senate committees still tend to be large, roughly 25--50 members. Taking the US Senate Appropriations Subcommittee for Defence (one of twelve Appropriations subcommittes), there are 17 members, divided amongst the majority (9) and minority (8) parties. Taken by party, this gets us to my five-to-nine member core working group. There's typically further breakout by ad hoc working groups, and as I understand there are unelected staff (that is, subcommittee participants who are not themselves elected members of Congress) as well. There's little actual work which occurs in full sessions of a legislature. Votes (based on Committee work), speeches (largely for public consumption, and often to an empty chamber), ceremonial proceedings (swearing in, State of the Union), and with exceptions such as impeachment proceedings or the largely-but-not-entirely-it-seems perfunctory functions of certifying national election results. What parliamentary procedures do provide for is smooth function of subdivisions of full legislatures (e.g., committees and subcommittees), as well as rules for overall operation of the largely pro forma full-chamber sessions. That said, procedures are key in those functions. The Judicial system is interesting in that courts often operate highly autonomous, with individual judges having extreme discretion over the operations of their courtrooms, and courts collectively of dockets. A US trial court consists of a single judge. If held before a jury, there are usually 12 jurors in civil and criminal cases (fewer in some state courts), though jurors don't actively participate in the trial proceedings themselves, but rather observe the prosecution / plaintiff and defence, as well as judge's orders and rulings. After completion of the trial phase, the jury members deliberate amongst themselves to reach a verdict. Witnesses are fully independent (and are often excluded from hearing one anothers' testimony), legal teams are also typically small in all but the very largest cases. Other countries have various different systems, often with civil or criminal cases being tried before a panel of judges (frequently three). US appeals trials operate similarly, though in significant cases an en banc hearing with all the judges in the district hearing the case (six to twelve, I believe, depending on the circuit). Appeals courts and Supreme courts, whether at the state, Federal Circuit, or Supreme Court levels are the only overview of individual court judges and judgements in the US. Which is to say, again, that the structure is highly independent and autonomous and based on small groups. Academia is another interesting situation, again with relatively high autonomy amongst tenured faculty, though that's been decreasing. Academia is divided into disciplines, universities, colleges, and departments. Typical department sizes again tend to fall into the 15--50 full-time permanent members (there may be many more teaching assistants, lecturers, and other part-time or contingent positions). You didn't mention business organisation, though that would be another useful model. I believe the terms are M-Type and D-Type for monolithic and divisional corporate structures, respectively, with the latter emerging at firms such as DuPont and General Motors (particularly under Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., at GM), or terms to that effect. Again, the goal is to reduce dependencies between organisational divisions whilst also achieving efficiencies of scale. (Charles Perrow devoted much of his academic life to studying organisations, and wrote survey text on the topic, Complex Organizations, which discusses much of the prior work in the field.) All of which again generally show that communications scales poorly. Where it does scale, it almost always does so by hugely simplifying the content communicated. Markets, where prices substitute for a whole host of other qualities, would be an example of this. (That prices communicate complex qualitative differences and nuances poorly is another well-known challenge. Complexity will out.) Information automation does expand processing capability, but that tends to end up in a Red Queen's race, and often seems to consume free budget in additional processing, effectively a form of economic rent, rather than delivering improved profits, a/k/a the Solow Productivity Paradox.
ganzuul 3y ago
We have a word for it. "Harmony".
lifeisstillgood 3y ago
It's partly that there is only one way to express oneself in an online textual conversation. With text. If 2 people are loudly and annoyingly having a (intimate) conversation on say the bus, others around can use looks, physicality etc to communicate around them creating a shared parallel experience ce of WTF. However with no way to do that online just encourages text, joining in the conversation. Perhaps there are alternatives with avatars, GUIs etc.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  In intimate conversation —a case where both or all parties in the same space and time — there are additional ample side-channels for subtexts to be communicated, including both conflict-diminishing and conflict-escallating ones. From TFA, 5th paragraph, by some counts. And yes, I frequently read without comprehension, scan quickly, or misinterpret as well. The problems I'm describing seem to be universally, or at the very least quite broadly distributed.
dale_glass 3y ago
I made a similar observation some time ago, so let me add this: human interactions in general don't scale. Social media easily turns completely normal human interactions into something perverse. Eg, say you've just exited to the cinema and vent to your friend that this movie sucked. What were they thinking? Who had the brilliant idea to change directors mid trilogy? There's a bit of venting, but quickly things settle down. There's a bit of bonding over the shared experience. Nobody is hurt, you're just having a private talk with your friend. Take that to Twitter, use the same words, and now the same thing is an addition to the torrent of hate aimed at the movie's director. You might have meant to reach your 10 followers, but search, recommendations, hashtags, retweets, etc can easily pull your statement out of its intended context. Then there's what it must be like to end up on the other side of that. This happens organically, people aren't organizing around it for the most part. So the torrent of hate can regain its strength at random, wherever some person posts about it 3 years later, it makes #2 in some countdown on Youtube, comes up on the top of AskReddit, etc. In real life most things settle down, the Internet allows rehashing old stuff effectively forever. And I think human interaction breaks at those scales. A single person can't meaningfully interact with a million random people which mostly spontaneously decided to flood you with messages. You can ask a prominent one or two to leave you alone, but more can show up at any time.
- eloisant 3y ago
  People have to understand that posting to Twitter is the equivalent of shouting in a megaphone at Time Square. It's not the equivalent of sharing something with your close friends, even if some people might think so. Yes most of the time your Twitts will only be noticed by your close friends. But they're still public speech.
- gspencley 3y ago
  It's also worth noting that even with in-person interaction, when you've got a party of more than 4 people, even sitting at the same table together, the group typically splits into smaller groups with their own individual conversations. Any in-person situation where a "group conversation" is meant to scale (ex: town hall meeting or class room), there is always a person in charge of leading and moderating the conversation (hand raising, mic queuing etc.).
bilekas 3y ago
I'm not sure why hut archive.ph just never works for me. Am I the only one with that problem?
- patrec 3y ago
  Are you using cloudflare's DNS? https://jarv.is/notes/cloudflare-dns-archive-is-blocked/ https://jarv.is/notes/cloudflare-dns-archive-is-blocked/
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  As the author and submitter of that piece, no, you're not: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37148681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37148681> I happen to be in a somewhat unusual interval of Archive Today lucidity (and accessibility) myself at the moment.
isodev 3y ago
Was B what we know as a “reply person”? I think it's not a question of scalability but the sensibility to develop skills needed to “read the room”. Just because the thread was public, doesn't mean it's appropriate to join. In many cases people post to share or vent and even if it sounds like a question, they probably don't want another opinion.
- lynx23 3y ago
  So, if it is considered inappropriate to join in, why was the thread public in the first place?
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    Both your comment and the one you're replying to illustrate perfectly (if perhaps unconsciously) the problem I'm attempting to convey in the essay: Online interactions give the appearance to some of an intimate discussion whilst of a public discourse to others, and the clash of those perceptions quite frequently leads to unpleasant disagreement, frustration, conflict, and confusion.
  - kire456 3y ago
    I am guessing, for the same reason I can have a picknick in the local park with a few friends and discuss intimate matters. This takes place in public because that is convenient, but I still don't appreciate random passers-by interjecting their opinion. It's fine to listen in though, if you're sitting close by. Most people intuitively understand this. Online, this intuition sometimes disappears, and people feel that the fact that something is readable to them, implies it is meant for them to interact with.
    - lynx23 3y ago
      But does the comparison really hold? IMO, you'd have to have your "intimate" public discussion carved in stone or something to be comparable. Your example is more like SnapChat or any other platform that limits the lifetime of postings.
    - 3y ago
extasia 3y ago
From the title I was expecting a study on polyamory or the like haha.
zogrodea 3y ago
This sounds something like an oft-repeated truth. "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic." - indicating that people tend to have less emotional investment on larger scales. There was more on my mind, but I forgot.

193 points by dredmorbius 3y ago

jagtstronaut 3y ago

The ads on this page make it unreadable on a mobile device.

dredmorbius 3y ago

NB: Archive submitted as the original site is now inactive.

supriyo-biswas 3y ago

This is a great post. People like to take out their anger on Facebook/Tiktok but the bigger issue is that human communication doesn’t work well at scale. Human experience is temporal and locality sensitive (hence the distinctions between us vs them, such as boomers/millenials, west/east), and scaling it to different temporal and local contexts inevitably leads to hostility and tribalism.

xnx 3y ago
For hundreds of thousands of years we lived in groups of dozens. Only in the past few hundreds years have larger cities become where most people live. Mass person-to-person communication is only a few decades old. Our ape brains are very adaptable, but the modern world is a lot to ask of them.
- nico 3y ago
  Checkout the group size theories about humans’ Dunbar number Dunbar figured out that within apes, the one factor that correlates to every species brain size, is group size If you apply the formula to humans (ie. measure brain size and calculate the group size), it gives you a number around 150
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  It was only a few years ago that I realised that every major advance in communications, going back to speech and arguably before, had a profound influence on human (or pre-human) society, culture, and interactions. Shortly after I discovered Elizabeth Eisenstein, who'd pretty much developed that thesis, off the work of Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, and with parallels to Harold Lasswell and other media theorists. More on that / links / references: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33685661 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33685661> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34906482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34906482>.
7373737373 3y ago
It remains to be seen if humans are capable of primarily identifying themselves with the "humanity" tribe
jancsika 3y ago
> People like to take out their anger on Facebook/Tiktok but the bigger issue is that human communication doesn’t work well at scale. How long did it take CSS to be able to center something vertically on the page? Going to go out on a limb and say that human communication at scale is at least slightly more difficult than that. Patience!
- sublinear 3y ago
  > How long did it take CSS to be able to center something vertically on the page? https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1/#vertical-align https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1/#vertical-align "vertical-align" has always been around since the beginning if you're okay with setting the line height to the height of the page. The original model for style might have been text, but that didn't stop anyone from doing what they needed. The question has always been more whether you really want an element vertically centered to the page rather than to a page section.

SanjayMehta 3y ago

Even better, don’t discuss personal issues on a public forum. Worst case use DMs while being aware that screenshots exist.

dredmorbius 3y ago
I'm using intimate in its sense of mutual relation rather than the content of discussion, though these aren't fully independent. Borrowing from the Online Etymological Dictionary, "intimate" meaning "closely acquainted, very familiar", and which comes from the Latin intimus: "inmost, innermost, deepest". <https://www.etymonline.com/word/intimate https://www.etymonline.com/word/intimate> That is, an intimate relationship or conversation is one in which the participants are both engaging at their deepest and most personal level. This contrasts strongly with a common experience online and in broadcast media of parasocial relationships. Tom Scott has an excellent discussion of this in his 2019 video "There Is No Algorithm for Truth", at 33m36s: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=leX541Dr2rU&t=33m36s https://yewtu.be/watch?v=leX541Dr2rU&t=33m36s>. Well worth watching. Based on Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl, "Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction" (1956): <https://archive.org/details/donald-horton-and-richard-wohl-1956/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/donald-horton-and-richard-wohl-1...>

cheschire 3y ago

Imagine using machine learning to create shadow profiles of users. You don't need to focus so much on the content of their messages directly, but rather you score the replies that come after a user's message. When a user's shadow profile reveals them to be a conflict amplifier, or one who responds to other amplifiers, then the usage of the site is throttled subtly for them in a way that discourages engagement. For example you could lock the reply component for 10 seconds on page load, or don't show replies that are less than 90 seconds old, and other small nuances. All of this is to say, I bet there is a technological solution, contrary to the author's assertions.

cphajduk 3y ago
Doesn't have to even be that complicated. Remember when YouTube comments used to be a dumpster fire? I'm pretty sure YouTube is doing sentiment analysis on all comments and artificially promoting the ones that tend to be positive.
- trustingtrust 3y ago
  Positive or negative ? Positive comments don’t generate interaction. If a comment was positive I’d like and move on not comment. Negative comments in the other had generate a lot of interaction. If I was to guess, Google as a marketing company loves interaction.
  - thejazzman 3y ago
    I believe their point was that we no longer see as much nonsensical hate in YouTube comments anymore - or at least that rings true to me and I've actually wondered about it for awhile
  - wordpad25 3y ago
    You min/max for engagement, but get a local max with negativity, so you increase your variability to find another peak
  - dredmorbius 3y ago

bawolff 3y ago

Talking about intimacy of discussions happening in a public forum is a weird contradiction of terms. Like in real life - if you were giving a conference presentation you wouldn't have any expectations of intimacy. I don't know why people would communicate in public spaces if they don't want to interact with the public. Isn't that the entire point?

trustingtrust 3y ago
Anonymity plays a key role here.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  Speaking as both the original author and someone who's been studiously pseudonymous online for well over a decade (after several decades of generally-public disclosure): anonymity and pseudonymity are exceedingly challenging. I know I've left trails, and that if this were something my life absolutely depended on I'd probably not be writing this now. There are any number of ways to determine who a person is, or even to narrow down the probable set of individuals, often with only the thinnest of data. Given the prevalence of sensors, tracking, and physical-space monitoring (facial recognition, device tracking by WiFi and Bluetooth sensors, license plate readers, purchase and credit card data, and more), odds are pretty good that an online persona could be narrowed down to a few score of potential targets reasonably quickly by a motivated entity. Doing that at scale might be more challenging, but seems to be at least roughly possible by some state-level actors. And that level of surveillance many well not be necessary, only the threat of such actions. For discussion, semantic analysis, time(s) of activity, correlation with other known factors (travel or commute patterns, power or communications outages correlating with non-active periods, and the like), there's a lot of data to go on. The biggest protections seem to me to be far less technical measures such as encryption, obfuscation, and pseudonymity, than they are strong privacy laws, civil rights, legal protections, rule of law, and civil institutions which are strong, robust, highly-trusted and trustworthy, effective, and dedicated to their mission. That's not to say that technical protections aren't necessary; I absolutely believe that they are. However they are not sufficient, and often prove to be highly brittle: affording strong protection until at some point, whether due to a technical fault or lapse in tradecraft, they aren't. At that point the jig is up, and absent the social institutions in my previous 'graph, vulnerability is absolute. We cannot live without trust. An absolute faith in anonymity is the false belief that we can.

laserbeam 3y ago

Great post. I wouldn't be so defeatist about technological solutions though. I can think of a few technologies that we already have which have allowed intimate, important and meaningful discussions to scale (imperfectly) in our past. 1. Parliamentary proceducers. This is a tool that allows debate to scale up to a few hundred/thousand people. It provides rules for how topics can be chosen for discussion, altered, debated and how to reach consensus during a discussion. It's a social technology that is not easy to apply, not obvious, but used by dozens of countries and I've no clue how many large organizations. 2. The judicial and academic systems. Again, not flawless, but these ones show that we can have asynchronous debates over long periods of time where people reference and use old cases and studies. There may be other mechanisms which humans have used to structure conversation, facilitate debate and allow for important expression. All of these require training and only work when participants agree to certain rules. To my knowledge none of these apply to online media. But, who knows, maybe it will take a few hundred years for us to discover some social technology that does. The examples I bring were not obvious to society and took similar timescales to develop.

high_5 3y ago
Both 1 and 2 provide good layout for important and meaningful, but not intimate discussions. Most social conversations are not necessarily obliged towards a resolution of a problem as in these two cases. In intimate discussions it's most of the time good enough to be heard.
dredmorbius 3y ago
Those are two excellent examples, as they're certainly technical, but not based on advanced information technologies, which is a common bias in HN discussions. I've done some informal looking into governmental structures, with one key entity often being some sort of central cabinet, central committee, politburo, or privy council, which can be found in a wide range of governmental systems: representative democracies, parliamentary, Communist, and monarchical. In almost all cases, that group tends to be on the order of 5--9 or so individuals. This would mean that, say, the US Cabinet (28 members) would have a much smaller core group, with the most powerful positions generally being considered as the Secretaries of State, Treasury, and Defence. Along with the National Security Advisor and perhaps the Attorney General, this would give a core counsel of six members, including the President. Parliaments virtually always operate in terms of both committees and parties, with each of these being further subdivided. US House and Senate committees still tend to be large, roughly 25--50 members. Taking the US Senate Appropriations Subcommittee for Defence (one of twelve Appropriations subcommittes), there are 17 members, divided amongst the majority (9) and minority (8) parties. Taken by party, this gets us to my five-to-nine member core working group. There's typically further breakout by ad hoc working groups, and as I understand there are unelected staff (that is, subcommittee participants who are not themselves elected members of Congress) as well. There's little actual work which occurs in full sessions of a legislature. Votes (based on Committee work), speeches (largely for public consumption, and often to an empty chamber), ceremonial proceedings (swearing in, State of the Union), and with exceptions such as impeachment proceedings or the largely-but-not-entirely-it-seems perfunctory functions of certifying national election results. What parliamentary procedures do provide for is smooth function of subdivisions of full legislatures (e.g., committees and subcommittees), as well as rules for overall operation of the largely pro forma full-chamber sessions. That said, procedures are key in those functions. The Judicial system is interesting in that courts often operate highly autonomous, with individual judges having extreme discretion over the operations of their courtrooms, and courts collectively of dockets. A US trial court consists of a single judge. If held before a jury, there are usually 12 jurors in civil and criminal cases (fewer in some state courts), though jurors don't actively participate in the trial proceedings themselves, but rather observe the prosecution / plaintiff and defence, as well as judge's orders and rulings. After completion of the trial phase, the jury members deliberate amongst themselves to reach a verdict. Witnesses are fully independent (and are often excluded from hearing one anothers' testimony), legal teams are also typically small in all but the very largest cases. Other countries have various different systems, often with civil or criminal cases being tried before a panel of judges (frequently three). US appeals trials operate similarly, though in significant cases an en banc hearing with all the judges in the district hearing the case (six to twelve, I believe, depending on the circuit). Appeals courts and Supreme courts, whether at the state, Federal Circuit, or Supreme Court levels are the only overview of individual court judges and judgements in the US. Which is to say, again, that the structure is highly independent and autonomous and based on small groups. Academia is another interesting situation, again with relatively high autonomy amongst tenured faculty, though that's been decreasing. Academia is divided into disciplines, universities, colleges, and departments. Typical department sizes again tend to fall into the 15--50 full-time permanent members (there may be many more teaching assistants, lecturers, and other part-time or contingent positions). You didn't mention business organisation, though that would be another useful model. I believe the terms are M-Type and D-Type for monolithic and divisional corporate structures, respectively, with the latter emerging at firms such as DuPont and General Motors (particularly under Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., at GM), or terms to that effect. Again, the goal is to reduce dependencies between organisational divisions whilst also achieving efficiencies of scale. (Charles Perrow devoted much of his academic life to studying organisations, and wrote survey text on the topic, Complex Organizations, which discusses much of the prior work in the field.) All of which again generally show that communications scales poorly. Where it does scale, it almost always does so by hugely simplifying the content communicated. Markets, where prices substitute for a whole host of other qualities, would be an example of this. (That prices communicate complex qualitative differences and nuances poorly is another well-known challenge. Complexity will out.) Information automation does expand processing capability, but that tends to end up in a Red Queen's race, and often seems to consume free budget in additional processing, effectively a form of economic rent, rather than delivering improved profits, a/k/a the Solow Productivity Paradox.

ganzuul 3y ago

We have a word for it. "Harmony".

lifeisstillgood 3y ago

It's partly that there is only one way to express oneself in an online textual conversation. With text. If 2 people are loudly and annoyingly having a (intimate) conversation on say the bus, others around can use looks, physicality etc to communicate around them creating a shared parallel experience ce of WTF. However with no way to do that online just encourages text, joining in the conversation. Perhaps there are alternatives with avatars, GUIs etc.

dredmorbius 3y ago
In intimate conversation —a case where both or all parties in the same space and time — there are additional ample side-channels for subtexts to be communicated, including both conflict-diminishing and conflict-escallating ones. From TFA, 5th paragraph, by some counts. And yes, I frequently read without comprehension, scan quickly, or misinterpret as well. The problems I'm describing seem to be universally, or at the very least quite broadly distributed.

dale_glass 3y ago

I made a similar observation some time ago, so let me add this: human interactions in general don't scale. Social media easily turns completely normal human interactions into something perverse. Eg, say you've just exited to the cinema and vent to your friend that this movie sucked. What were they thinking? Who had the brilliant idea to change directors mid trilogy? There's a bit of venting, but quickly things settle down. There's a bit of bonding over the shared experience. Nobody is hurt, you're just having a private talk with your friend. Take that to Twitter, use the same words, and now the same thing is an addition to the torrent of hate aimed at the movie's director. You might have meant to reach your 10 followers, but search, recommendations, hashtags, retweets, etc can easily pull your statement out of its intended context. Then there's what it must be like to end up on the other side of that. This happens organically, people aren't organizing around it for the most part. So the torrent of hate can regain its strength at random, wherever some person posts about it 3 years later, it makes #2 in some countdown on Youtube, comes up on the top of AskReddit, etc. In real life most things settle down, the Internet allows rehashing old stuff effectively forever. And I think human interaction breaks at those scales. A single person can't meaningfully interact with a million random people which mostly spontaneously decided to flood you with messages. You can ask a prominent one or two to leave you alone, but more can show up at any time.

eloisant 3y ago
People have to understand that posting to Twitter is the equivalent of shouting in a megaphone at Time Square. It's not the equivalent of sharing something with your close friends, even if some people might think so. Yes most of the time your Twitts will only be noticed by your close friends. But they're still public speech.
gspencley 3y ago
It's also worth noting that even with in-person interaction, when you've got a party of more than 4 people, even sitting at the same table together, the group typically splits into smaller groups with their own individual conversations. Any in-person situation where a "group conversation" is meant to scale (ex: town hall meeting or class room), there is always a person in charge of leading and moderating the conversation (hand raising, mic queuing etc.).

bilekas 3y ago

I'm not sure why hut archive.ph just never works for me. Am I the only one with that problem?

patrec 3y ago
Are you using cloudflare's DNS? https://jarv.is/notes/cloudflare-dns-archive-is-blocked/ https://jarv.is/notes/cloudflare-dns-archive-is-blocked/
dredmorbius 3y ago
As the author and submitter of that piece, no, you're not: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37148681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37148681> I happen to be in a somewhat unusual interval of Archive Today lucidity (and accessibility) myself at the moment.

isodev 3y ago

Was B what we know as a “reply person”? I think it's not a question of scalability but the sensibility to develop skills needed to “read the room”. Just because the thread was public, doesn't mean it's appropriate to join. In many cases people post to share or vent and even if it sounds like a question, they probably don't want another opinion.

lynx23 3y ago
So, if it is considered inappropriate to join in, why was the thread public in the first place?
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  Both your comment and the one you're replying to illustrate perfectly (if perhaps unconsciously) the problem I'm attempting to convey in the essay: Online interactions give the appearance to some of an intimate discussion whilst of a public discourse to others, and the clash of those perceptions quite frequently leads to unpleasant disagreement, frustration, conflict, and confusion.
- kire456 3y ago
  I am guessing, for the same reason I can have a picknick in the local park with a few friends and discuss intimate matters. This takes place in public because that is convenient, but I still don't appreciate random passers-by interjecting their opinion. It's fine to listen in though, if you're sitting close by. Most people intuitively understand this. Online, this intuition sometimes disappears, and people feel that the fact that something is readable to them, implies it is meant for them to interact with.
  - lynx23 3y ago
    But does the comparison really hold? IMO, you'd have to have your "intimate" public discussion carved in stone or something to be comparable. Your example is more like SnapChat or any other platform that limits the lifetime of postings.
  - 3y ago

extasia 3y ago

From the title I was expecting a study on polyamory or the like haha.

zogrodea 3y ago

This sounds something like an oft-repeated truth. "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic." - indicating that people tend to have less emotional investment on larger scales. There was more on my mind, but I forgot.