Get the latest tech news
Dunbar's Number Is Quadratic (2020)
Or, Inference in Relational Space is Human-Hard
Extrapolating with data from other primates, Dunbar himself theorized that the binding constraint was neurological.I’ve taken considerable liberties in relaying the anthropological story and literature because this isn’t an academic post and I’m not writing a lit review. At the level of a band or tribe – where geography, kinship, and resource scarcity compel durable proximity – it seems reasonable to believe you could accumulate direct experiences with 150 people that would allow you to induce at least some mental model for them all. (You notice this most on the knife’s edge – “I think I like this post but let me first check the profile description and a few other tweets to make sure.”) The trouble is that the resulting judgment back-propagates over both our social and asocial beliefs (i.e. knowledge or something like it).
Or read this on Hacker News