Astral Codex Ten

Dunbar’s number

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Dunbar’s number

Article

Dunbar’s number is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 08, 2021 and June 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “according to wikipedia on Dunbar’s number”; “Dunbar’s number is the idea that humans can hold around 150 distinct social”; “Dunbar’s number is the idea that humans can hold around 150 distinct social relationships in mind”. It most often appears alongside California, Hobbes, 50,000 BC.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: April 08, 2021
  • Last seen: June 10, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Book Review: Order Without Law
April 08, 2021 · Original source
One oversight is that it’s not clear to me how large the population Ellickson studied is. Given that it’s a case study for questions of groups maintaining order, I think the size of the group matters a lot. For example, according to wikipedia on Dunbar’s number: “Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 250, with a commonly used value of 150.”
Inline links: Dunbar’s number
Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything
June 10, 2022 · Original source
The work of Robin Dunbar seems important here, somehow, although no two thinkers on these topics use it in the exact same way. Dunbar’s number is the idea that humans can hold around 150 distinct social relationships in mind at any one time, and that this is a function of their cortex size, for, in primates, the greater the neocortex the larger the average social group size.
It seems there’s likely something special about Dunbar’s number being violated—after all, a lot of the Upper Neolithic revolution is occurring when groups of humans (in the few hundreds) are getting together seasonally into much larger groups, making pilgrimages, joining, and then dispersing. Each theory might have a different relationship to Dunbar’s number; for the followers of Rousseau, past Dunbar’s number egalitarianism begins to break down, and therefore the terrible necessity of the inventions of hierarchy, state, and bureaucracy. Even the Davids admit that the violation of the Dunbar number is likely important, writing we should
Is there any hypothesis that fits all these disparate facts? We somehow need there to be (a) an initial condition to humanity that keeps it in a Great Trap for tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of years, and then also (b) we need that initial condition to have led very naturally to the diverse political and cultural experimentation of the Upper Neolithic, which almost looks like it precludes having a single initial condition at all, and finally (c) the explanation would ideally also explains the mechanism by which the violation of Dunbar’s number is important on the steps toward civilization.