Robin Dunbar
Article
Robin Dunbar is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 09, 2022 and June 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “Robin Dunbar claims that humans have a capacity to handle 150 social relationships”; “The work of Robin Dunbar seems important here”. It most often appears alongside 50,000 BC, ACX Grants, Africa.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: February 09, 2022
- Last seen: June 10, 2022
Appears In
Related Pages
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- 50,000 BC (1 shared issues)
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- ACX Grants (1 shared issues)
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- Africa (1 shared issues)
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- Against Malaria Foundation (1 shared issues)
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- Altamira (1 shared issues)
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- Amazonia (1 shared issues)
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- Asia (1 shared issues)
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- Astalcodexten (1 shared issues)
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- Athens (1 shared issues)
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- Benjamin Todd (1 shared issues)
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- Bio Grants Committee (1 shared issues)
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- Biology Grants Evaluation Committee (1 shared issues)
External Links
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.
Robin Dunbar claims that humans have a capacity to handle 150 social relationships. Count up my friends, family members, coworkers, and acquaintances, and there will probably be about 150 who I can remember consistently and have some vague emotional connection to. If I made some mistake that killed all those people - all my friends, relatives, everyone I know - then in some “objective” sense, that would be about as bad as screwing up this grants program in some way that made it only half as good as the malaria counterfactual.
Inline links: claims
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.