Dunbar's Number

If there is any concept I think will improve everyone's superstructing, It's a decent understanding of Dunbar's number.

Dunbar's number is the maximum size of a social group for primates. It's named after the theorist, who bascially discovered that in primates, there was a direct corrolation between brain size and size of social groups. Monkeys with smaller brains form smaller tribes of monkeys. Monkeys with larger brains form larger tribes of monkeys. Since Humans are primates as well, we have a Dunbar's number too, estimated to be about 150.

There seems to be two factors contributing to Dunbars number. One is time spent maintaining group cohesion. You have to work at relationships, obviously, and different primates have different ways. Chimps maintain social cohesion through group grooming sessions. Bonobos have lots and lots of sex. And humans talk to each other. Some methods are more efficient than others. No matter the method, though, as group size increases so does the time spent maintaining the relationships that keep the group together. After a certain point, ALL your time is spent maintaining cohesion and there is no time left for anything else.

The Brain size thing also suggests that there is a hardware component to it. Basically, your brain has a certain amount of processing power devoted to keeping track of the feelings of others. This is a lot more complicated than, say, quantum physics, and so almost all of your brain in devoted to this. When you are dealing with two people, you have to remember not only each of their personalities and their relationship to you, you also have to remember their relationship to each other. Go to three, and you now have to remember not only the people, their relationships with you and each other, but the relationships of groups within the groups to other individuals and other groups within the group. When you look at the number of relationships there, it's frankly amazing our brains can handle up to 150 people.(I don't even have the math to figure out how many relationships that is.)

Basically everyone who doesn't get a coveted spot in your personal Dunbar Limit is not a person to you, at least not a fully fleshed out person. They are an NPC, a two dimensional support character, a stereotype.

Why does this matter? Well, there's a lot of implications, and I can't put many of them better than this Author does at http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html. It's such an excellent read. If you prefer not to get your scientific education from comedy writers, you can hit up the wikipedia page for Dunbar's number as well.

But to reiterate David Wong's point, this is basically the reason society doesn't work. We have a very direct, very hardwired limit on the number of people who we are capable of treating like people. We can be nice to other people, we can be charitable, we can care in the abstract sense, but we cannot actually get to know more than 150 in a meaningful fashion.

One thing I never see mentioned in other descriptions of Dunbars number is that the relationships that count towards 150 don't even have to be positive. Your worst enemy takes up a dunbar slot, the same as your best friend, provided you spend time thining about them, tracking their evil deeds, etc. You still exhibit extraordinary brainpower keeping tabs on the people you hate, the same brainpower it takes to keep track of people you love. So choose negative relations with care, they literally keep you from having a friend.

People are happier the more they interact with people from their monkeysphere. Anyone else they interact with is a stranger, and the more they have to interact with strangers the more anxious people get. Any attempt to get people to form tribes of over 150 is going to fail because people simply don't have the means to incorporate into such a structure without going mad. This is why communism fails at the large scale, for instance. 150 is also a top limit, a point at which so much energy goes into maintaining the relationships that nothing else can get done. If people have relationships outside the group, it's size is going to need to be much smaller.

What does all this have to do with superstruct? Simple. Because of Dunbar's Number, people form tribes. It's hardwired, we can't get rid of it. But living above a hunter-gatherer lifestyle requires coordination of more than 150 people. Superstructs are methods for connecting Tribe to Tribe in ways that make coordination possible.

A superstruct is not a tribe. A tribe is a group of people who all are within each other's monkeysphere, and they form the basic unit of human society. A Superstruct should link tribe to tribe in ways that allow for useful collaborations.

Take a look at the current superstructs out there. How many are tribes? I'll use my own as examples so as not to offend anyone. Zombie Squad seems to be a relatively popular superstruct, except it isn't really. It's a tribe of people in st. louis (with affiliated tribes elsewhere), who just happen to be really awesome and have a cool concept and a mission. Meanwhile The Exchange, a less popular superstruct, actually deserves the name because it connects multiple tribes together in a way that helps them overcome their dunbar limit to collaborate.

Right now, regardless of your specific government type, most societies coordinate between tribes via a pyramid scheme, what I call feudalism. Each tribe send a representative to the next highest level, where they form their own tribe of leaders. They send someone to the next level, and so on, until all the people in the society are underneath a group small enough to work at things. The major problem with this is that unless the total size of both groups together is less than 150, you cannot be in two tribes at once. The leaders forget their constituents in the lower tribe and identify with the leader tribe. This is inherently unequitable, and it very specifically disempowers the masses and concentrates that power, for good or ill, in the hands of less than 150 people. It's also vulnerable to disruption, since taking out one person can disconnect a whole section of the tree from the rest.

What we need to see are decentralized superstructs, ways to join tribes together in ways that preserve equity, reduce or eliminate dependance on central social control, and encourage diversity. I have my ideas, but I challenge you to come up with your own. I really want to hear about it or better yet, see it in action.

Also, when creating superstructs, ask yourself: what tribes am I connecting? Why? Is this a real superstruct, or a tribe? (Even if it's a tribe, go ahead and post, because we need tribes to be linked and there's no place other than superstructures to put them.)

The other way to overcome Dunbar's limit is Social Network Computing. This could be used to increase one's funcional dunbar number, offsourcing to the program important tasks like remembering someone's birthday or where you met them or if they know tiffany your friend from high school . These tools could increase the number of people you keep track of, and would be especially useful if you could access people's profiles on your mobile, through AR and unobtrusively. But even in this case you are only strecthing the bunbar limit, not removing it, and sooner or later your tribe will be too big to increase any more and still work.

In the final analysis, we need to know that no matter what, humanity is tribalist. It's hard-wired, you can't fight it and win. What makes the difference between tribal warfare and civilization is the ability for these tribes to cooperate. Any attempt at organizing society is going to have to understand the limits of Dunbar's number, or be destined to failure.