Dunbar’s number needs to be retired as a concept. It’s turned into a meaningless trope under conditions of modernity. It’s not a meaningful social scaling breakpoint for anything in practice, and hasn’t been since the invention of agriculture and archetype based storytelling.
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150 made men in most mafias, last I checked. Anecdotally, go much over, get a lot of turncoats.
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Dunbar’s number refers to how many other minds you can model not group size per se. Unless all made men only know w the other made men personally and nobody else, it’s not an example.
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You probably mean that it's not constant but a function of other variables.
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I don't know. You seem to be living in what is the far future for most folks.
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There is no way to retire a concept. You con stop using it, but it will keep popping up, whether you like it or not.
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I still see it as the woebegone metric for practicable democracy. So we basically agree here.
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I find "Dunbar's number" still order-of-mag-approximation useful; and also useful as one of the few turns of phrase that reliably gets people to think about the fact communication changes as the numbers of participants goes up.
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Super useful for understanding early startup modalities, in my experience
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