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If something good is happening, chances are more than one person is riding a systemic serendipity. Picking out 5 lets you praise individuals a bit but also flag the pattern, inviting others to ride it, and counter-programming the temptation to feed attribution bias.
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It’s fine to traffic in archetypes or even stereotypes when you sense the conversation is not “difficult” and within the scope of good-natured jokes/roasting that will be received as such. This means enough mutual trust and small enough power differential.
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Been thinking along these lines for a few years, but I was stuck on 1:1. That’s an ideal in some ways. When you engage 1:1 it’s hard to truly dehumanize. You’re forced to see the other person as a human and if not, have your inhumanity witnessed. But it doesn’t scale.
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The rule of 5 scales, works at a distance, works on large orgs, etc. Forces due diligence, generates proof of systemic problems in the process of formulation etc.
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If the rule in a court of law is “innocent until proven guilty” the rule in a court of public opinion is “guilty until proven innocent” and there’s no good middle ground. Rule of 5 is not as sloppy and type-1-error-prone as mob law, not as type-2-error-prone as court law.
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No point decrying mob law/court of public opinion. It’s a permanent feature of the species. No point trying to make courtroom law more expansive. Thar be abuses. But we can invent a third type.
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Just occurred to me that the NYT practices a perverse inversion of this trend, when there are ~3-5 named individuals on the provocation side as in “these 3-5 people claim iPad use causes racism.” A specious “difficult conversation” premise propped up by bearing anecdotal witness.
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Another way to remember this heuristic: to a first approximation, the largest group that can do effective unstructured conflict resolution is a nuclear family. And it really sucks even at that scale. Above that you’re just picking a fight that will reproduce bad patterns.
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For eg if a group A is trying to fight a group B for change in an institution, and A+B >5, then whatever the outcome, it will harden and further reify the most visible archetypal divide between A and B. You’ll “rotate” the problem rather than solve it.
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The synthetic link between “5 is the useful limit” and “name 5 people” is perhaps not obvious. It’s just that that that’s what our social brain can really handle. Some sort of speculative cousin of Dunbar number. Above/below you get overfit/underfit
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This is part of my thesis that a controlled dark age is probably for the best now. The world needs a good night’s sleep. Been “enlightened” too long. Going < 5 = going cozy = going dark. Public spaces only for light entertainment. Take difficult stuff backstage. Breakout sessions
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