Transmission #34: Picking Fleas, the Tower of Babel, the Indestructible Bureaucrat, and Believing a Serial Fraudster
Design, ideas and other flotsam
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This is Transmissions by me, Martin Brown. Father. Husband. Design Lead at Craig Walker, sometime lecturer at RMIT. Marty to most.
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Design
Dunbar’s number and how speaking is 2.8x better than picking fleas
Matt Webb, Interconnected
Breaking down our social relationships by the numbers. The famous Dunbar number (~150) is the number of social relationships our neocortex has evolved to simultaneously track. But in order to build an maintain that number of connections, we require efficient a more efficient method than our evolutionary forebears. Try as we might, we simply can’t groom and pick fleas off that many people. Instead, we have language. And language, unlike grooming, allows us to create 1:many connections, simultaneously.
But how many simultaneous connections can we make? What is a good conversation size? It turns out there’s an ideal number here too.
Dunbar’s prediction, based on the estimated efficiency gain versus chimps: human conversation group sizes should be limited to about 3.8 in size (one speaker plus 2.8 listeners).
And this holds up!
Looking at restaurant reservations: the mean size of 3070 groups was 3.8.
In a university refectory: the average number of people directly involved in a conversation (as speaker or attentive listener) reached an asymptotic value of about 3.4 (one speaker plus 2.4 listeners) and that groups tended to partition into new conversational cliques at multiples of about four individuals.
These limits can be incredibly useful for anyone thinking about how to facilitate better conversation, or developing new systems of communication.
Because as the next article talks to, some of our current and most powerful systems of communication are clearly malfunctioning.
Ideas
Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
Jonathan Haidt, The Atlantic
This essay begins with the biblical story of Babel, and how a splintering of understanding leads to its ultimate downfall. This, says Jonathan Haidt, is what is happening now, all around us.
Haidt has been exploring this topic for well over a decade, looking at how the left and right are growing ever more distrustful and fearful of each other, and increasingly incomprehensible to each other (in America, chiefly, but by extension most of the Western world).
The fundamental change, in Haidt’s opinion, has been the rise of social media. According to Haidt, it is destroying our ability to face the real world, resolve disagreements amicably and find a shared truth, and, as a result, we’re regressing into our own small worlds, which get stupider and stupider.
It’s a bleak picture, and it’s persuasively argued. There’s also absolutely an argument that social media has been, if not a net positive, then at very least neutral – not that you’ll hear it argued often, and I’m not about to try here. But it’s not about whether social media (circa 2007-2022) is good or bad. The genie is out of the bottle. Social media is here to stay – there is no going back to 4 channels of clear narrative and counter narrative.
The question, as it always is, is how do take what we have, and make it better?
Collapse Won’t Reset Society
Adam Van Buskirk, Palladium Magazine
If Haidt has you believing that we’re headed into oblivion and anarchy, this next article may lighten your mood. Society, as we know it is incredibly, incredibly, durable. During the black plague, possibly the worst catastrophe imaginable short of an asteroid hit, where 30-50% of the population died, society didn’t collapse at all. In fact, many of the recognisable aspects of society, such as the church and the state, were actually strengthened.
Trade too, is extremely durable, even in conflict.
"Even during active wars, trade goes on. The Russia-Ukraine conflict is one of the most recent examples. The amount of Russian natural gas flowing through Ukrainian pipelines actually increased in the weeks following the invasion, with Russia paying transit fees to Ukraine in full even as it rained missiles on the country. While conventional state-on-state warfare is reducing cities such as Mariupol to rubble, Ukrainian and Russian bureaucrats are evidently working together, and are clearing payments. These fee payments are presumably being used to purchase military equipment to use against the other."
Quote of the Week
In the austral winter of 1911, Wilson, Bowers, and Cherry-Garrard went on a phantasmagoric five week journey to try and collect the eggs of the empreror penguin. This journey, which gave Cherry-Garrard’s book its title, took place in complete darkness and temperatures that dropped below -77º Fahrenheit. The men, forced to relay and searching for their footprints by candlelight, sometimes made as little as a mile of progress a day. When Cherry-Garrard’s clothes were weighed on his return, they contained twenty-four pounds of ice.
– Maciej Cegłowski, Scott And Scurvy, Idle Words
Chart of the Week
From @RajaKorman: This is probably the most basic chart that explains politics on both sides of the Atlantic.
Other
💣 Good news! Kind of. A full scale Nuclear War, while undoubtedly very bad, is “unlikely” to completely destroy all of civilisation. Link
💿 Spotify generates more money in royalties from ‘fake artists’ making musak than off legitimate artists writing songs and albums. Guess what is being shoved into more and more Spotify-promoted playlists then? Link
✈️ Well blow me down with a feather. Catch Me If You Can, the book written by Frank Abagnale, a serial fraudster, about his life as a serial fraudster… seems to, also, be mostly a fraud. Link
🍄 A fairly gruesome and lengthy description of what happens if you eat the wrong mushroom. Link
If you like what you read, maybe somebody else you know will to!