Dunbar's Number/Monkeysphere

[Lago PARANOIA]

These two things are usually presented as a bad thing in a trite 'oh, look at how dumb and selfish human beings are' sense, but really, isn't such a thing necessarily true?

Even if you really, really wanted to a being can only give so much energy towards other people. Imagine how paralyzing it would be if the concerns of Schoolteacher #49 two towns over were of equal importance and tragedy as of your own mom. No one could function like that.

This is of course not a garden-variety excuse for selfishness or uninvolvement in the concerns of others. I'm just tired of this observation being bandied about in some pretentious Fight-Club style revelation.

[Gelare]

How about a little background for those of us not immediately familiar with the topic?

[Username17]

How about a little background for those of us not immediately familiar with the topic?

Dunbar's Number is the upper limit of how many people we are able to have stable, non-formalized relationships with. It's generally supposed to be about 150. Social interaction beyond that requires social interaction rules. Society, law, politeness.

The Monkeysphere is the extent of your ability to ascribe fully human traits to the people you interact with. Again, it's a number limit. As you interact with more people you have to fall back upon generalization and stereotyping.

The fundamental reality then is that you have a more visceral empathic reaction if, say, your sister gets run over by a car than some other person. Because you relate to the other people formally, their death is a statistic. And yeah, that's fine. People die every day. If everyone grieved for every death, we'd never get anything done.

-Username17

[Ganbare Gincun]

BEHOLD! Google explains it all!

Dunbar's Number, Monkeysphere

Not to be confused with Monkey Torture.

Edit: Crap, Frank beat me to it.

[Gelare]

BEHOLD! Google explains it all!

Not as good as Are You Afraid of the Dark.
Anyway, some more useful background would be why the OP thinks these things are usually presented as a bad thing. I'm pretty sure they're great.

[Crissa]

Well, it's usually seen as a failing not to stop everything to deal with issues about people you have very little connection with.

And then again, blasted for having any empathy for anyone you don't have tenuous connection to.

Which is a horrible way to structure a society.

-Crissa

[Josh_Kablack]

I completely fail to see how "Hey some people are closer to you than others, and other people feel the same way about you" is a revelation to anyone.

I also fail to see how that is a bad thing in any way shape or form.

We manage to have societies larger than extended families, small tribes and clans precisely because we have formalism.

Seriously, Dunbar is pointing out a "problem" that Hammurabi solved.

[Murtak]

I completely fail to see how "Hey some people are closer to you than others, and other people feel the same way about you" is a revelation to anyone.

This is not quite it though. Past this number, you do not feel empathy for people. You just don't care about them. We have created some social concepts that partially solve the issue, but this is learned behavior. The implication is of course, that if we do not actively teach people to feel empathy for those outside of their tribe, they will not care about them, feel free to rip them off or in a pinch even kill them.

The revelation is not "you care less about some people than others" but "there is a cutoff point after which you do not care about people at all (or close to it)".

[Username17]

The point of horror is that the formalism that allows us to interact politely and efficiently with random people we meet in the mall, it takes an extremely subtle change in the formalism to allow us to go ahead and pillage Nanking. The lives and deaths of people outside our monkey sphere are just statistics, and it is easy enough to define any particular set of numbers as positive.

The Dunbar number is a demonstration of why War is thinkable. And will remain thinkable forever, or at least until we replace ourselves with a new species of robot that is wired for empathy in a different manner that makes it harder to demonize out groups.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

I'm still not seeing any revelation there.

Maybe that's because I've played, "pick a year, google the massacre" before. But really, 98% of history is "We beat back saddam, kruschev, hitler, bismark,napolean, saladin, ....xerxes and his inhuman war machine so that we could all be free, but now we gotta fight Bin Laden and his people who aren't like us at all so that we can maintain our tradition of beating people up freedom"


and here's 5 minutes on google

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/ma ... cre-babies

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maguindanao_massacre

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chris ... es_(Congo)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tech_massacre

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Trincomalee_massacre

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andijan_massacre

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beslan_sch ... age_crisis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athens_Pol ... c_uprising

[Koumei]

...goddamn it. I tried playing that game and got a hit at every random year I tried.

[Username17]

It was more of a revelation back in 1950 when people were trying to figure out how Nazis had managed to get people to do that. The Milgram experiment hadn't been done yet, and a lot of people had stupid ideas for how to explain this shit. Dunbar was competing with Golding's Lord of the Flies explanation that only the repression and fear of authority kept us from turning on each other like wild territorial animals.

That you can get people to massacre other people is not news. That people get massacred every year isn't news either. But why it works like that is still being debated. The Monkeysphere is a much more plausible answer than "some people don't have enough God in their lives" - which is seriously the answer provided by a lot of politicians.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

It was more of a revelation back in 1950 when people were trying to figure out how Nazis had managed to get people to do that.

So people back in 1950 had forgotten that what the Nazis got people to commit was a form of genocide so common that we have a specific word to differentiate it from those other, slightly less common forms of genocide?

Wishful thinking that it can't happen here
It's well underways but nobody knows
A repeat of history
That's how it goes

[CatharzGodfoot]

It was more of a revelation back in 1950 when people were trying to figure out how Nazis had managed to get people to do that.

So people back in 1950 had forgotten that what the Nazis got people to commit was a form of genocide so common that we have a specific word to differentiate it from those other, slightly less common forms of genocide?

Wishful thinking that it can't happen here
It's well underways but nobody knows
A repeat of history
That's how it goes

I had written a long post about having empathy for complete strangers without messing yourself up, but it came out trite so I deleted it.


On the bright side, now I have urban monkey warfare stuck in my head.

[Kaelik]

So people back in 1950 had forgotten that what the Nazis got people to commit was a form of genocide so common that we have a specific word to differentiate it from those other, slightly less common forms of genocide?

No, read it again. Back in the 1950s, people were all curious about HOW the Nazis got people to do it. You know, what the psycological basis behind genocide is, how exactly people could rationalize doing "evil" acts.

[Josh_Kablack]

I get that.

My point is that wondering "how could anyone do that?" about genocide bespeaks a truly vast ignorance of history.

Here, in 2010, over 60 years since the fall of the Third Reich, the ardent vow of "Never Again" has proved to actually mean "just about every year"

To me, the point of horror isn't how easily small changes in formalism allow us to dehumanize others and commit barbaric acts upon those others - to me, the real horror is that we have deluded ourselves into regarding such barbaric acts as rare and unusual in the first place when history and current events indicate otherwise. Atrocity is commonplace. Barbarism is endemic to the human condition, and by denying that ugly reality and pretending that it can't happen here we let down our guard against a repeat of history again and again and again.



***

On a related tangent

MIA's genocide video is awesome, but likely not work safe.

[Username17]

MIA's father apparently helped invent the suicide vest and assisted in the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi.
In related news: she fled her home country of Sr Lanka because of the civil war, and the government there currently keeps a registry of Tamils (which would include her) and disappears people from her ethnic group on a regular basis.

-Username17

[Kaelik]

My point is that wondering "how could anyone do that?" about genocide bespeaks a truly vast ignorance of history.

And my point is that wondering "how" you could get someone to do something is different from wondering "what" you could get someone to do. And you are being an idiot by equating the two, and then complaining about how it's stupid to not know how this thing comes to happen.

So let's try this again.

Floods happen. They happen all the time. They happen a lot. So a long time ago, some people, who fucking know that floods happen all the time you idiot and don't think they are rare, decided to find out how floods occur.

They wanted to know the cause of bad things. And once they discovered the cause, they also discovered ways of preventing the bad thing.

Likewise, if someone wonders how you can convince someone to commit genocide, WHICH IS A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THING THAN WHETHER OR NOT YOU CAN CONVINCE PEOPLE TO COMMIT GENOCIDE, it is not stupid of them to investigate the cause of this event and try to figure out how people come to do it, because then they can do things that actually fucking reduce the instances of genocide!

[mean_liar]

Nazi.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So I'm wondering if even if we're succeeded by transhumans or robots or aliens or whatever if there's an actual upward limit towards caring.

Like seriously, if someone had deep personal connections/empathy to 10,000 people, it'd drive them fucking insane; that is 100x the amount of sadness someone will get from normal life trauma created from caring about others such as the sudden death of a friend or them getting fired or whatnot. Or even on a more positive note, is no one who could keep up with the birthday parties or weddings or sleepovers of that many people; there is just not that much time in the day. Your choices are either to select a smaller slice of people to regularly interact with, to interact with them with utter randomness, to give them extremely superficial attention, or not to bother with it in the first place... which still seems to be justifying Dunbar's Number.

I'm not saying the number can't be raised, but I don't really see moving it from one hundred people to, say, five thousand people is something to get excited amount. Or even a million people. And the proposed solution to this 'hard code in empathy' isn't that much of an improvement either, since even with our crude human brains it's still possible in much the same way you can convince almost everyone to wear clothes in public or teach them to read, it's just that no one wants to do it.

Or maybe it's just an argument from incredulity.

[K]

There's an area of the human brain that when damaged sometimes gives the person a sense of oneness with all people. It's not empathy really, but more of a religious sense of there not being boundaries between you and other people.

I figure the supermen of the future will basically have that hardcoded in. The only solution to conflict between humans is to crank down the sense of self quite a bit.

[Username17]

There's a reason that's an advanced secret project!

-Username17