DunbarNumber

@ethicalfeast @TyrantsMuse @johnrobb I certainly buy that humans are evolved to be social. And that includes prioritizing communication bandwidth and behaviour over maximizing individual cognitive power. Being 'independent thinkers' isn't our nature.

@ethicalfeast @TyrantsMuse @johnrobb Might we continue to evolve towards being even dumber individuals wired into even larger networks?

Maybe. That's kind of what homo economicus is. Someone who conforms themselves to being a simple utility maximizer in a market of billions communicating via prices.

@ethicalfeast @TyrantsMuse @johnrobb We aren't evolved to be homo economicus. We've just learned to execute that virtual machine on our cerebral wetware.

And maybe we could also learn to emulate homo socio-medius who behaves well on social media and interacts with hundreds of thousands.

@ethicalfeast @TyrantsMuse @johnrobb But it would involve having to suppress part of ourselves. And there's a lot of pain in that. Just as there's pain in being forced to conform to homo economicus.

@ethicalfeast @TyrantsMuse @johnrobb Evolution is also messy. And will kill a lot of people while it moves these behaviours into our brain.

I don't think hoping we'll evolve to be homo socio-medius is the answer to the immediate stresses and social damage we're experiencing at the moment.

@ethicalfeast @TyrantsMuse @johnrobb In another sense it's the same as the difference of country people and city people.

City people have already adopted the behaviours necessary to deal with many strangers better than country people do. But we feel that a kind of rural warmth has been lost in urban life.

@ethicalfeast @TyrantsMuse @johnrobb The virtues of the city are tolerance and liberalism. But at a cost of coldness. Those of the country are loyalty and intimacy, but at the cost of prejudice against difference and non-conformity.

@ethicalfeast @TyrantsMuse @johnrobb Imagine a humanity adapted to social media as being like city dwellers amplified to 11.

And, in a sense, the current right-wing populism as a kind of instinctive reaction against the globalism that people have glimpsed on the network.

People want to go back to the warmth

@ethicalfeast @TyrantsMuse @johnrobb I'm freestyleing here ... but back to the question. Will we evolve a bigger 'Dunbar number'? I think plausibly yes, but the cost is getting used to this 'not really knowing' people. And eventually not even worrying we don't really know people.

@ethicalfeast @TyrantsMuse @johnrobb Because we'll have protocols that are simpler and perhaps more formalized instead.

We'll stop being so rude and so hostile to each other on social media. Because we'll stop caring what other people seem to be thinking.

Because we'll stop caring what they actually do think.