Comment by martin-t
4 days ago
I like the application of Dunbar's number, though I am torn on (2). The largest countries currently have over 1 billion citizens, that's still 10 million representatives. That's as much as some countries.
One solution is to say that no country should be so large anyway. And I'd like that, creating such huge power structures (hierarchical or not) is dangerous. But realistically, sometimes they are needed for defense. A lot of power structures are shaped by the necessity of organized defense (and can then be used for organized attack).
Yes.
I imagine on the level of any individual's participation in society, culture, economy, whatever you want to call it - it's always started out more or less like "here, you have these 100-150 places in your memory which nature gave you to know other apes; turns out you can also use them to store abstract concepts, which take 7-8x less neural bandwidth before compression; here are some: ..."
And it's due to some general agglomerating drive of systems - perhaps the same principle that made multicellular life preferable - that it ended up working out like "half of who you consider yourself to be is determined by the metanarrative undertow of the first language you were taught, and the rest by the last movie you watched."
Ain't that a life.