Thursday, October 10, 2019
Magic number
Via BBC "science":
Dunbar and his colleagues applied this basic principle to humans, examining historical, anthropological and contemporary psychological data about group sizes, including how big groups get before they split off or collapse. They found remarkable consistency around the number 150. According to Dunbar and many researchers he influenced, this rule of 150 remains true for early hunter-gatherer societies as well as a surprising array of modern groupings: offices, communes, factories, residential campsites, military organisations, 11th Century English villages, even Christmas card lists. Exceed 150, and a network is unlikely to last long or cohere well. (One implication for the era of urbanisation may be that, to avoid alienation or tensions, city residents should find quasi-villages within their cities.)There's a lot of Savannah Sabertooth "evolution" shit in the article, but the number does seem to be pretty well established. Caught my attention because I'd just been listening to a 1949 episode of Truth or Consequences that proved the point. TOC sometimes moved around the country, and this episode was broadcast from the Municipal Auditorium in KCMO. The best prank in the episode starts at 16:00. Mrs Maggie Johnson of Sibley, population 150, is induced to sing an old song into the microphone, and the host offers her a prize if she can call someone in Sibley who heard her sing. (She's a pretty good singer, in old Appalachian shape-note modal style.) They bring her a phone, and she starts calling. She doesn't ask the operator for names, she asks for numbers, and it becomes clear that she knows the phone number of everyone in Sibley. These are complicated party-line numbers like 30F22, not modern dialable numbers. The host lets her call more numbers while he goes on to other pranks, then returns to her after she has called pretty much everyone. She's frustrated because nobody is home, so she can't win the prize. The big reveal: Everyone in Sibley is in the audience, behind a curtain. The show has gathered them up and bused them in. Again Mrs Johnson immediately recognizes that everyone is there. Sure enough, 150. Sidenote: Googlemap shows that Sibley is still there and still about the same size. It has a Johnson St, so Maggie's family must have been prominent.
Labels: defensible times
¶ 12:10 AM
