Why Dunbar's number matters
So, I cast a fairly wide net in terms of things I passively track for potential food-for-thought. Blogs and tweeps, books, articles, etc- I try not to limit myself too much because I can skim pretty quickly across a fairly vast swath of content, even if it IS just a drop in the bucket. This morning, the following tweet came through, from Tim Hurson : To ourselves we are a complex of thoughts and feelings. To others we're just a bunch of behaviors. Really not engineering related, of course, but it meshed well with something else I saw come through my twitter stream- a post about Dunbar's number, which is the supposedly optimal group size of human culture: the number of people that you can conceivably know about and care about. That group of about 150 individuals is your monkeysphere , and people outside of it are, to some extent, not really people in your mind. I think there's a little more to that tweet than the 140 character limit allows. See, to people who consider y...