I've always preferred groups of 2-6 people. Many board games are made for groups of this size.
On one side, humans can mentally cope with 4-6 objects at most - as though we have 4-6 memory slots, which is reasonable given that we have 4 limbs.
On another side, network effects of nodes on a grid become unmanageable above about 6 nodes - a group of 6 people will have 36 one-on-one interpersonal relationships to manage.
> On another side, network effects of nodes on a grid become unmanageable above about 6 nodes - a group of 6 people will have 36 one-on-one interpersonal relationships to manage.
Network effects grow surprisingly fast. Between 2 people there's only 1 bidirectional edge. Between 3 it's 3 and between 4 it's 6.
Intuitively, this is important because in a conversation, each member must project and rationalise each other communicator's response to a message. In other words, each member must be cognisant of every other members response to every message. Between a few people that's manageable, but the combinatorics really grows for n >= 4.
It's all I do. It's the only way I can understand if my next comment will offend or work as a joke or if I'm posing an interesting topic. It's what makes conversations so draining to an introvert I feel. The more people, the more I have to figure out what I can say to be ok with the group at hand.
As I posted below, there is a difference between observing how different people react to a particular comment (O(n)) and observing how different people react to a particular comment based on who it's from (O(n^2)). I'm mostly trying to question the idea that there's anything quadratic in the number of participants going on here. Are you sure you're saying that the work you do is quadratic?
That's fascinating, thinking about this, I've realised that I only do this when I'm in a conversation with new people or for whatever reason am specifically considering the interplay of what's being said.
Otherwise I have a broad set of heuristics I apply which I adjust as needed.
I never considered that a tendency to do this might have an impact on introversion/extroversion. Something to mull over, thanks!
I think you (and everyone else) does this implicitly. It makes sense for a survival perspective to be able to assess how people react to certain comments & actions in conversation. If other people support a comment it's a signal that you can reiterate the comment or build upon it.
There's a difference between observing how a comment was generally received and remembering exactly how each person reacted. I'm not saying nobody does the latter, but I don't.
And the other way, one can notice how a person reacts to a comment without necessary needing to remember the source of it. Both of these are going to scale linearly (obviously).
I might pick up on something like "A seems to respond to B uniformly negatively" and make a note of that, but remembering one notable thing doesn't require me to "allocate" memory for all of the other non-memorable things. I'm not literally building and labeling a graph, like some commenters are implying. Or if you insist, it's a sparse data structure.
I guess this has something to do with why communication is so different in collectivist cultures. Maybe it's the different nature of communication itself that allowed collectivism by allowing to manage larger groups of people without getting into overwhelming numbers.
There have been tons of research and nobody seems to fully understand it.
Collectivist, most messages are intended for the whole group, with ocassionally talking to a specific person, but it's expected the message will be understood by other people who are present. There is very little "code talking" within the group.
In individualist cultures, it's expected that most messages are targeted to specific people, and there can be whole dialogues meant to be only understood by the two people. Or a message may be superficially said to one person, but is actually meant to be overheard by another person. Very often what is said isn't actually true, but it was only said as a means to an end (to make somebody do or say something) and the people involved are expected to understand that. Very litle detail and deeper information is shared, things are rarely said that are not strictly necessary to know.
It truly is a cognitive burden for people who care about how their words are perceived and understood. Logically, I see two ways to succeed in communicating to large groups.
One way is to tune down your level of awareness of, or your psychological attachment to, how your message is being perceived; i.e. turn off the filter and just talk, public perception be damned.
The other way would be to improve your mental approximation of how people are perceiving and emotionally responding to your message, taking the integral of emotional response like some kind of social calculus. Perhaps this consists of bucketing people into groups, the way politicians do, only in more of a real time fashion? I'm not sure, but I do find it interesting.
It helps to be aware that anyone could hear it and to account for that. It's not perfect, but it reduces problems.
It also helps to be aware that some parts of what you are saying will be entirely missed by some people and this not only isn't a problem, it can be a feature.
That is thought provoking. But it almost seems like accounting for everyone (infinite nodes) could make things even more complicated. I have noticed that, as I've gotten older, I've become more aware that people can break into conversation by overhearing something at almost any time. Sometimes it makes me just want to say less so avoid that possibility.
There are typically three things you need to think about:
1. The intended audience, whether an individual or group.
2. Anyone who could generically presume you somehow meant them or were commenting on their life.
3. Actual people you personally know that you actually are speaking about or that might legitimately assume you meant them when you didn't.
Group 3 is probably the biggest source of trouble for most people. It's the one I make the most effort to account for.
My brother-in-law is (or was) a programmer. Though his hourly rate is certainly something I envy, he has a history of working part-time and intermittently and is more talented at spending money than at making it.
That strongly shapes my failure to live in awe of programmers and my failure to presume them to all be wealthy and powerful types. But I believe this is the first time I have said such on HN because it's challenging, at best, and potentially impossible to express that without sounding like I am putting him down. So I just never said anything about it. Most people didn't really need that information anyway, so not saying something potentially offensive to my sister, her husband and other relatives was the easy solution.
Basically, before you tell that cutesie anecdote about your own life, contemplate what it says about people connected to you and how they might feel if they heard you telling that story. Does it cast them in a bad light? Could it be construed as such, even if that wasn't your intention? Is there some means to tweak it to make it less problematic?
The other thing I worry a lot about are acquaintances that will think I meant them when I didn't. I try to not make comments that could be taken to mean I am talking about them when I'm actually not. This is often a matter of tweaking it slightly. It might be as simple as saying "a curly haired person I know" instead of "a blonde person I know" to make sure a blonde acquaintance with straight hair doesn't assume I mean them.
Group 2 is best addressed by finding a sympathetic framing and going ahead and giving some provisos. Don't assume that folks will just know that, of course, you would make allowances for X.
Your friends and relatives may know that, but other people won't. It helps to view it as simply an artifact of clear communication.
The mistake most people make is only thinking about the intended audience and stopping there. You do need to think about that. But you should also think about anyone you are "talking about" or could be construed as talking about.
Edit: To be perfectly clear, I'm not putting my brother-in-law down. His work history is due in part to supporting my sister's career, a thing she doesn't appreciate enough.
Interesting - so with 5 people, your memory slots are clearly exceeded, even without considering the possibility that edges might not be the same in each direction.
Tangential, but I noticed the same thing with visual information when testing data visualizations: people have a hard time processing information beyond 4-5 variables.
Most humans can only really understand 2D (2 variables). That is why visual representation of data are almost always 2d. Graphs, charts, scatter plots.
I think they're claiming that people have enormous amounts of trouble reasoning formally about graphs with 3 or more dimensions. Anecdotally this is bourne out by my experience, where it's easy to read an X-Y plot and speak to how the X value influences the Y value(EG linear, cubic, quartic, grows to infinity in one direction, etc). Add a third or 4th dimension and I start to have a lot of trouble making general statements because I have to juggle the impact of the third dimension on the X-Y plot slices.
Please note that I'm not saying it's impossible for people to intuitively understand 3 or more dimensions. Indeed as you say we do it every day. This is not the same as reasoning about it in a general way, which is much harder.
There’s a confound here between an extra “spatial dimension” (x, y, z) and an extra “feature dimension” (x vs y for plain and star-bellied sneeches). Very few people have trouble with the latter, but the former is tricky to plot and interpret.
Coincidentally, the idea of this natural conversational limit at Four surprises me. Sure, it is challenging, if you intend to participate (without just being a spectator). I'm used to Six as the described hard limit for this phenomenon.
The professor would then muse down a tangent about "six archetypal roles". But remembering this about human active memory and reasoning capabilities flushes things out a bit more.
The simplest example is with two people. John is a different person from Mary, so both John and Mary have a relationship with each other. 1x2 = 2 relationships.
Shouldn't that be 6x5=30? Unless you count everyone's relationship with themselves.... [this also aligns with the 5+4+3+2+1 version, it's just n*(n-1)/2 ]
You get 36 if you count the relationship in each direction (e.g. crush one way, disinterest the other way), and if you also count each person on their own (e.g. a quick temper).
On one side, humans can mentally cope with 4-6 objects at most - as though we have 4-6 memory slots, which is reasonable given that we have 4 limbs.
On another side, network effects of nodes on a grid become unmanageable above about 6 nodes - a group of 6 people will have 36 one-on-one interpersonal relationships to manage.