Dunbar's Number: Pt 1 - Hierarchy

<p>Robin Dunbar did an interview to coincide with his new book, and there are surprising depths to Dunbar's Number that isn't normally picked up by commentators.</p><p>Audio source: <a href="https://play.acast.com/s/intelligencesquared/thescienceoffriendship-withrobindunbarandhelenczerski">https://play.acast.com/s/intelligencesquared/thescienceoffriendship-withrobindunbarandhelenczerski</a></p><p><a href="https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1381628282311901187">Share this clip on Twitter!</a></p><p><strong>swyx: </strong>[00:00:00] I think people who work in community and social networks think a lot about Dunbar's Number, and i was pretty surprised to hear Robin Dunbar actually talk about it recently so here's a clip from his recent interview:</p><p><strong>Helen Czerski: </strong>[00:00:12] Let's get onto the numbers a little bit.  There are these numbers that seem to be surprisingly robust. Tell us a little bit about the hierarchical structure on what those numbers are. </p><p><strong>Robin Dunbar: </strong>[00:00:21] If you look at how often people  talk with their friends and extended family, what you find is. That you can string everybody out from the person who devote most time to the person who devote less time to, but actually it's not a sort of simple line of declining contact.</p><p>It's rather bumpy. And those bumps occur in various specific. Places which cause your social network, the sort of collection of friends and extended family, you have to look like a set of ripples on a pond. If you like, where a stone has been thrown. If you think of yourself as the stone, right in the center, you're surrounded by these ripples, which go further and further out.</p><p>And in fact the analogy is quite good because the inner most ripples are usually a bit higher than the outer, most ripples of getting towards flat as the energy dissipates. So the inner most layer, or the ones you devote most time to, in fact, you devote 40% of your total social effort to that inner core of just five people.</p><p>And then