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Thanks for your reply.

By the way, I like Robert A. Heinlein too !

That's just one of many very perceptive observations the man made.. now all I need is a spaceship..

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Diziet Sma wrote:

That's just one of many very perceptive observations the man made.. now all I need is a spaceship..

Although, come to think of it, I don't agree with the observation (and its essentially libertarian standpoint).

This may be caused by living on a continent which has always been underpopulated. In sub-saharan Africa people have, faced by the choice between organizing themselves in more sophisticated societies (that would be the ID-thing) or just moving elsewhere out of each other's way, for ages tended to go elsewhere, thereby preventing not the collaps, but the very build-up of societies and--more important--infrastructure in the first place. The result: under-development.

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Commander McLane wrote:

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or just moving elsewhere out of each other's way, for ages tended to go elsewhere, thereby preventing not the collaps, but the very build-up of societies and--more important--infrastructure in the first place. The result: under-development.

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build-up of societies and infrastructure.. now there's the way to get collapse.. read 'Ishmael' and 'The Story of B' by Daniel Quinn
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We now return you to your regularly programmed Space-Game...

Sorry for the interlude, folks..

Heinlein talks about this much more in "Friday" (in which he also talks about Wikipedia and Wolfram Alpha quite a lot, come to think of it, when she's looking up sunspots and beard lengths!)

Anthropologists (esp. Robin Dunbar) suggest that the most efficient size of society is around 150 people. Malcom Gladwell talks about it in one of his books, and uses Gore - as in Gore-Tex - as one of the examples. They made sure that their business units stayed under 150 people because over that point the "society" stops working and that's when you get the left-hand deviating from the right-hand, and "inter-service rivalry", groupthink, and all those other things that make big companies a nightmare.

I personally think this is what kept early society splintered into tribes. My theory is that the travel and communications technology creates the -illusion- of bigger groups, but fundamentally even now the brain still chunks it into "communities" of 150 people, whether than community be online or IRL.

I've noticed this running multiple projects... I can keep up with 2 teams of 60 people or 4 teams of 30 people but any more than that and it needs to be a programme rather than a project.

I would go and look at the chapter but they're such good books I'm forever lending them to people!

Obligatory Wikipedia link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

Anyway - is it "under-development" or "necessary and sufficient" development? There's no magic reason our knowledge of, say Objective C is any "better" than a plainsman's knowledge of 20 different herbs that are good for a snake bite.

Just for the record, the theory of underpopulation as one of the main driving factors in sub-sahara African history is not my invention. It's the main hypothesis in John Iliffe's History of Africa. I just find it very convincing.

zevans wrote:

Anthropologists (esp. Robin Dunbar) suggest that the most efficient size of society is around 150 people. Malcom Gladwell talks about it in one of his books, and uses Gore - as in Gore-Tex - as one of the examples. They made sure that their business units stayed under 150 people because over that point the "society" stops working and that's when you get the left-hand deviating from the right-hand, and "inter-service rivalry", groupthink, and all those other things that make big companies a nightmare...

Not having read Dunbar myself, and therefore not knowing which differentiations he makes, I would say that this is true for a good size of a "community". However, "community" is different from "society". A society is made up of any number of communities, and any member of the society may belong to one or more communities. Community needs a close relation between all its members. Society, however, needs not. There is simply no way I could know all 82 million Germans personally. Still they form a society.

Please note that the society provides services to its members which a single community simply couldn't afford. For instance, where did you get your education? There's no way a community of 150 members could run a high school, let alone a university. And obviously 150 people could never ever start a city. Fine, you say, they would live in a village, that's simply a question of size and naming. Well, no, it isn't. The difference between village and city is not one of quantity, but cities offer another quality of life. One very simple example: Have you ever checked out the nightlife (bars, discos, cinemas, theaters, etc.) in a typical 150-inhabitants village? Good luck with it! Or, another example, perhaps you don't want to eat only those things which grow in your own garden. You may want to buy a cheese or a beer from another part of your country, or a soft drink, or fruits and fish from the other end of the world. How would you get hold of these? Not only that your 150-person village doesn't even have a supermarket. Even if it had, how would the goods you desire even get there in the first place? At least you need a road to the next village, and from there to town, and from there a railroad to a center, and from there even an airport to reach the rest of the world--in one word, you need infrastructure. Who is supposed to build this infrastructure (not only roads, but powerplants with electricity lines; and fresh water supply; TV, phone, internet, etc. etc.)? The 150 people in your community? Very unlikely.

So we need to organize ourselves on a bigger scale. And that's why we have (and need) societies far bigger than the 150 treshold. If you don't want a society which unfortunately requires you to carry an ID, well, then what you're ultimately saying is that you don't want to travel outside your home village, don't want to buy or consume anything that wasn't produced entirely in your home village, using only materials available right there, don't want electricity apart from your own windmill, don't want fast and reliable communication outside your home village, don't want medical services above the level of 20 herbs which you have to know basically yourself (and hopefully you live in a region, preferably next to the equator, where these herbs are actually growing throughout the year), don't want theater, cinema, or computer games, don't want a pension payment after retirement apart from the alms of the people in your home village, etc., etc., etc. Because all of these are provided to you courtesy of the society, above the level of your 150-people community.

The point of all this is: In much of sub-sahara Africa people have been indeed confined to their small communities for the entire known history. Which is why they are lacking all of the above mentioned services courtesy of the society until this very day. Most parts of Africa feature basically rural communities with self-subsistency (peasant) agriculture, no access to goods produced more than let's say 50 kilometers away, no (or very limited) access to medical facilities, no access to travel or transport, meaning no access to cash, because even if you would grow vegetables for selling you wouldn't get them to a market outside your home village, no access to information, education, and the whole "global village", because they are simply stuck in their local village.

And because most Africans didn't make a conscious choice to live as peasants in poverty, but are forced to by the lack of infrastructure, which itself is caused by the lack of a strong society, I think the situation can be properly named underdevelopment.

zevans wrote:

Anyway - is it "under-development" or "necessary and sufficient" development? There's no magic reason our knowledge of, say Objective C is any "better" than a plainsman's knowledge of 20 different herbs that are good for a snake bite.

Of course not. We are not talking about "better" or "worse", and we are certainly not qualifying the people living in different circumstances as "better" or "worse".

It is "under"-development, because the guy who knows Objective C has (and has had since he was born) loads and loads of choices and opportunities, not least for his own advancement (education, healthcare, social security, money, entertainment, career, political participation, chosing how many children he'd like to have; to name only a few), which the plainsman never ever will have, regardless of his knowledge of herbs or whatever.

I know there is a certain romanticistic view of simple societies (like plainsmen). And I have to admit that I don't know any plainsmen and can only speculate about their point of view. (I am not living in a region of plains and pastoralists.) But I can assure you that most African villagers I know would prefer not to have to die from tetanus because of a simple wound caused by a rusty nail. They would prefer to be able to send their children to a school, and probably even equip them with a pair of shoes for school (children without shoes are legally suspended from school). They would prefer to get hold of a little money for buying sugar, salt, tea, kerosine (for their lamp), and clothes by growing vegetables for sale in a town or city, where people actually have money to buy and pay for vegetables (the only potential customers on the market in your home village are your neighbours, who have as little money as yourself). They would prefer not to have to fetch water in 20 liter canisters from a source eight kilometers from home. They would prefer to get some sort of pension after retiring, instead of the need to create income by hard work basically until the day of death. They would also prefer a lower child mortality and an average life expentancy of more than 47 years.

And all of these would be possible, if, at any point in the past or present, a society would have provided the necessary infrastructure. It hasn't, because people have moved out of each other's ways instead of building societies since way back. And to this day they are essentially living in small-scale communities without much regard to or influence of society as a whole. I mean, seriously: I am regularly meeting 30- or 40-year olds who have never left the boundaries of their home village, who are astonished when they see that ten kilometers away from their homes still the same plants are growing as in their own gardens, and even the people don't look so different, who have never seen a house with a second floor, never seen and much less used stairs, who are unaware of the existence of water pipes, who have never visited a place where there were more than a couple of hundred people; and Heinlein is talking about space travel?!? (Not to mention that--as should be clear by now--only a complex and very developed society would be able to provide the very means for space travel in the first place.)

And to finally make the point with Heinlein's example: there are indeed no ID cards in Tanzania, no need to register yourself at the place where you are living, no need to register a new-born child. A paradise for libertarians, you should think. Yes, as long as you don't try to get a landline connection, for instance (provided in the first place, of course, that you live in one of the few towns where landlines and desk phones actually exist). Because then the phone company issues a load of forms to you, on which all your neighbours have to sign affidavits that you are really who you claim to be, and you are actually living where you claim to live, and, according to their assessment of your financial circumstances, there is a certain likeliness that you actually will be able to pay your bill. Which is a lousy, complicated, time-consuming, and costly surrogate for simply owning an ID card which shows your address.

Of course – and this is just by the way – sometimes an author makes a character say something that is the opinion of the character, and not necessarily that of the author ... what a fictional character – e.g. a massively long-lived, highly individualistic person, living in an age of space travel and limitless frontiers – says in a fictional universe might not be what the author would vote for here in mundane reality.

Disembodied wrote:

Of course – and this is just by the way – sometimes an author makes a character say something that is the opinion of the character, and not necessarily that of the author ... what a fictional character – e.g. a massively long-lived, highly individualistic person, living in an age of space travel and limitless frontiers – says in a fictional universe might not be what the author would vote for here in mundane reality.

Amen.

Well, of course.

I guess what I wanted to say boils down to: Wouldn't it have been for a society sophisticated enough to require an ID, the character never would have got the option for space travel in the first place, because space ships tend not to be developed and built by highly individualistic persons, but by complex societies, having massive resources at their hands.

Yeah, that's more or less it.

*****

Anyway, don't we all love this forum for its endless transgressions of threads, topics, and posts?

<YOUR THREAD A SPLODE.>

Its all too easy to get into word games here. Most efficient is does not appear to be well defined, and is not equal to providing higherst standard of enjoyment, health, lifespan, or any of a number of things which people may hold important. I would expect efficiency of society to be measured in something like GDP per capita, which is certainly not optimal (at least as far as we can see from real life) for small societies. Nor is it true that the most efficient size for a community should be a target for communities which are already established. It could be that making the change is worse than maintaining the status quo.

Also the definition of society is open to some question. I think its fairly safe to assume that the "ideal" 150 person society groups would need to have some interaction with each other (trade etc.). There are many reasons for this, but efficiency is actually one of the best. Division of labor and all that.