

Dunbar's Number isn't just a number, it's the law - bdfh42
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/10/the-penalty-for-violating-dunbars-law.html

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Tichy
Maybe, but then again, perhaps with better tools it is possible to have more
friends after all. Some people make good money by being able to connect to
more people than the average person, and then facilitate contacts between less
gifted connectors.

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a-priori
One difference between non-human primates and humans is that humans have a
wide variation in the closeness of relationships, from celebrities you have
never met but hear about occasionally on the news, to a soul-mate you know
everything about. Presumably, the more intimate the relationship, the more
cortical real-estate is taken up with information about that person.

Non-human primates have their troop; certainly there's variation in
relationships within that troop, but it's still just one troop of finite size.

So, what this means in the context of humans is that Dunbar's number is very
much dependent on the closeness of the relationships you're dealing with. Co-
workers are different from close friends are different from comrades-in-arms.

Someone who's up on pop culture (i.e, not me) may be able to tell you
something about a couple hundred actors, athletes, politicians and so on, in
addition to their personal acquaintances. Are those people included in their
"Dunbar group"? If not, then where do you draw the line?

It really is a problem of defining what, exactly, Dunbar's number means for
humans.

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daeken
The discussion of Dunbar's Number (as well as WL Gore, for that matter) in The
Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell is very interesting. I highly recommend the
book for everyone here.

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gaius
This is misguided, as Facebook "friends" aren't your friends so much as they
are your address book/contact list. FB doesn't differentiate between someone
you know through work, someone you went to school with and someone you see
socially. If I added up everyone who I ever might want to contact about
anything ever, I'd probably have more than a thousand contacts. I don't hang
out with any more than a few dozen people regularly tho'.

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StrawberryFrog
"The law" eh? Wikipedia calls it just a theory.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number>

I doubt that it's even a theory which has solid weight of evidence showing
that it applies to human beings.

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JoeAltmaier
First we must define "friend". Its not "someone who's name I remember".

