

What is the Monkeysphere? (and the surprising implications for social nets) - nickb
http://www.cracked.com/index.php?name=News&sid=2417

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davidw
See also Dunbar's Number:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number>

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leoc
Dunbar's number really can't be the whole explanation of man's inhumanity to
man. Among primitive societies where people live as small bands in which
everyone knows everyone, the murder rate is high. (According to /Guns, Germs
and Steel/.) There's certainly lots of intracommunal violence and nastiness
among most other ape bands too. And don't people in our society tend to be
murdered by people they knew?

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asdflkj
I don't think anyone is claiming that it's "the whole explanation". It's only
an explanation for why people don't care about other people, which sometimes
has violence and suffering as a side effect. In other cases, violence and
suffering is purposeful, and this happens for other reasons.

~~~
leoc
> What do monkeys have to do with war, oppression, crime, racism and even
> e-mail spam? You'll see that all of the random ass-headed cruelty of the
> world will suddenly make perfect sense once we go Inside the Monkeysphere.

There's plenty of cruelty between acquaintances in the world, and a great deal
of it is random and ass-headed. Lots of that cruelty falls under the headings
of oppression, crime, and racism too. (War and spam are between strangers
almost by definition.)

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chaostheory
a good perspective on one of the aspects of game theory (or at least what I
think is game theory):

Sub-systems will tend to maximize their gains even at the expense of the
system as a whole...

Co-opetition is a good book on this subject

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mynameishere
It's easily bridged, and I believe there's a degree of institutional pressure
to not allow it.

 _In all of the following years of the war, artillery bombardments were
ordered on Christmas Eve to ensure that there were no further lulls in the
combat._

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce>

