“There’s an interesting pattern that may explain it. If you measure the size of the cerebral cortex—the brain’s “machine of understanding”—in different primate species relative to the rest of their brain and plot it against the number of group members typical for each of those species, the two numbers fall on a straight line: the more members, the... See more

“Dunbar’s number” is a theoretical cognitive limit on the number of stable social relationships humans can maintain at one time. According to Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist, humans have the cognitive capacity to keep track of somewhere around 150 close personal connections. Beyond this limited circle, we start treating people less like

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Around a dozen members is the sweet spot of social motivation: small enough to know everyone, yet large enough that the group won’t collapse if one or two members’ enthusiasm wanes; small enough that you are not daunted by competing with the whole world, yet large enough that you still need to be on your toes to keep up.

Collectives don't scale. In most successful collectives, you have an anchor group composed of less than a dozen people who are super engaged. When you compare collectives to other social structures like communities, vertical social networks and social networks, you understand that collectives are trading numbers for engagement. If a collective... See more

There are limits to how much the human brain can process. Dunbar’s number is the notorious limit for how many social relationships the human brain can manage, but “DAObar’s number” is the DAO version of that: how many DAOs can a person be meaningfully involved in? Each subsequent DAO involvement is an increase in the processing power needed to... See more