I’m going to be giving a talk about Dunbar’s Number to an educated but fairly diverse bunch - similar to the SDMB audience - and I wanted to get a sense of how much people know about this topic.
Dunbar’s is the bar down the street, and the number is how you reach Jenny for a good time.
Pretty sure it is 8675309.
Yes, I skimmed a book on it recently.
I voted no even though I’m reasonably sure it’s a sequence of numerals, possibly accompanied by a decimal point and other mathematical signage.
I had never heard of the term before seeing this thread.
Never heard of it, I’m afraid. But Google shows it might be an interesting topic.
Regards,
Shodan
I saw the term in this thread and thought it vaguely familiar. I just looked it up online and realized that a college professor of mine had discussed this topic a couple times in class when speculating on the nature of early human social groups in Africa, though I’m sure he didn’t use the term “Dunbar’s Number.”
Are you giving a lecture on anthropology or something?
Anyway, good luck/break a leg.
While I answered no, I do know about the monkey sphere.
I thought it was a Catch-22 reference.
My first thought was A Fortiori. Which, um, isn’t a number.
ETA: The Wikipedia page suggests it’s a pretty interesting concept. Has it gone up since social networking was invented?
Same here. I wonder how the breakdown of people who know just the number; just the monkeysphere (i.e., don’t remember the name from the essay); and know both.
:: googles ::
Interesting. I’d heard of the idea before, but never the name.
Same here.
I’ve actually read a couple of books by Dunbar, but didn’t know that that was now considered “Dunbar’s number.”
What he said.
I’ve never heard the term.
After looking it up I remembered that I had heard of it before, but I voted no because if you’d just asked me out of the blue, I’d have no clue what you were talking about.
Sorry, no idea. I wikipedia’ed it after I took the poll.
Like several others…I know the concept, did not know the term.
I worked at a school where the number of people (adults plus kids) went from around 165 up to the mid-200s. The school had been one reasonably cohesive unit–suddenly, it was most definitely split into 2 parts.
And in my church denomination, it has been conventional wisdom for years that if a small church (less than 100) grows past 150, the atmosphere becomes very different, in large part because you really can’t know everyone, and smaller interest groups begin to form. (Not that many of our churches are actually growing, you understand, but…nice to know.)