solve cooperation, use it to solve everything else
Oct 11, 2023 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
thread on Dunbar's "anatomy of friendship" paper, expanding on the famous "Dunbar number". h/t @__drewface for the rec
150 is the number of people with whom you can have a "mutual, reciprocal relationship of trust and obligation, combined with a willingness to act prosocially". So Dunbar's number is mostly trust not memory (you can maintain about 500 acquaintances and remember about 1500 faces).
Jun 28, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
my beef with mental health culture is that it adopts the medical frame, so saying you have a mental health issue is equivalent to saying "I have a problem and I'm outsourcing the solution to the professional class of therapists and psychiatrists". (1/N)
I guess I just don't accept the legitimacy of that professional class in helping solve people's life problems! Unlike surgeons and antibiotic-prescribers (doctors) they just don't seem to have great quality control, so you have to rely on your judgment when choosing one. (2/N)
Jan 7, 2023 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
The famous "36 questions that lead to love"... don't. The NYT and everyone else reported a different set of questions from the same authors, modified to be less romantic! The original set of *40* questions wasn't online, but I emailed the authors and got a copy. Details in 🧵
I was trying to reproduce the original study as closely as possible (you know, like a normal person) and stumbled on this paragraph in the famous 1997 paper that everyone cites (journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…)