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Why are conversations limited to about four people?

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Re: Why are conversations limited to about four people?

#31

Post by 40acres »

bmm6o wrote: post #30
api_or_ipa wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On another side, network effects of nodes on a grid become unmanageable above about 6 nodes - a group of 6 people will have 36 one-on-one interpersonal relationships to manage. Network effects grow surprisingly fast. Between 2 people there's only 1 bidirectional edge. Between 3 it's 3 and between 4 it's 6. | people | edges | |--------|-------| | 2 | 1 | | 3 | 3 | | 4 | 6 | | 5 | 10 | Intuitively, this is important…

> this is important because in a conversation, each member must project and rationalise each other communicator's response to a message Do they, though? Maybe I participate in conversations differently, but trying to unravel how A interpreted B's comment is not something I would do.

I think you (and everyone else) does this implicitly. It makes sense for a survival perspective to be able to assess how people react to certain comments & actions in conversation. If other people support a comment it's a signal that you can reiterate the comment or build upon it.

Re: Why are conversations limited to about four people?

#32

Post by jschwartzi »

jodrellblank wrote: post #26
wtvanhest wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most humans can only really understand 2D (2 variables). That is why visual representation of data are almost always 2d. Graphs, charts, scatter plots.

What are you claiming? That in a picture with line graphs varying X, Y, people can't understand if the lines are different colours or the same colours (a third dimension)? That people can't play 3D games because they can't understand that the image is depicting length, width and depth? That people can't use windowing GUIs with overlapping windows, because they can't understand the Z-order of which window is "in front…

I think they're claiming that people have enormous amounts of trouble reasoning formally about graphs with 3 or more dimensions. Anecdotally this is bourne out by my experience, where it's easy to read an X-Y plot and speak to how the X value influences the Y value(EG linear, cubic, quartic, grows to infinity in one direction, etc). Add a third or 4th dimension and I start to have a lot of trouble making general statements because I have to juggle the impact of the third dimension on the X-Y plot slices.

Please note that I'm not saying it's impossible for people to intuitively understand 3 or more dimensions. Indeed as you say we do it every day. This is not the same as reasoning about it in a general way, which is much harder.

Re: Why are conversations limited to about four people?

#34

Post by jschwartzi »

tylerjwilk00 wrote: post #27

The problem I see with larger group discussion is that the idea permutates far enough from the original idea after 4 turns that a participant's response to the topic may no longer be valid in the new discussion context. It can be very frustrating to have to unwind the progress to an early point for the input to be valid.

This is usually my experience, where if I'm with more than 3 people I stop talking because the idea I have is no longer relevant by the time there's an opening for me to say something.

Re: Why are conversations limited to about four people?

#36

Post by DoreenMichele »

We have the terms monologue and dialogue, but I'm not aware of words for 3 speakers or more specified by number. (They may exist, but presumably aren't in common usage.)

So I'm a little surprised to learn that four-way conversations are a thing, actually. Or an important thing, I guess. Not that they exist per se, but that they are an important demarcation.

Re: Why are conversations limited to about four people?

#39

Post by bmm6o »

40acres wrote: post #31
bmm6o wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this is important because in a conversation, each member must project and rationalise each other communicator's response to a message Do they, though? Maybe I participate in conversations differently, but trying to unravel how A interpreted B's comment is not something I would do.

I think you (and everyone else) does this implicitly. It makes sense for a survival perspective to be able to assess how people react to certain comments & actions in conversation. If other people support a comment it's a signal that you can reiterate the comment or build upon it.

There's a difference between observing how a comment was generally received and remembering exactly how each person reacted. I'm not saying nobody does the latter, but I don't.

Re: Why are conversations limited to about four people?

#40

Post by kragormonkey »

munificent wrote: post #28

I got halfway through, which I think gets you to the answer to the money question of what's special about four. Here's my attempt to summarize: There are bunch of possible reasons conversation size might be limited or optimal at certain numbers. They choose to focus on mentalizing -- your ability to maintain a mental model of another person. (I don't know if they have a strong claim for why they chose this.) One inte…

Paper seems paywalled. How are you reading this? Any mirror?
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