WTF is social? Anti-Social is not anti social

 

This blog is part of a series.  WTF is social?  Using Human Completeness as the core ability of the human brain, we examine various facets of social life and how communication technology and size of social circle,  impact our ability to be socially effective.

Man made systems to manage scale of humanity are at odds with the social brain. Keeping these two problems under control: scale of human society and the inability of the human mind to comprehend it, is at the core of most conflicts.  Thanks to state, police, constitution, money, etc that some of us can choose to be anti-social and  survive.  We simply haven't evolved to understand pain in numbers and be humans at this scale. Few thousand years ago, unsocials would have been killed for not being social enough. May be the progress depends on these anti-social ones(at the cost of missing to participate in social), but the survival of the species, the regular maintenance and bridging of differences between each other to make common sense so that we don’t end up killing each other, is the key activity of the most of the humanity and extremely important.  

We just can't be human enough to each other at this scale. The advantages of scale are at some point dwarfed by the lack of humanity we experience as we grow the size of our community. We need to learn to find balance between the two and really soon. The story of progress might lead us into places where we have progress, but we are no longer "we". 

Human Completeness is an ideal. It is of course incomplete and imperfect. We can never truly know any one else - the state space is simply too large: 100 billion neurone and trillion synapses. Human mind is truly mind boggling. We have this magical ability but it is limited in supply. Its effectiveness depends on the number of people we keep in our social circle. It has worked for millions of years and got us where we have reached. It works only when we have "common knowledge", common in the sense of "shared" and not frequent.  As our areas of specialisation diverge and we live in larger and larger societies,  we are left with gaps in our common knowledge. These gaps creates fault lines in the completeness of evolutionary social brain, making it dysfunctional at best, unable to compute and understand: what is going on? 

Social networking has a cost which is easier to see in the light of limitations of social brain. Freedom to make more relationships comes at the cost of lack of depth and decreasing freedom to express yourself honestly. The larger the network, the higher the stakes. At some point it becomes futile to bridge the gaps and advantageous to  burn the bridges with minority opinion. It is no longer Pareto efficient. We just need to find the side with better returns at Nash equilibrium.  

We are progressing, we are scaling our social circles, but we are becoming incomplete at being human as well. 

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WTF is social? Curse of Specialization

This blog is part of a series.  WTF is social?  Using Human Completeness as the core ability of the human brain, we examine various facets of social life and how communication technology and size of social circle,  impact our ability to be socially effective.

We are not equipped with natural apparatus to make sense of markets or states or taxation or economics or law or even media. The social animal functions not by knowing but by knowing who knows and can he be trusted. The more knowledge we create, more idiots we become relatively to each other, lesser becomes our common knowledge. May be there is some truth in the Bible story: eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge may be leading us on to a dangerous path. 

Just like we have limits to number of people we can know, may be there is a limit to all the knowledge we can save in our heads. Learning and discovery of new knowledge are time consuming. All knowledge which is not social is learned at the cost of social. If everyone is busy seeking knowledge and no-one is maintaining the social relationships, the "knowledge" we gained is useless, because we forgot to maintain "we". Society needs to keep itself together before anything else. It is not surprising that simplifying something and making it accessible to the world at large is so much in demand all the time. It connects the "knowledge" with the rest of us, giving us a great multipliers like: wheel or fire or numbers or vaccines etc.  

Sorry to all the economists but Adam Smith was misguided. Specialisation is what bring efficiency to the society but the pure pursuit of efficiency makes it less of a society and hence vulnerable. The irony is that systems are the main cause of systematic risk and all economists and social architects do is build systems. 

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WTF is social? Being human at scale

This blog is part of a series.  WTF is social?  Using Human Completeness as the core ability of the human brain, we examine various facets of social life and how communication technology and size of social circle,  impact our ability to be socially effective.   

The idea of good of humanity at scale is a scam, an impossible computation for the social brain. We just can't know more than 150 people deeply enough. At scale we use two technologies. One is classification (peasants, elite, etc) and the second one is converting to numbers - voting, money, net worth, age, interest rate etc. If you know someone who meets more than 150 people, chances are he has a system to either classify you or measure you numerically. It is impossible to care humanly at scale. Companies use LTV (Lifetime value of a customer). Countries need to find sources of revenue. Sales people need quotas and PhD needs publications and citations. Nothing human scales without measurement and numbers, becoming less human in the process.  And that is counterintuitive to the social brain designed to understand pain in persons and not pain in numbers. Classifications and numbers are great tools to approximate humanity at scale, because considering everyone is practically impossible. The ruthless market competition is the only system that has worked well to consider the good of as many as possible at as cheap a price as possible. And yet it always "feels" wrong.  

It is so hard to decide for place and time for a lunch between four people, imagine how hard it is to decide the "good" for million or billion people. It can't be imagined because that is limited by our brains. I have no idea what is the "will of a nation" and what is the "spirit of our company" when it is not a startup. The problem that media and politicians face just because of the sheer size and scale of people they serve is the following: we can do good for people, but will people be able to understand it? And the answer is obviously no. You can only sell charisma of a person, a brand, even though everything behind it is completely calculated. Social brain is not meant for logic and rational, it is designed for understanding character and intentions. 

Next: Curse of Specialization 

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WTF is social? Stress

This blog is part of a series.  WTF is social?  Using Human Completeness as the core ability of the human brain, we examine various facets of social life and how communication technology and size of social circle,  impact our ability to be socially effective. 

Intents, Motives And Stress 

 We see human faces on rocks, in clouds and even on surface of moon. And we see human error in our offices and when driving. We see intent and bad motives where there are none. This is the social brain at work.  Mostly harmless, easy and intuitive, but also inaccurate and exploitable. We need books on thinking in objects, thinking in java, thinking like a state, thinking as a company, thinking as a bureaucracy, thinking as a system, etc but we don't need a book on thinking as another person. That is hard-coded and inbuilt into the brain. 

The most important consequence of the social brain and its limitations is that we now live in societies larger than 150 in size and we don't even have time to attend to these 150 people with which we can be truly human. Celebrities have taken over some of the slots (150) available. Politicians take some. News anchors have stolen a few. Religion and Gods also need some slots. And of course one for the boss and his boss. And it is not only that the slots are taken but also the power equation in each relationship matters. Modern life is stressful. Too many relationships and most of them with odds against you. Do you feel boxed? Find it hard to navigate the web of obligations around you? Sorry I have no advice or solution. This is it.  

One of the key problem seems to be broadcasting. Communication with face-time gives us the ability to ask questions, rephrase what we say and avoid misunderstandings. Sermons, Books, Newspaper, Radio, TV and now Twitter, Facebook etc don't have the same texture. They are all focused on reach, on monologue. Monologues doesn't makes societies. It is dialogues Sir.  

Freedom of speech is a silly kind of right at best. It is probably like say right to bring a knife to a fight. Broadcast would be equivalent of bringing a machine gun or atomic bomb. In the fight of ideas, best arguments only win when they have the same reach and broadcasting power. Knifes have no chance against machine guns even when they are super sharp. The only chance they have is if they can reach someone's heart.  

Next: Stereotypes

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WTF is social? Religion

This blog is part of a series.  WTF is social?  Using Human Completeness as the core ability of the human brain, we examine various facets of social life and how communication technology and size of social circle,  impact our ability to be socially effective.

Religion, Gods and Humanity 

People have been fighting for as long as they have been people. In fact fighting with others is main use case for being people/group in the first place, instead of a lone wolf. Religion then seems to be a saviour. Seems to come from some frustrated soul asking "why can’t people be nice to each other?” But when we make people try to be nice to everyone, trust and help each other, what we get is a dumb society. And a dumb society is a great resource for someone smart. It is Kalyug all the time and it is rightly so because it can't be anything else. The social animal is not a nice animal. The social animal is not even just self interested. Social animal is self interested considering the self interest of others but only upto a point. After that point, the animal is gone and we are left with something abstract, classifiable, easily comparable, computable, less human, ununderstandable.   

  

God didn’t make us in his image. We made God in our own image. All kinds of Gods get angry, help, are just, listen to our prayers, get jealous, feel insulted, seek revenge, want to teach a lesson, etc. It couldn’t have been any other way simply because it would be hard to even communicate it and make it understandable to most humans. The easiest thing to tell a human is something about another human or something humanlike.  This to some extent also explains why it is easy to teach new religion than to say teach democracy or rule of law or even physics or calculus or economics because they just don’t make much sense to the social mind or the savage mind or the uncivil mind. And they shouldn’t! Most of our evolution has been spent negotiating the power relations among each other, figuring out what can and cannot be said, what can and cannot be done, and where. Anything that isn't rooted in the fundamental premise of social living, should appear useless or at least not too important to human brain. 

Next: Being Human at scale

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WTF is social? Stereotypes

This blog is part of a series.  WTF is social?  Using Human Completeness as the core ability of the human brain, we examine various facets of social life and how communication technology and size of social circle,  impact our ability to be socially effective.

Stereotypes 

Why do ads and jokes use stereotypes? First of all stereotypes are a modern phenomenon. It is a term first used to describe something completely technical in printing process. One of the key features of stereotypes is that they are widely understood. We don't label our friends and family members with stereotypes and if we do, it must be a really hard relationship. Some people can afford to do that, if they enjoy lots of power in the relationship or if they have no reason to maintain that relationship.  

What stereotypes do is that they activate and stimulate our social brain. Given the time (30 seconds ad), that is all marketing people can do to get our attention. Why do we believe in stereotypes? That is all we can do within our social brain limits. It is hard and even impossible to think and consider every thing about everyone. We just have to deal with too many people in the modern world. Some of them are real people we actually meet, but some of them are pure fiction created by the broadcasting  communication. Cartoons and caricatures work because our brain supply the rest of the details. Stereotypes work the same way. We bring them to life with our experience. They will break as soon as we have to debate them with our friends, but on a one way broadcast they are never questioned and skip the test of normal socially created reality.   

Let's add stereotypes to the list of some of the slots that are already taken in the brain. It is no wonder we miss the human connection in our interactions. There are not many slots left nor much time left to fill them to any decent depth. Stereotypes are just simplifications created by us to cope up with the scale of the societies we are now forced to live in. It is practically impossible to be human at scale. 

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WTF is social? Media and Politics

This blog is part of a series.  WTF is social?  Using Human Completeness as the core ability of the human brain, we examine various facets of social life and how communication technology and size of social circle,  impact our ability to be socially effective.

Media & Politics 

Let's get into the media business a bit. Why do people care about a child stuck in a well more than statistics on number of people who died in second world war? There is no pain in statistics. Being able to be pained by statistics is a special faculty of the brain and perhaps only as old as numbers (few thousand years max).  It needs to be inculcated and developed. It needs imagination that is not universal. It is inhuman for normal social brain humans. I almost wept when I reduced context switches from  150K to 200 when building a multi-threaded non-blocking http proxy. The social brain can only detect pain in other people, not numbers. We have been feeling pain of other humans for millions of years. 

The key to social brain is personification - the act of making a thing or a system appear like a person. And as a corollary, the key to suppress humanity in a person is de-personification - the act of labelling or suggesting a person is not worthy of being called a person - perhaps an insect, or a virus or a poison or a thing. Enimification is similar to de-personification except the person remains a person but evil and localised enough so that at least in imagination can be defeated in one move. It is stupid to term anything undefeatable as enemy like global warming. All you get is smirks.

 The only thing we can assume that every human can understand is the pain and happiness of other humans. This makes selling things as person and persons as things, the main business of mass media and politics. Media keeps changing but the politics is the same - tricking the social brain into making people into things and things into people. Being together is not enough. That is just the first step. Surviving each other is the real test of survival, just like marriage. 

Next: Stress

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WTF is social? Stories

This blog is part of a series.  WTF is social?  Using Human Completeness as the core ability of the human brain, we examine various facets of social life and how communication technology and size of social circle,  impact our ability to be socially effective.

Stories 

Why do we like stories? One way to think about them is to treat them as just puzzles and exercises for the social brain. Who is going to do what and why? Who is lying and who is speaking the truth? What will happen next? Stories are equivalent to sports for social brain. Stories are not interesting because of what is in the story but how the story is told and what is likely to happen next and what are the choices left for each character as the story progresses. The most boring stories are those that preach, they have nothing for the social brain. Stories are like chess: opening, middle-game and endgame, each one is important and builds on what has already happened. They train us for social life. The popularity of Reality TV tells us the same thing. It is not the story that matters. It is people, how they behave vs how we think they will behave. We just love to understand and simulate other people's brain inside ours, for good reasons.

This is a bit of a hopeless situation because it tells us simply that politics is the only game in town. Being social and being political are same. We will never be able to eliminate politics from human affairs, not until we make humans something non-humans. The only thing that makes humans human is politics or what I have been referring to as “human completeness” or "social brain" as termed in Dunbar's papers/books. 

Next: Brands

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