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.
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