Scaling in Human Societies

A growing societal scale–rising population and increasing technological prowess–raises the question of what severe risks that scale may pose. [Read More]

Dunbar’s number, first proposed by the anthropologist Robin Dunbar (1992), proposes to explain the size of human social groups in terms of brain size. A common rule of thumb is that stable human social groups, based on mutual interpersonal knowledge, have a maximum size of around 150 people. Dunbar’s number... [Read More]

This article is Version 2. Version 1 can be found here. [Read More]

Zipf’s law, developed by the linguist George Kingsley Zipf in 1932 (Zipf (1932) and also presented in Zipf (1949)), is an observation of word frequency, and how the most common words in a language appear more often than others. It has been applied to many other contexts, especially to the... [Read More]

This article is Version 2. Version 1 can be found here. [Read More]