Daily Tao – The Ten Types of Human – 1
We just cannot meaningfully extend the process beyond a certain point. Because for all our thousands of Facebook friends or Twitter followers, the effective limit of our social circle is 150 – what has come to be known as Dunbar’s Number (he is unaware of the precise origins of the term, but is quite content to adopt it). What can we deduce from all this? Thinking of others comes at a price. It has a cognitive cost. And that affects how we view and treat other people. Once we start worrying, caring, or just plain thinking of other people outside our family and familiar circles, we begin to load up our system. As Dunbar’s team conclude, this cognitive load ‘acts as a brake on our social ambitions’. It’s good to know this. It does not have to be viewed as a mordantly negative thing. It just is. It’s not that we don’t care. It’s just that in an important but critical sense we just cannot keep caring indefinitely. As Samantha Power poignantly puts it in her account of the historic failure to engage with genocide, we just can’t ‘wrap our minds around it’. We should stop beating ourselves up about this. Because there is a risk: our inability to care for the many, to act on a massive scale, can preclude us from engaging on a more modest but essentially achievable level – a human level. When we reach out to other human beings, we expose ourselves to pain.
A passage that I found interesting. In general, cognitive load affects our ability to control ourselves, to make decisions that benefit the long term over short-term gains, to be disciplined. This seems to be the general behavior that I have read in these books. Dias speaks about it from a social perspective though, where at some point if we give up on caring about the “many” whom are suffering die to the cognitive load, it might also affect our day-to-day dealings with those close to us.
It also reflects on why humans in general respond much more strongly to narratives than statistics about suffering. Studies have shown that humans are more more likely to donate with an emotional appeal than a logical approach. The suffering of 1 person is real and many of us are able to empathize. However, scale that problem ten-fold, hundred-fold and the scope of the problem seems too huge, such that many of us can’t process it and give up.
It also reminds me about how we should always focus on getting our own shit together, before we can worry about others. As this points out, worrying about others increases the cognitive load and probably affects your own ability to take care of yourself. Get oneself right, before worrying about and helping others.
