Nod. The claim here is specifically about how much nuance can be relevant to your coordination, not how many people you can coordinate with. (If this failed to come across, that also says something about communicating nuance being hard)
I think I was taking “coordination” in the narrow sense of incenting people to do actions toward a relatively straightforward goal that they may or may not share. In that view, nuance is the enemy of coordination, and most of the work is simplifying the instructions so that it’s OK that there’s not much information transmitted. If the goal is communication, rather than near-term action, you can’t avoid the necessity of detail.
The whole point is that coordination looks different at different scales.
So, I think I was looking at this through a nonstandard frame (Maybe more nonstandard than I thought). There are two different sets of numbers in this post:
— 4.3 million words worth of nuance
— 200,000 words of nuance
— 50,000 words
— 1 blogpost (1-2k words)
— 4 words
And separately:
— 1-4 people
— 10 people
— 100 people
— 1000 people
— 10,000 people+
While I’m not very confident about any of the numbers, I am more confident in the first set of numbers than the second set.
If I look out into the world, I see clear failures (and successes) of communication strategies that cluster around different strata of communication bandwidth. And in particular, there is clearly some point at which the bandwidth collapses to 3-6 words.
Nod. The claim here is specifically about how much nuance can be relevant to your coordination, not how many people you can coordinate with. (If this failed to come across, that also says something about communicating nuance being hard)
I think I was taking “coordination” in the narrow sense of incenting people to do actions toward a relatively straightforward goal that they may or may not share. In that view, nuance is the enemy of coordination, and most of the work is simplifying the instructions so that it’s OK that there’s not much information transmitted. If the goal is communication, rather than near-term action, you can’t avoid the necessity of detail.
The whole point is that coordination looks different at different scales.
So, I think I was looking at this through a nonstandard frame (Maybe more nonstandard than I thought). There are two different sets of numbers in this post:
— 4.3 million words worth of nuance
— 200,000 words of nuance
— 50,000 words
— 1 blogpost (1-2k words)
— 4 words
And separately:
— 1-4 people
— 10 people
— 100 people
— 1000 people
— 10,000 people+
While I’m not very confident about any of the numbers, I am more confident in the first set of numbers than the second set.
If I look out into the world, I see clear failures (and successes) of communication strategies that cluster around different strata of communication bandwidth. And in particular, there is clearly some point at which the bandwidth collapses to 3-6 words.