More generally there have been lots of times and places where some people have been playing the game of scale-to-maximum, and people not playing that game have often had to adjust for its existence, but can often do quite a lot anyway, including weird bank-shot projects like Christianity and Buddhism that end up scaling a bunch, across borders, without having any sort of army or centralized infrastructure for quite a while. Things that don’t scale can engineer things that do. Obviously none of the past attempts have been good enough to permanently solve the problem, but you can look at how much deliberation went into them vs level of alignment and impact. To me, it looks like a Dunbar group that is modeling this situation explicitly has a pretty decent chance of building something much better, which in turn should improve the rate at which we get chances to try things.
More generally there have been lots of times and places where some people have been playing the game of scale-to-maximum, and people not playing that game have often had to adjust for its existence, but can often do quite a lot anyway, including weird bank-shot projects like Christianity and Buddhism that end up scaling a bunch, across borders, without having any sort of army or centralized infrastructure for quite a while. Things that don’t scale can engineer things that do. Obviously none of the past attempts have been good enough to permanently solve the problem, but you can look at how much deliberation went into them vs level of alignment and impact. To me, it looks like a Dunbar group that is modeling this situation explicitly has a pretty decent chance of building something much better, which in turn should improve the rate at which we get chances to try things.