[afarrell]

Right. It is also false to say there are no useful numbers in this space. For example: Dunbar’s number is 150.

But it is misleading to expect an employee to maintain relationships with 150 people—they also have a family and friends.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

[pintxo]

From the linked wikipedia:

> However, enormous 95% confidence intervals (4–520 and 2–336, respectively) implied that specifying any one number is futile.

[clairity]

what’s more interesting about dunbar’s number is that it suggests a potential maximum for the size of an effective organization (say, 520) rather than pinpointing an optimum. the idea of a maximum like this appeals to intuition, so it’s worth studying more (and more quantitatively), but opposes ambition, which is probably why we don’t have plentiful research in this area already.