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Ryan Collison

I write about cool science and share it here.

Dunbar's Number: The 150-Person Limit

Dunbar's Number: The 150-Person Limit

Dunbar's Number: The 150 Problem You have 847 Facebook friends. You follow 1,200 people on Twitter. Your LinkedIn network claims 500+ connections. Your company has 10,000 employees. But how many people do you actually know? Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist, proposed an answer in the 1990s:

Debt: The First 5000 Years

Debt: The First 5000 Years

Debt: The First 5,000 Years You've probably heard this story: Before money, people bartered. I have fish, you have wheat, we trade. But what if I want wheat and you don't want fish? Inconvenient. So we invented money—a universal medium of exchange that solved

James Scott: Seeing Like a State

James Scott: Seeing Like a State

Seeing Like a State: Why Institutions Fail In 1985, the Soviet Union was the world's largest wheat producer. By 1991, the country that had fed itself for decades couldn't keep bread on the shelves. What happened wasn't a drought or a plague. It was

David Graeber: The Dawn of Everything

David Graeber: The Dawn of Everything

The Dawn of Everything: Graeber and Wengrow's New History David Graeber died in September 2020, three weeks after completing The Dawn of Everything with archaeologist David Wengrow. It was the culmination of a decade of collaboration—an anthropologist and an archaeologist trying to answer a simple question: What

Everything You Learned About Civilization's Origins Is Wrong

Everything You Learned About Civilization's Origins Is Wrong

Everything You Learned About Civilization's Origins Is Wrong In 1651, Thomas Hobbes described the life of prehistoric humans: "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." They wandered in small bands, constantly on the edge of starvation, fighting over scraps. Then agriculture arrived like a miracle—surplus, specialization,

The Anthropology of Institutions

The Anthropology of Institutions

The Anthropology of Institutions Everything You Learned About Civilization Is Wrong The story goes like this: Humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years. Then we invented agriculture around 10,000 BCE. Agriculture meant surplus. Surplus meant specialization. Specialization meant hierarchy. Hierarchy meant states. States meant civilization. A

Synthesis: Defending Your Mind

Synthesis: Defending Your Mind

Building Your Mental Immune System You've now studied the technology of influence: Bernays showed how to engineer desire. Chomsky mapped how institutions filter information. Nudge theory revealed how choice architecture shapes decisions. Inoculation research proved you can vaccinate against manipulation. Misinformation studies documented how lies outcompete truth. Computational