[ExI] Beowulf

[hkhenson]

At 11:38 AM 11/27/2007, you wrote:
>On Nov 24, 2007, at 4:09 PM, hkhenson wrote:
> > At 06:23 AM 11/24/2007, David wrote:
> >> To me, the way to answer most questions like this is to simplify them
> >> to one involving two or three people.
> >
> > That's not entirely legit. Very small numbers of people invoke
> > different mental modules than larger ones. See "The Nurture
> > Assumption" for a discussion of relations vs groups.
>
>Unless you're suggesting that our intuitions about very small
>numbers of people are less likely to be reasonable, it seems
>that such reasoning extended to large groups (about what "should"
>be) would be *more* legitimate, for exactly that reason.

Relations involving two or maybe 3 people seem to invoke different 
parts of the brain.  So you really can't simplify down to that size 
and then extrapolate back up to larger groups.  Or rather, you can, 
but your extrapolations will be wrong. For example, you don't get mob 
behavior below some number of people.

>If someone's taken a nasty knock to the head and is confused,
>hitting yourself in the head before thinking about his situation
>is not likely to make you more able to figure out what he should
>do.

???

Keith