Cross posted from the EA Forum.

Epistemic Status: all numbers are made up and/or sketchily sourced. Post errs on the side of simplistic poetry – take seriously but not literally.

If you want to coordinate with one person on a thing about something nuanced, you can spend as much time as you want talking to them – answering questions in realtime, addressing confusions as you notice them. You can trust them to go off and attempt complex tasks without as much oversight, and you can decide to change your collective plans quickly and nimbly.

You probably speak at around 100 words per minute. That's 6,000 words per hour. If you talk for 3 hours a day, every workday for a year, you can communicate 4.3 million words worth of nuance.

You can have a real conversation with up to 4 people.

(Last year the small organization I work at considered hiring a 5th person. It turned out to be very costly and we decided to wait, and I think the reasons were related to this phenomenon)

If you want to coordinate on something nuanced with, say, 10 people, you realistically can ask them to read a couple books worth of words. A book is maybe 50,000 words, so you have maybe 200,000 words worth of nuance.

Alternately, you can monologue at people, scaling a conversation past the point where people realistically can ask questions. Either way, you need to hope that your books or your monologues happen to address the particular confusions your 10 teammates have.

If you want to coordinate with 100 people, you can ask them to read a few books, but chances are they won't. They might all read a few books worth of stuff, but they won't all have read the same books. The information that they can be coordinated around is more like "several blogposts." If you're trying to coordinate nerds, maybe those blogposts add up to one book because nerds like to read.

If you want to coordinate 1,000 people... you realistically get one blogpost, or maybe one blogpost worth of jargon that's hopefully self-explanatory enough to be useful.

If you want to coordinate thousands of people...

You have about five words.

This has ramifications on how complicated a coordinated effort you can attempt.

What if you need all that nuance and to coordinate thousands of people? What would it look like if the world was filled with complicated problems that required lots of people to solve?

I guess it'd look like this one.