The article quotes Dunbar as saying "In the normal run of things, when a fifth person joins a group, it’ll become two conversations within about 20 seconds." I've noticed something similar. The article suggests this might be because of the difficulty we have imagining what multiple other people are thinking, but I suspect other causes also play a part.
If I'm in a group of five or more, and I think too long about what somebody said, or about how to respond, I find there are two conversations going on without me. In a group of four, the only way it can split into two conversations is if I participate. If I don't, the other three have no choice but to maintain (at most) a single conversation, making it easier for me to rejoin.
in my experience it is more dynamic than that. based on tech meetings that i have been to, it depends on the topic currently being discussed. larger groups will break apart if not everyone is interested. it also depends on the arrangement. if a few people stand in a circle and more join the circle, the conversation won't split, because for that to happen they would actually have to leave the circle and create a new one.
This is a really interesting observation, because I'm in an adult discussion class in Sunday school that is arranged like a circle, and I've been trying to figure out why it seems that structure works so well at limiting conversational divergence.
It seems that when everyone is forced to look at each other, it's harder to divest from the main conversation without drawing your attention away from the remainder of the group. It seems better for fostering discussion with a single speaker at a time since everyone can look at that person all at once.
It's not perfect but for larger groups the "circle strategy" definitely seems to work well.
90 years ago in Serve it Forth, the glorious M. F. K. Fisher stated definitively that the maximum number of people at an ideal dinner party is six, and probably three or four. Glad to see she's being upheld! Of course, the individuals probably matter more:
>It is, though, very dull to be at a table with dull people, no matter what their sex. Dining partners, regardless of gender, social standing, or the years they've lived, should be chosen for their ability to eat—and drink!—with the right mixture of abandon and restraint. They should enjoy food, and look upon its preparation and its degustation as one of the human arts.
When I was a full-time IT industry analyst, one of the things that regularly annoyed me was overly large tables at dinner. A lot of factors were in play including the fact that many analysts felt very strongly about being at a table with the "important people" (tm) in the room. But if you were at even a round table seating 8+ people, it meant in practice you only talked with a few people who were reasonably adjacent.
I would say a 4-6 person table is about the largest where everyone can be talking with all the other people.
Six can be a bit of magic number for a table in a larger crowd, because people tend to be in groups of 2 or 4, so a table for six (apparently) means you’re inviting/ causing groups to mix.
Pro tip 1: Potluck! Cooking and organizing can be a lot of work.
Pro tip 1a: Hot pot! You supply the pot and broth; guests bring the rest.
Pro tip 2: The first one will be waaay harder; then it’ll get easier, as you get a track record and you don’t need to recruit (or “train”) guests; they’re already in and already trained :)
Pro tip 3: They get easier, fast, as you both 1) get practice and 2) learn what doesn’t matter
Pro tip 3: The first people to show up will ask to help; plan something for them to do (I do a make-a-pizza party; I have them grate the mozzarella)
My parents used to host dinner parties. Actual sit-down dinners at a table with place settings, not pizza with paper plates. They are a lot of work, especially if you do the cooking yourself. I was pretty young and only remember them vaguely, but they stopped because nobody ever reciprocated.
People are still doing it with game nights: have dinner, then play a board/card game together (usually with drinks.) In the 50s, Bridge or Dominoes was a big married couple date.
I'd like to see a revival of the old setup where everyone has dinner, then everybody in turn, individually and/or in groups, does a musical performance, poetry reading, or interesting lecture to entertain everyone else.
I found "The Two-Hour Cocktail Party" on Hacker News, and the advice really resonated with me although I haven't had the opportunity to host yet. The author suggests doing a few of these cocktail parties before a dinner party, as he considers those to be advanced and quite stressful for someone not used to hosting. I have to agree, I read through it right after hosting a Thanksgiving dinner party that was a lot of fun, but was... trying.
That's because everyone works for someone else these days. Back then more people (particularly women) worked for themselves, building their own wealth (house, social life, family etc) and their own expertise. Now everyone works for someone else, building someone else's wealth and becoming an expert in someone else's domain etc.
- Formal. Host does all the planning and provides all of the food. At most, some people help in the kitchen.
- Informal. Don't use the good china or fancy napkins, might eat in the kitchen or living room. Often used before a game night or similar.
- Collaboratively assigned. People are assigned a particular set of foods (bread, potatoes, etc.) to prepare (usually about 2 except for the host who might do more), common at holidays (usually formal in winter and informal in summer).
- Semi-assigned. People are assigned general categories of what food (meat, side, salad, dessert) to prepare. Useful if the meal is for a group smaller than the chaotic-potluck threshold, or if you don't have a potluck culture ingrained.
- Location. In a house? In a rented facility? In a public park, or at the beach? Sometimes "on your front lawn / in your back yard" is a reasonable answer.
I wish there were a tool that could quickly connect new articles to older ideas, highlighting how much of what seems original today often builds on existing work, or just was mentioned before.
It wouldn't need to be as precise as mathematics or the hard sciences, just probabilistic enough to reveal meaningful connections.
It could only go back to 1992 or so. For most people, history is whatever is linkable or the 5% of pre-1992 stuff that is popular enough to rate a dead wiki footnote.
I wonder if that's why some people are introverts, without even realising the cause.
I'll do small talk, but it's more boring than mowing the lawn with a pair of scissors. I find large gatherings completely boring, with nothing but noise involved because, well.. it's all just meaningless chatter.
Maybe some people aren't introverts, just "talking to more than a few people means this is dumb" verts.
> I'll do small talk, but it's more boring than mowing the lawn with a pair of scissors. I find large gatherings completely boring, with nothing but noise involved because, well.. it's all just meaningless chatter.
The trick I’ve found is to make the conversation more interesting, if you think it’s boring. 9 times out of 10 everyone is just jonesing for someone to take it somewhere fun, but afraid to make the first step. YOU can make that step.
This is why I always go outside to hang out with the smokers at parties, even though I don’t smoke. The conversations are always more interesting in those small circles of 2-3 people who went outside for a cigarette than in the main party.
It is worse when story tellers come in and hog conversations. It is even worse worse when there are more than one and it is one upmanship on the war stories. Find this unpleasant and tiring. I prefer listening from more people.
I concur, and this can be solved once you get the hang of actually creating a small bubble inside crowds and accept the FOMO of missing the rest of the event to have a quality conversation for a few hours.
Not everybody is made to ride a wave of people. But you can find a way to enjoy it in a different fashion. I find it true for a lot of situations, actually.
Same for me, in most situations I feel like 2 people (me included) is the perfect number, as I find it to be the only way for a conversation not to diverge from its pivotal argument ~2-3 minutes into it at maximun. Though sometimes when I feel more talkative 3 people is somewhat like a sweetspot, in disagreement with the article (for me personally) when the irl server reaches four it usually feels to me like a point of no return I wished we didnt get ourselves into.
I don't know if that's the reason but I couldn't agree more. The more people are in a group the more boring it tends to become for me too.
Maybe it's because it's more difficult to find shared topics of conversation. Or maybe people tend to avoid deeper topics because intimacy is lost. Or maybe there's some other group dynamic at play (family stuff etc).
I mean most people are just pretty boring. I find that people talk about:
Work (generally not a great idea at parties, maybe a bit more acceptable if it's hosted at work, or if you do something really unusual that others find interesting, and are able to talk about it in layman's terms).
Sports (I like sports well enough but am not passionate about any team or sport. I cannot add much to a conversation about specific players, games, coaches, statistics, strategy).
Wine, whiskey, tequila, food: See Sports, above.
Their kids or their vacations or other bragging. Nobody cares.
Reminiscing about some experience that a group of them had together. Hard to join in, if you're not part of that group or that experience.
Politics, conspiracies. Just no.
Interesting people who talk to people they don't already know are rare.
I think the easiest way to look at it is that you start with every topic available, then you filter down to what people are comfortable with. So, you can only ever lose topics as you add people, looking for the lowest common denominators.
I don't think this is true at all. If you have a bunch of engineers at the table, they have plenty of topics available, yes, but say you add a medical doctor to the mix, you've suddenly unlocked the topic of how the two professions compare, interact, overlap, etc. With just the engineers, you don't have that, outside of surface level speculation.
Very interesting, but there's no link or reference to a paper here, just
> But his research has also explored how people act in smaller groups.
My assumption is that Rhys Blakely was at Cheltenham Science Festival enjoying a lecture, and decided to fluff up a minute of it into an article. He seems to have quoted from one of Dunbar's popular science books; maybe he should have checked the footnotes or the bibliography?
We're on the internet now, we don't have to "Authorities say..." anymore. This sounds interesting to me, but I don't want to look through every paper Dunbar has written to find it.
-----
edit: curiosity is annoying. I found this:
Robin IM Dunbar, Neill DC Duncan, Daniel Nettle "Size and structure of freely forming conversational groups" (1995)
Abstract: Data from various settings suggest that there is an upper limit of about four on the number of individuals who can interact in spontaneous conversation. This limit appears to be a consequence of the mechanisms of speech production and detection. There appear to be no differences between men and women in this respect, other than those introduced by women’s lighter voices.
Guillaume Dezecache, R.I.M. Dunbar "Sharing the joke: the size of natural laughter groups" (2012)
> Our results confirm, with a considerably larger sample, the upper limit of N≈ 4 on conversation group size reported by Dunbar et al. (1995). In addition, they suggest that there is a similar limit on the number of individuals that can be involved in a laughter event.
One of the reasons I like D&D and board games is because it gives something to do while socializing.
The idea of inviting someone over just to hang out - or being invited to do so - without an underlying activity fills me with dread. But if I'm being invited over to play a game, then that's great - and I can chat and socialize while doing so.
I don't think it has to be Bunko, or any one particular thing. Hell, even helping friends move is fun in a way, as long as your spine is up to the lifting :P
If the hangout is activity-based, I find I feel forced to care about and talk about the activity, but I do not really give a flying fuck about the activity. For example going to do axe throwing? I don't care at all about axe throwing and have no interest in talking about it, I do have interest in talking about how my friends are doing, anecdotes, politics... I just want to sit down and _talk_ (a drink or meal works very well for me). Board games are hell to me, I don't care at all how many beans I can earn this round, I wanna talk about your home renovation or the trip you just went on.
For example I had a first date at an arcade. The games were actually pretty cool, but I wasn't really interested in them in the moment (I was interested in my date) and the chit-chat about the games felt very forced: I really didn't care on the moment. As soon as we took a break to grab soft drinks, suddenly conversation was flowing and infinitely more interesting.
Of course there are activities that I enjoy for their own sake and like doing with friends (eg rope climbing), but it's a very different type of hanging out which doesn't bring me the same pleasure at all.
I suspect this is related to why a string quartet is the right number of musical voices. Two violins, viola, and cello give you a very fulfilling number of separate ideas to track without overwhelming you.
I think you're taking the metaphor about a string quartet as a "conversation among equals" too literally.
In terms of perception, I'm not sure there's much of a relationship to a human conversation. To make things equal, the string players would need to take turns soloing while the others wait more or less silently to respond, each with their own solo response. You'd be bored out of your gourd if string quartets were written that way.
But more to the point, the vast majority of time in a string quartet is devoted to two or more of the players producing phrases of music in parallel, and that is musically coherent and pleasing to the players and audience. Most humans cannot track two humans speaking in parallel at all. That alone tells us that music cognition is a very different phenomenon than speech cognition.
In short, I'm not sure why a string quartet would be considered the optimal genre for humans to produce music together. And even if it is, the reasons why are even less likely to do with the protocols around human speech cognition, and certainly not with some bizarre equivalent of the "theory of mind" associated with the musical phrase produced by one of the instruments[1].
1: Small digression-- In Elliott Carter's 2nd String Quartet he actually started with a concept that each instrument was a kind of "character" in a play among the quartet. In this case, the problem with OP's metaphor becomes obvious even in the introduction-- the homogenous timbre of a string quartet makes it difficult to hear the differences among the characters. (IIRC I think even Carter admitted this.)
I recall that Charles Rosen wrote somewhere that one of the reasons the string quartet took off in the classical period was that it allowed the playing of all the notes in a dominant seventh chord without double stops. Although this was probably a better explanation for the relative paucity of string trios in the output of Mozart (1) and Beethoven (0). The establishment of four parts as the "standard" scoring for vocal ensembles can be traced back to the 15th century.
On the other hand the second and more famous dining (and conversation) club founded by Dr Johnson had originally 9 members, and gradually grew from that to dozens. Although many including Johnson may have not been entirely happy with the expansion.
Counterpoint may leave too much implied with only two voices; with four or more voices one must increasingly break or relax various rules that promote voice independence, e.g. the use of parallel motion where additional voices simply double some other line (they can't all be independent, there's too bleeding many of them!), or to drop voices for a thinner texture, for example where there are five instruments but only three or four of them are sounding together most of the time. That's a long way to say that around three to four voices is ideal if you want independent lines (except they're not really independent, like two people shouting past one another; there's a weird mix of both working together while each yet manages to stand out in good counterpoint) though even better than this claim would be to compare, say, Bach's two-part inventions to works that have more voices.
For those who do not know counterpoint, you have only three motions a voice (a horizontal line of music, traditionally sung) can make relative to another voice (move closer, apart, or to hold steady) combined with limited voice ranges (say, a doubling of frequency, or so) and limited interval choices (seven, or so) within an octave or frequency doubling, and the voices are very close to one another but only rarely cross one another, on top of all that various rules systems that forbid or frown on such things as the tritone, parallel fifths, and so on into the weeds such that with more than a few voices you quickly run out of valid options for all the voices to move independently.
Also the traditional barbershop quartet for acapella.
Interestingly, I like the 5-piece versions of all 3 of these: add a keyboardist to the rock band, a piano or harpsichord to the classical string or woodwind quartet, a female vocalist to the acapella group. Having two leads lets you do much more intricate countermelodies and harmonies.
A string quartet consists of 4 tonally adjacent instruments, and is thus much more like 4 humans talking.
A "classical" rock band consists of 4 utterly different instruments from a tonal perspective, and is thus nothing like 4 humans talking. Same thing for jazz - and its why you can have multiple instruments performing simultaneously and in ways that are not obviously connected to each other.
I think the big question is the components of the groups’:
1) willingness or desire to contribute (hopefully everyone does
2) the discipline of the participants (I find a growing trend of people wanting to talk over each other, start talking before someone has finished their thought, people wanting to dominate the conversation)
I’ve had conversations that are intolerable with 2/4 people because they’re either hard to talk to or talking over you, conversely I’ve had lovely conversations with 8 people that have gone extremely well.
> I find a growing trend of people wanting to talk over each other, start talking before someone has finished their thought, people wanting to dominate the conversation
Been noticing this at work meetings. It’s annoying because if you want to be heard, you have to become part of the problem… I hate it. I wonder if social media has anything to do with this, since it created a way to “win” conversations, and heavily encourages you to do so. Zoom meetings do amplify this problem, so maybe it’s always been like this and I forgot?
In large social groups I shutdown if people talk over me. I don’t want to fight to be part of a conversation. It’s fine, I’ll have moments here or there, though it does make me look quiet and weird… but there are other friends that don’t talk over me and I doubt they would say the same thing (the quiet part at least lol)
Zoom converstations are impossible with more than a few people, because there is an unnatural latency (even if slight) and the subtle body language cues that let you know it's a good time to speak are totally hidden. So three people start talking at once, then everyone stops and is quiet for a few seconds, then two people say something, etc. It's even difficult with just two people sometimes.
I do think social media has something to do with it, but I think to me it’s more the shortening of attention span e.g long form journalism -> tweet, Books -> TikTok’s, I think people just actually struggle to contain themselves if someone is speaking for more than ~20 seconds
Readit News
If I'm in a group of five or more, and I think too long about what somebody said, or about how to respond, I find there are two conversations going on without me. In a group of four, the only way it can split into two conversations is if I participate. If I don't, the other three have no choice but to maintain (at most) a single conversation, making it easier for me to rejoin.
It seems that when everyone is forced to look at each other, it's harder to divest from the main conversation without drawing your attention away from the remainder of the group. It seems better for fostering discussion with a single speaker at a time since everyone can look at that person all at once.
It's not perfect but for larger groups the "circle strategy" definitely seems to work well.
Thanks for sharing!
>It is, though, very dull to be at a table with dull people, no matter what their sex. Dining partners, regardless of gender, social standing, or the years they've lived, should be chosen for their ability to eat—and drink!—with the right mixture of abandon and restraint. They should enjoy food, and look upon its preparation and its degustation as one of the human arts.
I would say a 4-6 person table is about the largest where everyone can be talking with all the other people.
I sometimes find myself trying to follow both conversations, or switching to the more interesting one. Is that bad etiquette?
Pro tip 1a: Hot pot! You supply the pot and broth; guests bring the rest.
Pro tip 2: The first one will be waaay harder; then it’ll get easier, as you get a track record and you don’t need to recruit (or “train”) guests; they’re already in and already trained :)
Pro tip 3: They get easier, fast, as you both 1) get practice and 2) learn what doesn’t matter
Pro tip 3: The first people to show up will ask to help; plan something for them to do (I do a make-a-pizza party; I have them grate the mozzarella)
I'd like to see a revival of the old setup where everyone has dinner, then everybody in turn, individually and/or in groups, does a musical performance, poetry reading, or interesting lecture to entertain everyone else.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32879851
- Formal. Host does all the planning and provides all of the food. At most, some people help in the kitchen.
- Informal. Don't use the good china or fancy napkins, might eat in the kitchen or living room. Often used before a game night or similar.
- Collaboratively assigned. People are assigned a particular set of foods (bread, potatoes, etc.) to prepare (usually about 2 except for the host who might do more), common at holidays (usually formal in winter and informal in summer).
- Semi-assigned. People are assigned general categories of what food (meat, side, salad, dessert) to prepare. Useful if the meal is for a group smaller than the chaotic-potluck threshold, or if you don't have a potluck culture ingrained.
- Location. In a house? In a rented facility? In a public park, or at the beach? Sometimes "on your front lawn / in your back yard" is a reasonable answer.
I wish there were a tool that could quickly connect new articles to older ideas, highlighting how much of what seems original today often builds on existing work, or just was mentioned before.
It wouldn't need to be as precise as mathematics or the hard sciences, just probabilistic enough to reveal meaningful connections.
Thinking out loud here...That could be like an LLM that is tokenized on ideas as opposed to words/fragments, no?
I'm sure someone has worked on this, but how would a computer extract an idea from a bunch of words (sentences?) ?
Looks like another rabbit hole to add to the list...
* 2 people is ideal for serious, deep conversation
* 3-4 is ideal for more humorous, relaxing conversation, but precludes the deepest intellectual topics
I'll do small talk, but it's more boring than mowing the lawn with a pair of scissors. I find large gatherings completely boring, with nothing but noise involved because, well.. it's all just meaningless chatter.
Maybe some people aren't introverts, just "talking to more than a few people means this is dumb" verts.
The trick I’ve found is to make the conversation more interesting, if you think it’s boring. 9 times out of 10 everyone is just jonesing for someone to take it somewhere fun, but afraid to make the first step. YOU can make that step.
Not everybody is made to ride a wave of people. But you can find a way to enjoy it in a different fashion. I find it true for a lot of situations, actually.
You don't have to follow all the rules.
Maybe it's because it's more difficult to find shared topics of conversation. Or maybe people tend to avoid deeper topics because intimacy is lost. Or maybe there's some other group dynamic at play (family stuff etc).
Work (generally not a great idea at parties, maybe a bit more acceptable if it's hosted at work, or if you do something really unusual that others find interesting, and are able to talk about it in layman's terms).
Sports (I like sports well enough but am not passionate about any team or sport. I cannot add much to a conversation about specific players, games, coaches, statistics, strategy).
Wine, whiskey, tequila, food: See Sports, above.
Their kids or their vacations or other bragging. Nobody cares.
Reminiscing about some experience that a group of them had together. Hard to join in, if you're not part of that group or that experience.
Politics, conspiracies. Just no.
Interesting people who talk to people they don't already know are rare.
> But his research has also explored how people act in smaller groups.
My assumption is that Rhys Blakely was at Cheltenham Science Festival enjoying a lecture, and decided to fluff up a minute of it into an article. He seems to have quoted from one of Dunbar's popular science books; maybe he should have checked the footnotes or the bibliography?
We're on the internet now, we don't have to "Authorities say..." anymore. This sounds interesting to me, but I don't want to look through every paper Dunbar has written to find it.
-----
edit: curiosity is annoying. I found this:
Robin IM Dunbar, Neill DC Duncan, Daniel Nettle "Size and structure of freely forming conversational groups" (1995)
Abstract: Data from various settings suggest that there is an upper limit of about four on the number of individuals who can interact in spontaneous conversation. This limit appears to be a consequence of the mechanisms of speech production and detection. There appear to be no differences between men and women in this respect, other than those introduced by women’s lighter voices.
https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...
-----
edit 2: and this:
Guillaume Dezecache, R.I.M. Dunbar "Sharing the joke: the size of natural laughter groups" (2012)
> Our results confirm, with a considerably larger sample, the upper limit of N≈ 4 on conversation group size reported by Dunbar et al. (1995). In addition, they suggest that there is a similar limit on the number of individuals that can be involved in a laughter event.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2012.07.002
Tables of four people quickly form, play and move.
The game is based on luck, not skill, so people are social not competitive. They're also concentrating on each other not so much the game.
I got to attend it once and play, and found it to be an exceptional way to get to know absolutely everyone in the room.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunco
"over 59 million women have played bunco and over 27 million play regularly"
The idea of inviting someone over just to hang out - or being invited to do so - without an underlying activity fills me with dread. But if I'm being invited over to play a game, then that's great - and I can chat and socialize while doing so.
I don't think it has to be Bunko, or any one particular thing. Hell, even helping friends move is fun in a way, as long as your spine is up to the lifting :P
If the hangout is activity-based, I find I feel forced to care about and talk about the activity, but I do not really give a flying fuck about the activity. For example going to do axe throwing? I don't care at all about axe throwing and have no interest in talking about it, I do have interest in talking about how my friends are doing, anecdotes, politics... I just want to sit down and _talk_ (a drink or meal works very well for me). Board games are hell to me, I don't care at all how many beans I can earn this round, I wanna talk about your home renovation or the trip you just went on.
For example I had a first date at an arcade. The games were actually pretty cool, but I wasn't really interested in them in the moment (I was interested in my date) and the chit-chat about the games felt very forced: I really didn't care on the moment. As soon as we took a break to grab soft drinks, suddenly conversation was flowing and infinitely more interesting.
Of course there are activities that I enjoy for their own sake and like doing with friends (eg rope climbing), but it's a very different type of hanging out which doesn't bring me the same pleasure at all.
Deleted Comment
In terms of perception, I'm not sure there's much of a relationship to a human conversation. To make things equal, the string players would need to take turns soloing while the others wait more or less silently to respond, each with their own solo response. You'd be bored out of your gourd if string quartets were written that way.
But more to the point, the vast majority of time in a string quartet is devoted to two or more of the players producing phrases of music in parallel, and that is musically coherent and pleasing to the players and audience. Most humans cannot track two humans speaking in parallel at all. That alone tells us that music cognition is a very different phenomenon than speech cognition.
In short, I'm not sure why a string quartet would be considered the optimal genre for humans to produce music together. And even if it is, the reasons why are even less likely to do with the protocols around human speech cognition, and certainly not with some bizarre equivalent of the "theory of mind" associated with the musical phrase produced by one of the instruments[1].
1: Small digression-- In Elliott Carter's 2nd String Quartet he actually started with a concept that each instrument was a kind of "character" in a play among the quartet. In this case, the problem with OP's metaphor becomes obvious even in the introduction-- the homogenous timbre of a string quartet makes it difficult to hear the differences among the characters. (IIRC I think even Carter admitted this.)
On the other hand the second and more famous dining (and conversation) club founded by Dr Johnson had originally 9 members, and gradually grew from that to dozens. Although many including Johnson may have not been entirely happy with the expansion.
For those who do not know counterpoint, you have only three motions a voice (a horizontal line of music, traditionally sung) can make relative to another voice (move closer, apart, or to hold steady) combined with limited voice ranges (say, a doubling of frequency, or so) and limited interval choices (seven, or so) within an octave or frequency doubling, and the voices are very close to one another but only rarely cross one another, on top of all that various rules systems that forbid or frown on such things as the tritone, parallel fifths, and so on into the weeds such that with more than a few voices you quickly run out of valid options for all the voices to move independently.
Interestingly, I like the 5-piece versions of all 3 of these: add a keyboardist to the rock band, a piano or harpsichord to the classical string or woodwind quartet, a female vocalist to the acapella group. Having two leads lets you do much more intricate countermelodies and harmonies.
A "classical" rock band consists of 4 utterly different instruments from a tonal perspective, and is thus nothing like 4 humans talking. Same thing for jazz - and its why you can have multiple instruments performing simultaneously and in ways that are not obviously connected to each other.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
1) willingness or desire to contribute (hopefully everyone does
2) the discipline of the participants (I find a growing trend of people wanting to talk over each other, start talking before someone has finished their thought, people wanting to dominate the conversation)
I’ve had conversations that are intolerable with 2/4 people because they’re either hard to talk to or talking over you, conversely I’ve had lovely conversations with 8 people that have gone extremely well.
Been noticing this at work meetings. It’s annoying because if you want to be heard, you have to become part of the problem… I hate it. I wonder if social media has anything to do with this, since it created a way to “win” conversations, and heavily encourages you to do so. Zoom meetings do amplify this problem, so maybe it’s always been like this and I forgot?
In large social groups I shutdown if people talk over me. I don’t want to fight to be part of a conversation. It’s fine, I’ll have moments here or there, though it does make me look quiet and weird… but there are other friends that don’t talk over me and I doubt they would say the same thing (the quiet part at least lol)