Conversational Discipline

When a group gets to be above a handful or so, it becomes increasingly hard to have just one conversation. Indeed, even a handful of people can break into two smaller conversations. So, when people see this as a problem, they decide to institute the one conversation rule. This rule actually works with really small groups, but I don't think it works above nine people.

See, at above nine people the 'one conversation' pattern is highly unnatural, so if we are all sitting around trying to have the 'one conversation' pattern we have the same experience as day-traders or gamblers do as they try to see a pattern in the data they have available. Each individual gamble is essentially random, but the effect on the gambler is pavlovian; the gambler often believes more strongly in the pattern after a failure.

The conversation pattern may be less addicting, but the change from normal to NOT NORMAL tends to encourage to believe that we have conquered the normal, when in fact we should be realizing that the reason we had to shift back to NOT NORMAL was because we failed to avoid the normal. Also, people leave, zone out, and generally assume the conversation that they are participating in is the 'one conversation.'

So what happens is that it tends to look like, wow, this 'one conversation' thing is really working, when in fact the only thing that happened is that the group got whittled down back to where it can work. I guess the moral of this meander is don't put your all your discipline in one basket, or don't put all your eggs in one conversation.

Or, it will seem less and less like a conversation among friends, and more like a science experiment among confused sociologists, at which point we lose.