And if the group is made up of 1000 people? Then your hunter-gatherer instincts will underestimate the inertia of a group so large, and demand an unrealistically high price (in strategic shifts) for you to join.
I would say an equally if not more important issue is that your hunter-gather instincts underestimate the benefits (to you) of joining the thousand-person organization, presuming that they can’t be much greater than the benefits of joining a forty-person one.
On a related note, the value of communications networks (email, IM, telephones, blogs, the post office) seem to increase on the order of n log (n) with respect to the number of users. One may even get negative value, because after something reaches a certain level of popularity, spammers start flocking to it and driving out legitimate communication. Consider all the junk mail you get—and note that junk faxes are illegal!
So I suspect our instincts are just plain noise when it comes to the value of joining large organizations.
I would say an equally if not more important issue is that your hunter-gather instincts underestimate the benefits (to you) of joining the thousand-person organization, presuming that they can’t be much greater than the benefits of joining a forty-person one.
Could be, but there are diseconomies of scale as well as economies of scale in large organizations.
On a related note, the value of communications networks (email, IM, telephones, blogs, the post office) seem to increase on the order of n log (n) with respect to the number of users. One may even get negative value, because after something reaches a certain level of popularity, spammers start flocking to it and driving out legitimate communication. Consider all the junk mail you get—and note that junk faxes are illegal!
So I suspect our instincts are just plain noise when it comes to the value of joining large organizations.