Just host a dinner party already

It's for your own good

The brilliant economist Mandy Pallais said something to me a few weeks ago that has stuck: in equilibrium, social connection is underprovided. If you need friends or connections, it’s socially costly to ask people to help you make them. And it’s costly to host a dinner party or introduce people to one another. The consequence? An underprovision of social connection, leading to delayed family formation, information moving too slowly through disconnected networks, and loneliness.

This problem exists because too few people realize that providing social connection pays dividends. That’s one of the main insights from Laszlo Barabasi’s excellent book The Formula (nb. I hate the title/cover and first chapter, if you read it on public transport you might want to wrap it in a Playboy to make yourself seem respectable). Laszlo is a leading network scientist who along with his collaborators (especially Dashun Wang) has spent a good part of his career studying how externally-defined success relates to performance within a range of fields, including science, art and sports. This work has a catchy punch-line:

When performance is easy to measure, success and performance correlate strongly. When performance is difficult to measure, success appears to be a function of the person’s network.

But what about a person’s network predicts success? Put simply, it’s their access to central players. A good example: it’s very difficult to compare the quality of art in any objective sense, to the point where even experts don’t seem able to judge which of two works they don’t know is more valuable. Yet the ultimate success of artists (as measured by them continuing to be artists, and their sales prices) can be predicted in part by the centrality of the galleries they exhibit in at the early stages of their career. Artists whose early-career exhibitions are at “peripheral galleries”—those whose artists don’t tend to exhibit at other good galleries—seem to drop out of art at higher rates, and sell their works for less. Sadly, it really is who you know.

How then do people gain network power? Again, it’s not rocket science. They make themselves useful to their network. Scientists who develop and popularize methods and tools that help answer a field’s core problems (think CRISPR or Instrumental Variables) “make themselves useful”. People who capture the zeitgeist and communicate the central vibe of a network do too (think Rob Wiblin, roon, or Manfred von Richthofen). Some work in funding and coordination roles, getting work funded and helping to set the rules of the game. Others provide scaffolding for those in their communities to meet. They organize conferences, workshops, make introductions, and …host dinner parties.

For your own sake, host dinner parties. Here’s how.

At a dinner party of n people, there’s n choose 2 (n*(n-1)/2) possible connections between people, each which might lead to something new and interesting. So for a dinner party of 12 people, that’s 66 possible connections—a lot of potential network value on (at?) the table. Some tips on how to maximize the probability they convert:

1. Triadic closure. When person 1 already has trust with person 2 and 3, there’s a much higher probability that person 2 and 3 will bond. Implication: when inviting people, it’s ideal that each invitee already knows a couple of people there.

2. Alcohol. Offer a strong cocktail on arrival. People will stay longer and have more fun if they’re slightly tipsy.

3. Curate. People remember a bad experience more than a good one. Keep nasty and predatory people away. There should be some coherent theme to the group, as people with some natural affinity will be much more likely to enjoy one another. But beware creating a “sausage fest” or any other homogenous grouping. Deliberately prioritizing cohort diversity (along many dimensions) makes for a much more amusing evening.

4. Make sure to prioritize “social tops”. Sam Rosen has an amusing categorization of people as being “social tops” or “social bottoms”, the latter not providing much amusement to others in social situations. At a pure dinner party, you’ll need to make sure that there’s at least 1/4 social tops. You’ll directly observe how well you do this by looking at group sizing while people are enjoying cocktails. Small groups indicates a high share of social tops, while large grouping suggest you’ll need to change the skew next time. If your network contains relatively many social bottoms, you should consider providing more structure to the evening (board games, circling, or other structured activities).

5. Food. Please put some effort in here. The worst thing is guests being hungry. A distant second is the quality of food. Learning to make industrial quantities of a good curry and rice, or soup, can be an easy way to feed many. But learning to make a few delicious things can delight your guests. Portrait control and catering is a weird Protestant thing that I don’t understand.

6. Music. My father plays Miles Davis’s In A Silent Way at dinner parties when he wants people to leave but have close friends stay.

If you’re interested in coming along to one of our dinner parties—we do maybe 10-15 a year—please fill out this form.