Friendships of Scale: Applying Scaling Laws to Interpersonal Relationships

Here we will argue that different kinds of friendships follow different kinds of scaling laws. First, we will review Aristotle’s three types of friendship. Second, we will review three different types of scaling laws. Third, we will show how the three types of friendship roughly map on to the three types of scaling laws. After this, we will discuss some of the consequences of the scaling laws of friendship. We hope that the use of these abstract scaling laws to describe social values will convince computer programmers and policy makers to temper their would-be ambitions as social engineers.