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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3950 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 23, 2023

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I recently read The Elephant in the Brain and a review of it (https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/12/31/book-review-the-elephant-in-the-brain/)

One of the main ideas is that humans have competitive tendencies that helps them gain access to limited resources and mates. Humans need to signal that they are a good ally and mate in order to get some of the things that they desire. Instead of directly signaling (such as trying to impress people with our bank statement) people send indirect signals (such as wearing expensive clothes). Signaling indirectly gives us plausible deniability and even allows us to deceive ourselves (example: I wasn’t wearing expense clothes to show off my wealth, I just wore them because I like the way they look).

The book goes through Body Language, Laughter, Conversation, Consumption, Art, Charity, Education, Medicine, Religion and Politics to explain hidden motives. Examples:

  • Conversation isn’t just about exchanging information it is also about signaling intelligence and social skills.

  • Politics isn’t just about policy, it is also about alliances.

What are some hidden motives that you’ve noticed?

Some I’ve noticed is dancing is about signaling social confidence to potential mates. Brightly colored hair usually signals loyalty to left-leaning politics, the signal is costly because non-leftists may detect the signal and be biased against the signaler.

Status signaling is a sacred cow in rationalist spaces, and while important rationalists tend to way overblow how much you can boil down to signaling. Zvi himself admits this when condescendling talking about wanting the "MacGuffin":

But let’s not take that too far. That’s not all such things are about. Y still matters: you need a McGuffin. From that McGuffin can arise all these complex behaviors. If the McGuffin wasn’t important, the fighters would leave the arena and play their games somewhere else. To play these games, one must make a plausible case one cares about the McGuffin, and is helping with the McGuffin.

Otherwise, the other players of the broad game notice that you’re not doing that. Which means you’ve been caught cheating.

Robin’s standard reasoning is to say, suppose X was about Y. But if all we cared about was Y, we’d simply do Z, which is way better at Y. Since we don’t do Z, we must care about something else instead. But there’s no instead; there’s only in addition to.

A fine move in the broad game is to actually move towards accomplishing the McGuffin, or point out others not doing so. It’s far from the only fine move, but it’s usually enough to get some amount of McGuffin produced.

Ultimately status signaling doesn't work as a fundamental explainer, because some people really must want some things some of the time, or the whole thing is nonsense. This reduces the explanatory power of the framework by a massive amount.

Because it's in the Sunday thread, I'll use a fun low stakes response.

There was a time in the early to mid 2010s where male grooming accidentally looped around both sides of the culture war. On the right, dudes started growing out beards because of the military special operations affiliation (SEALs etc. famously get to ignore grooming standards and push to an extreme.) I think this also coincided with a wave of Viking-related media which roughly coded right. Simultaneously, on the left, beards started being used to signal a sort of neo-hippy/bohemian/burning man/tech bro vibe. Guilfoyle in Silicon Valley leaned into this. Chunky dudes into Craft Beer and board games really took it far.

(un?)fortunately other fashion and grooming signals usually reduced the ambiguity. Right coded dudes often had the undercut haircut to go with the beard and wore the various tactical-inspired clothing styles (fitted polos, earth tone sneakers / boots). Left coded dudes would have band teeshirts, lots of flannel, flat brims, ear gauges. You could usually figure it out pretty easily.

But I'll always enjoy the time I watched an actual beardy-military dude and a very in shape rock climber exchange 90 minutes of workout advice and hiking / climbing stories, only to have Mr.SEAL go "Dude, where do you hunt?" and the Vegan Boulder stare him dead in the face and go "I would never hurt a living thing."

"I do not" at weddings probably has a less awkward silence.

It’s interesting to think that the Muslim world might be onto something by banning the female appearance competition spiral. If the thesis of the book is correct, then it’s never enough for a religion to say “don’t entertain vanity” — instead the religion must actively punish vanity and reinforce less vain competition. The fundamentalist Muslim world just says “every woman wears this plain garb, period”, and in one fell swoop they have immediately restore six hours a week of labor to every woman, billions of dollars kept in middle class pockets, improved grades, etc. Because now the marriage-driven and reputation-driven competition over appearances is eliminated, and women now are forced to look for other ways to compete against each other. An entire % of brain activity is redirected to something that is, at least in theory, better for everyone’s happiness.

Another question: is virtue signaling bad, or is it only bad when the signal lacks substance? If moral action is induced by a person displaying his own morality, then why not support that? Our concern then should just be ensuring that the “moral competition” has the correct exemplars and rules, so that the substance lines up with the competition. So a person who is being “Christ-like” by practicing humility would be, counterintuitively, obtaining reinforcement by his community which all believe in such a moral exemplar — and this would be good, and not bad, because it’s making the most of human nature.

So a lot of moral implications hinge on the question of this book: is human behavior, pessimistically and ultimately, always decided by what gives the most ”primal” rewards?

The fundamentalist Muslim world just says “every woman wears this plain garb, period”, and in one fell swoop they have immediately restore six hours a week of labor to every woman, billions of dollars kept in middle class pockets, improved grades, etc.

The sorts of societies inclined to enforce this strongly don't seem like the sort that're squeezing every bit of (non-fertility) productivity from their women.

Counterpoint: Iran has iirc one of the highest levels of women in STEM

They have the highest level of women with STEM degrees, you mean. Many of these women are either not in the workforce or working in non-STEM positions, and Iran’s technology sector remains unimpressive.

Iran is sanctioned by the world, yet does have impressive scientific output: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20291-iran-is-top-of-the-world-in-science-growth.html

Another question: is virtue signaling bad

I think virtue signaling itself is neutral, it is just communicating a fact about your beliefs to the world. The problems related to virtue signaling are:

  • If someone has what they believe is a virtue, but it is actually something bad for society.

  • The virtue signaling competition where people need to come up with more extreme signals to stand out. Then the signal becomes ridiculing the out group in extreme hyperbole that some people can misinterpret as literal.

Per the OP’s book, virtue signaling would not just be communicating a belief but communicating a positive value of yourself to others. And if this is done implicitly, then perhaps we can say that all morality hinges on signaling virtue. If that’s the case, our priority should be fleshing out good competitive parameters and norms for how we judge virtue to maximize moral actions.

In other words, it may be a bad idea to ignore the idea of signaling virtue (as an inherently virtue-less activity), and instead accept it as underlying all morality, in spite of what certain Christian teachings posit, and if develop a great criteria for judging real virtue from false, we would increase sum total virtue.

So a person who is being “Christ-like” by practicing humility would be, counterintuitively, obtaining reinforcement by his community which all believe in such a moral exemplar — and this would be good, and not bad, because it’s making the most of human nature.

I am not sure what your last part re: human nature means there, but I would suggest that at least in the fundamentalist-leaning or fully fundamentalist circles I was raised in and around, practicing humility would only be seen as desirable in certain contexts (e.g. in church with peers or in-group.) Once dealing with out-group (whoever that happens to be) these behaviors, or, types of signaling to use the language of OP, no longer seem to have the same standing.

It's always been odd to me that in many fundamentalist groups (I won't say all or even most, as I am speaking only from experience here) qualities like aggressiveness, retribution, even strong-arm or violence (see: War, but not just war, also in other contexts such as self-defense) are nearly always heralded as the moral choice when dealing with public issues (e.g. not issues within the church itself), and the counterpart to these qualities (passivity, turning-the-other-cheek, non-violence) are often dismissed as weak, or misunderstanding the gospel, etc.

Edit: I am also doubtful that Muslim women wearing covering in public at all times so neatly redistributes their schedule as suggested by OP, but I have no data or personal experience here.

It’s interesting to think that the Muslim world might be onto something by banning the female appearance competition spiral.

Yeah, without endorsing or condemning, I would bet that the arrangement of "every woman keeps her appearance hidden from view at all times in public" is one of the few stable and self-sustaining norms one can implement if one's goals are to maintain a patriarchal social order.

is virtue signaling bad, or is it only bad when the signal lacks substance

I think the point is that a reliable signal is supposed to be costly to the sender in some way. Else they can simply manipulate the signal in whatever way they wish to get the recipient to do the thing they want.

So signalling one's morality should, in this view, be associated with some penalty/cost for falsifying the signal or breaching the morals they're signalling.

Take, for example, a vehemently pro-life politician who nonetheless makes his mistress get an abortion when he accidentally knocks her up. If their moral signalling goes out the window they second it would cost them something to uphold it, then the entire false edifice of their beliefs and behaviors is laid bare for all to see, which tends to... dilute the strength of their signalling.

Take, for example, a vehemently pro-life politician who nonetheless makes his mistress get an abortion when he accidentally knocks her up.

I know it’s a hypothetical, but if this was a scenario that happened then you would expect it to be a major scandal that’s prominent in the news, even if said politician is like a West Virginia state legislator or something equally irrelevant. As strong on family values politicians get in trouble for having mistresses regularly enough for nobody to be surprised, and occasionally have children with those mistresses, but there’s not a lot of news stories about their mistresses getting abortions, we can surmise that their commitment to pro-life values extends at least that far.

https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2017-10-04/pro-life-rep-tim-murphy-pressured-mistress-to-get-abortion

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2012/10/scott-desjarlais-recorded-abortion-call-with-mistress.html

Just reading the link gets you all the info you need in this case.

That's just the best examples from a quick Google. There's a few cattycorner examples mixed in there as well (campaign operatives, or having a girlfriend get an abortion as a teen) but these two are recent and on all fours with the hypothetical.

Now you can quibble with what this means: out of how many pro life politicians so maybe this isn't that many, or should we only count out of pro lifers who have affairs, or should we assume that this kind of thing happens 12 times in secret for every time it happens in public so this is only the tip of the iceberg, or whatever you want. But it's certainly not an absurdity.

Indeed, I included that as an example not to make a point about pro-life politicians or anything, but just because it is a handy example that has readily available real-world examples.

That's what virtue signalling is. You scream loudly about a moral position you claim to hold, but when the time comes to apply that position you back down instantly. So you get to feel good about 'supporting' the right thing but have no intention of behaving in accordance with it.

Your signal is unreliable, and you intend for others to believe it but you don't care to be bound by it nor incur the costs of enforcing it.

Robin Hanson’s importance to the early LessWrongers means that he shows up in a ton of related work. Scott essays and so on. Try reading this one about countersignaling.

Have you encountered the signaling theory of education? I want to say it’s Caplan’s work. The argument goes that almost all of the value in education is signaling compliance to employers. It doesn’t matter if one didn’t actually learn a technical skill; the point is looking like a good corporate drone. For obvious reasons, this is really appealing to people who were really bored in school and hated its structure.

Therein lies the problem, because the signaling lens is just too applicable. Take your hair-color example. It’s definitely used as a signal of blue-tribe allegiance. But so is “left-leaning politics.” So is valuing nonconformity. How far down do you have to go before you hit a real belief, rather than something intended as a signal?

The Hanson answer, as I understand it, is “all the way.” Signaling all the way down. This is tempting, because it preempts anyone trying to signal that they’re one layer deeper than you. It’s also prone to half-assed psychoanalysis! Sooner or later you end up like Freud, constructing a whole mythos to justify why someone might think blue hair is hot.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Thanks for sharing the link. I have encountered the signaling theory of education prior to reading the book and it is something I’ve felt intuitively for a long time.

How far down do you have to go before you hit a real belief, rather than something intended as a signal?

Well the real belief should be whatever the person would do in the privacy of their own home if they knew nobody could ever find out that they did it. For instance, wearing sweatpants in their own home because sweatpants are comfortable.

But when 2 people interact then a person’s behavior falls into 3 buckets:

  • Person A is intentionally sending a signal and is consciously aware of it (wearing a suit to an interview to impress the potential employer)
  • Person A is sending a signal but they are unconsciously aware that they are sending it
  • Person A is communicating a real belief

Then person B is interpreting the behavior and signals and trying to determine what is a real belief vs. signal. Then also using those observations to make predictions and assumptions about Person A.

If person A has a dog just because they like dogs (so a true belief) then person B might interpret that Person A is signaling that they are good with commitments and are good at raising kids. This interpretation happens even if Person A has a real belief that they don’t want kids.

If Person A wears sweatpants in public it will still get interpreted as having some meaning regardless of it is a true belief (Person A believes it is the most comfortable choice of attire) or signal (Person A intentionally did it to show they don’t care about appearance).

IIRC Hansen warns us against psychoanalysis. We can never be certain why another person behaves a certain way, it is always a guess.

It is also impossible to intentionally signal something and guarantee that other people interpret the signal in the way you intend.

To me the point of signals is:

  • Help predicting a person’s future behavior, but realize that this is just an uncertain prediction
  • Analyzing your own behavior to make sure you aren’t sending signals that you’re not intending to
  • Finding X is not just about Y situations so you can design good policies and procedures or explain unexpected outcomes

How far down do you have to go before you hit a real belief, rather than something intended as a signal?

Easy. Until you hit the point where the person stating the belief will actually pay a significant personal cost for their stated belief turning out to be false.

This is one form of 'revealed preference.' If you say you believe something but you suffer no consequence for being incorrect, then you have no incentive to be truthful, and thus the signal is cheap and likely unreliable. Your REAL beliefs, on the other hand, will be reflected in how you behave when actual consequences, rewards, or punishment are on the line based on whether you get things right or not.

This is incidentally why Hanson strongly endorses prediction markets as a method of finding consensuses on 'truth' and why Caplan places bets on many of his own predictions.

Putting this on my to read list.

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