signaling Archives

Tag: signaling

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Exolymph creator Sonya Mann's active website is Sonya, Supposedly.

December 20, 2016

Up and Down the Levels

I have a messy hypothesis to unwind.

There are several different levels on which The Discourse™ takes place. Communication has multiple functions for humans, the dominant two being establishing social relationships and relaying information. Often a communicative act serves both purposes at once.

I don’t know who coined this term, but “stroking” is a good mnemonic for the base level of communication. Apes pick nits out of each other’s fur; humans ask, “How are you?” despite indifference to the answer. These are ritualistic gestures that ease everyday social interaction and establish bonds of civility.

The next level up is factional or tribal. We align with particular cultural entities, often based on family background or the local consensus, and signal this loudly. Sharing political memes on Facebook falls into this category. In fact, it’s the secret behind the “fake news” phenomenon. Partisan clickbait peddlers have a ready audience because many people are concerned with tribal signaling rather than evaluating facts.

Then we get to the object level. Here people are concerned with evaluating facts, and assessing the relationship that abstract ideas have to reality. If you read this newsletter you probably spend much of your time in this realm.

Above the object level is the meta level, and perhaps this is less of an entirely separate layer of discourse and more of a self-aware version of the object level. I don’t think anyone can stay in meta territory all the time, but I might be universalizing my own failings.

Examples of The Discourse™ at each level:

stroking level — “good morning”
tribal level — “the outgroup is bad”
object level — “I disagree with the outgroup’s policies”
meta level — “the most effective way to go about disagreeing with the outgroup’s policies is XYZ”

People are able to be nice to each other at the stroking level and the meta level. The object level is kind of a tossup, and the tribal level is usually toxic. Often these two middle levels bleed together, or oppose each. People engaging at the object level tend to be rebuffed by people engaging at the tribal level, and everyone ends up frustrated.

Like I said, this is a messy idea, and I haven’t figured out how to articular it properly. Also, I’m not sure 1) if there is any solution, or if a solution is even needed, or 2) how the internet messes with this beyond context collapse. If you have thoughts on this, I’m very curious to hear them.

(Much of this dispatch is a rephrasing and reframing of David Chapman’s stages idea. His version is more deeply considered.)

Reader Greg Juhn responded:

Quick comment — “signaling” one’s affiliation to a tribe sounds kind of benign, like birds chirping to each other or staking out territory, whereas most fake news has an aggressive “lock her up” or “burn him at the stake” vibe that indicates tribes have entered an attack [or] combat phase. Fake news is essentially a rallying cry. [¶]

Tribe members can huddle and pat each other on the back (a benign echo chamber) or they can turn with bared teeth and actively attack the other group. I don’t know when a conversation on social media moves from the benign phase to the attack phase, but it seems like that is what happens. Something triggers benign commentary to become meme warfare which leads to physical warfare.

John Ohno, AKA @enkiv2, also shared a mind-expanding comment.

June 9, 2016

Las Vegas & Self-Doubt

From a very long essay that probes human nature and coordination problems, here’s a passage about gambling, random initial conditions, and the resultant perverse incentives:

“Las Vegas doesn’t exist because of some decision to hedonically optimize civilization, it exists because of a quirk in dopaminergic reward circuits, plus the microstructure of an uneven regulatory environment, plus Schelling points. A rational central planner with a god’s-eye-view, contemplating these facts, might have thought ‘Hm, dopaminergic reward circuits have a quirk where certain tasks with slightly negative risk-benefit ratios get an emotional valence associated with slightly positive risk-benefit ratios, let’s see if we can educate people to beware of that.’ People within the system, following the incentives created by these facts, think: ‘Let’s build a forty-story-high indoor replica of ancient Rome full of albino tigers in the middle of the desert, and so become slightly richer than people who didn’t!'”

I’ve been to Las Vegas. It is perhaps the most surreal, dystopian place that I’ve ever seen. (Obviously there are much worse cities with equal aesthetic impact, but I haven’t personally visited them.) I guess that’s what you should expect from a metropolis developed by mafia cartels?

The Vegas sky blares with neon lights; the inside of every building is coated with cigarette grime. Elderly immigrant women stand on the sidewalk, wearing yellow shirts that advertise escort agencies, and slap their fliers against their palms. The drinks are huge, just as neon as the billboards. The casinos all have different exterior themes, but inside the slot machines are the same.

Walking up and down the Strip, every kind of advertisement is incessant, and you can spend copious amounts of money as pointlessly as you want.

Photo by Matthew Straubmuller.

Of course, I have to wonder — are my objections to Las Vegas’ tourist culture classist? Plenty of people enjoy it. They go there on purpose, spend their money on purpose, and come back next year. Yes, the city is ecologically terrible — all that decadence in a desert is obscene — but San Francisco features a greater number of miserable humans camping on the street. Let she who is without sin cast the first stone, etc.

Maybe the reason why I don’t like Vegas is that it caters to people who aren’t bourgeois intellectuals, which is the snobbiest possible way for me to describe myself, but still pretty accurate.

Maybe I’m unconsciously writing all of this as a way to signal “virtue” as perceived by members of my ideological tribe. I’m not into conspicuous consumption, so I’m “good” by the norms established in my social sphere. Never mind how odd my own conspicuous information habits look to other groups.

The larger point of the passage I quoted at the beginning is that people follow their incentives, even if their choices seem silly or tragic when analyzed from a great height. Sometimes incentives are really obvious, albeit in an absurd way — whoever builds the most ostentatious casino will profit — and sometimes incentives are expressed through social compulsions that don’t make 100% sense.

(PS: Schelling points are “focal point[s] for each person’s expectation of what the other expects him to expect to be expected to do” — more on Wikipedia.)

May 31, 2016

Meandering Digital Meta-Anxiety

The infamous Skateboard Academic on Twitter.

Sometimes I make grand declarations: “Fundamentally, I am a cynical optimist.” Imagine that accompanied by a sweeping gesture. But it’s not true, of course. Fundamentally, I ride the tides of the media I’m absorbing on a given day, and whether I’ve remembered to take my meds or not.

(A cynical optimist believes that the world is gradually improving over time, but that human beings are selfish above all else. I do believe both of those things. However, like most ideological posturing, at core it’s probably just my way of signaling a certain set of sympathies.)

“You are what you eat.” I am what I consume, information and images included. And so are you, meaning that I’m feeding you right now, if we stretch the metaphor a bit. The phrase “media diet” is kinda played out by now, but you know what I mean.

Does this seem disjointed?

Photo by Dave Bonta.

Well, it is disjointed. That’s how I read nowadays so it’s also how I write. I came back to this browser tab after detouring through Facebook and Slack. It’s okay, I suppose. The ideas are still here. Or at least I don’t know about the ideas that have been sacrificed.

“To the days beyond this one which are still perfect” — that which is unborn is unspoiled. It’s easy to expect so much of the days that haven’t come yet. But I worry, too. I’m sure Y Combinator and everyone who hates Y Combinator will find a way to make their basic income experiment contentious, for example.

Here in the US, those of us in the Blue Tribe are increasingly frightened by Trump as the election trundles onward like some perverse version of Manifest Destiny where meme magic conquers every plot of land and the fucking alt right gets to decide who can sharecrop.

So the days beyond this one are not only perfect — the possibility also exists that they’re horrific. And we’d obsessed with both dialectical futures.

April 3, 2016

Small Internet Ingroups

“Under low uncertainty, you have to find a way to like one of the few default options available. Under high uncertainty, you have to eliminate options and avoid premature commitment.” — Venkatesh Rao

Photo via The Preiser Project.

At the end of the dispatch inspired by Mad Max, I asked how genuine communities can protect themselves in the chaotic dystopian milieu. Is it possible to avoid the fallout and continue trusting each other? I got a couple of interesting answers. Uel Aramchek said:

“This is where I think the Mad Max side of the internet is most clear — in the bubbling and sequestering of communities. People band together against trolls and opposing voices through a number of tactics that create a desert between online groups. Through blocking, moderating, filtering, featuring, etc. Communities are tightened, but the space between them is widened. Online fights and factionalizing have grown far more brutal as this has increased.”

Great description of Reddit, tbh. That’s exactly how the upvote function in a sub works. Twitter “tribes” follow the same principles. See also: Scott Alexander’s brilliant essay “I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup”, which makes the case that politics = identity signalling. I have mixed feelings about all of this. On the one hand, I don’t want to associate with people who hold a bunch of beliefs that I judge to be bigoted. On the other hand, how much intellectual enrichment am I sacrificing for the sake of social cohesion?

From a different angle, Reddit user inpu weighed in:

“I think most [communities] won’t [be able to shield themselves]; they’ll just hope that they’re not interesting enough to get into trouble with the surveillance state or the companies.

I see only two ways to protect yourself:

Live a low-tech, off-the-grid life.

Become a hacker yourself. This will require a lot of knowledge and skills. Understanding all the necessary details about IT and encryption is already complicated, and it will only get more so.

I could see some cooperation and overlap between groups 1 and 2, with people using little technology in general and creating the tech that they need themselves or have hackers do it for them.”

I tend to be a cynic, so I’m not too hopeful about the ability of lone-wolf hackers to circumvent governments and huge multinationals. But there is the possibility that a tool created by a small group can scale up to have a far greater impact. Bitcoin is a prime example.

One of the reasons why I’m intrigued by the open-source and free-software movements is that they try to do an end-run around typical corporate power structures. They don’t entirely succeed, of course, but it wouldn’t be fair to expect that.

I’m still pondering what my own modus operandi will be.

Tag: signaling

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