Do a deep dive on one chapter to see how much social signalling/status motives can explain to see how seriously we should take it
I worry that signalling based explanations are fun but have too many degrees of freedom, if the first order signalling explanation doesn’t work, move to 2nd order, or 3rd order, or an equilibrium, repeat until you get a ‘surprising’ result. I guess the test for this is to re read the chapters and check which have a rigorous defense of this equilibrium we see matches the (or one of the very few) equilibria predicted by a signalling theory.
If writing about signalling, include something abt. sprezzatura
Competitive altruism of babblers links to stupidity of ordinal Ambition altruism
- Many animals have a local “pecking order” set by winners of pair-wise physical fights. In some animals, rank is also influenced via prestige elements. For example, babbler birds rise in rank by doing good things for their local group, such as by sharing food and warning against predators. These things count for rank even when gained via violence, such as by fighting other birds for the best places to look out for predators, and by forcing food down the throat of other birds.
Arms race of redwood height, with increasing rate of height increase up to a limit? is evidence of intra species competition, same as machiavellian intelligence hypothesis between defense and offense re deception and investigation.
In animals that are pair bonded and monogamous, male and female reproductive strategies converge, humans are close
Status hierarchies cam be dominance based, with aversive upwards relations, or prestige based, with attractive relations. But since time and attention are limited from both superiors and inferiors, prestige hierarchies can be just as zero sum as dominance hierarchies.
Playful insults are countersignals for spouses having the highest amount of affection/commitment. (though isn’t signalling only relevant in games where there’s a difference of interests and info asymmetry? Mere epistemic incompetence isn’t enough? I guess ignorance of each other’s interests kind of suffices for a risk of accidental interest divergence)
This happens when background info is enough to distinguish low status from high status, but neither from medium. A high status person may then countersignal in a way that shows them to be either low or high status, (resolving to high status with background info), and a medium status person will aim to be distinguished from low-status people by conspicuous consumption).
(this is contra normal signalling, where the handicap principle in biology states that only animals with a surplus of desired resource, like energy, will deliberately ‘waste’ it on growing large tails,
Lack of coordination allows arms races
Why are hunter gatherers patrilocal?
Dubiousness of some of the low violence and egalitarian claims in HG section
- mightnt HG have high dominance equality and low admiration equality?
- anti faction forming norms seem rare now, maybe because we have more dominance hierarchies?
Humans needed weapons, and maybe language to hav3 norms, which are defined by being enforced by 3rd party collective punishment
Meta norm axelrod shifts equilibrium
- is Hanson’s post on other meta norms connected to this?
Reputation and gossip are egalitarian coordination and punishment mechanisms
Our intuitions about fairness and merit could either map to costly/non-fungible signals, or robust dispositions. Cobsider cases when you can cheaply/costlyly change your character, either reversibly or not?
- super relevant for dispositions and love
Secrets may depend on who knows, or how common the knowledge is, thus pretexts like irony and brown paper bags can be enough to erode common knowledge which is sometimes all that’s needed
Plausible deniability is key, communicating in a way that lowers the chance of common knowledge emerging lets eavesdroppers avoid enforcement of the meta-norm, and speakers avoid regular norm enforcememt - consider sexual euphemisms
- why exactly does plausible deniability let someone off for not enforcing the meta norm? Why should the meta norm not be structured to be ‘if you reasonably thing there’s above an X percent change that someone is violating this norm, enforce it’. Is it structured like that?? Idk I can’t figure out the objection or confusion here.
Continuing possibility of cooperative norm evasion lets brains keep evolving after open competition, cheaters and detectors arms race, this explains why we still got big brains and didn’t plateau.
Schelling on mixed motive games like chicken and the value of self deception. Ignorance must be publicly believed in order to be useful. Since humans have ToM that works for other people, we cant lie perfectly, so the best way to convince others of our ignorance is to either be bad liars, which may have evolved, or incapable of intenti9nally successfully deceiving others via already having deceived ourselves.
How might aliens without a ToM lie? How might humans and aliens with very different ToMs interact?
4 incentives to self-deceive
Madman -
Loyalist
Cheater
Cheerleader
Disability denial and split brain word assoc explanations
Self discretion in intra brain communication is the mechanism for much self deception
Much universal body language isnt conventional, its a costly display of vulnerability, or is aimed at making something common knowledge, like ring kissing, or preventing it from being common knowledge, like flirting via eye contact and coded language.
Consciousness = ignorant press secretary
Eye contact ratio in conversation signals dominance, tracks intuitive status.
Laughter = play signal, thats why babies do it, and why its audible i.e. communication. Babies laugh to show theyre playing/trusting the adult throwing them up. Much adult human play is based around curiosity around testing norms to figure out whats really dangerous. This is why humor has to be novel/surprising, simple norms which toilet hunor skirts dont stay funny, but norms around sex are more complex. Similarly, once it becomes clear something is considered racist, its not funny anymore
Whether a harm is funny depends on the degree of harm and psychological distance (this is why roadrunner is funny as a cartoon) cf. Tragedy is me pricking my finger, comedy is you falling into an open sewer and dying
Those in power want to prevent people laughing (eslecially together) to prevent the boundarues of what norm violations will be enforced from becoming common knowledge, i.e. they want to keep the boundaries of force illegible.
Against the theory of conversation as info exchange (i.e. what Tyler Cowen does)
- we would focus on more important topics
- we wouldnt care about relevance
- we wouldve evolved big ears, not nimble larynxes
- we would be hesitant to speak to avoid losing info monopolies
- we would track debts of information to compensate for this.
The general pattern here seems to be that variety is social – we prefer variety more for things that have wider social scopes. It is as if we personally don’t care much for variety, but we need our larger social circles to see that we can afford and tolerate a great deal of variety. (From OB post)
Convo is instead for finding allies/partners so we want to assess their more robust dispositions (whats in their backpack) relevance restriction thus acts like randomness restriction, preventing degrees of freedom and thereby making signals more reliable
Academic research is similarly about forming prestigous allies between patrons and researchers, not finding neglected useful information, this explains lots
Consumers of news are looking for what they need for comversational success, not being informed citizens
Much conversation is also maintaining ally strength/syncing up by talking shit or gossiping, and testing how in sync we are, not just ruthless prestige climbing
BMW ads dont aim for potential customers, instead lifestyle advertisers like this pay more per person for the ads when the viewers know other people are seeing the same ad. This is why the superbowl is all lifestyle ads.
The Elephant in the Brain on art
Many discrete, non-anonymous, Local, identifiable lives, child-focused, presentist charities signal spontaneous empathy, (cant defect), good mates, commitment to community, etc. Marginal charity fails at this.
Sheepskin effect, curve grades, bad for memorisation, being dull and pointless all help education as signal
6x productivity diff in domesticated vs wild workers
Domestication inc belief in justness of hierarchies
Importance of being cared for while sick, physically and politically, by allies for HGs leads to modern custom of sacrificing time and effort to help sick people now, e.g. home cooked only. Also signalling good allyship as helper
Med spending tracks relative wealth
Rcts e.g. rand and oregon find almost no diff with med spending
Care for credentials
8 perc pay more than 50 to learn risk adj death rates for hospitals and su4geons but news stories matter
Boredom of sermons is feature not bug, makes attendance a costly time signal, which shows trust via community commitment, same fir sacrificing pleasure, sex, outside group status, e.g. h7mbling self before god, financial gain, positions of leadership require strongest signals, thus we trust poor celibates most
Religions make ritual sacrifices to show loyalty to each other (and making barriers to entry to ensure only the most committed join). Resource sacrificed can be money, food, health, pleasure, time, status, or energy. Outside-group status is often sacrificed by stigmatism to tie members to in group. This reduces the need for expensive monitoring and enforcement of norms by the groups.
Church attendance was a good signal of trust. Even now, americans dont want atheist presidents.
Conservative norms around birth control, monogamy, high fertility let child rearing costs be shared, reduce needs for monitoring fertility. Thus seeming liberal personal choices actually effect conservative communities, they encourage defection for careers and stuff, which lessens the value of the community for its remanining members.
- everything has externalities, my face never ends, and your fist is always punching it.
Synchronised movement and speech increases generosity and self-sacrifice in public goods games.
Common knowledge prevents ignorance as an excuse, and lets potential defectors see how many people will enforce the norm. This is the point of mutual visibility of audience in sermons
Badges like yamakas signal in group membership to in-group, and willingness to be held to ing-group norms/punishment to outgroup.
Irrelevant doctrinal matters signal in-group commitment the same we sports teams do, you have no selfish reason to hold them, so they’re pure signals of loyalty, the more fanatical the better. Thus they are stringer when there’s competing religions, e.g. reofmration, muslim conquests, contra china mostly.
The same goes for points of political polarisation to an extent, they should be useless so signalling loyalty is the only explabation. They should thus be a midpoint of implausible/useless and plausible, so people dont th8nk your party are idiots.
There are usually two parties, partly bc shared attention space, but why else.