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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   3670 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.

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