A high status person violating norms for trendsetting/ counter-signalling is violating expectations for a specific purpose very much like a comedian violates them for laughs. I agree that violating expectations helps achieve certain goals.
But, if my goal is to argue well, communicate well, find more accurate beliefs, then I should be focused on not violating expectations for the sake of clarity.
[Note: I am finding a lot of value in our conversation thread so far, and I appreciate your input. It’s really forcing me to figure out when and why and how this concept is useful or when it’s not.]
What if the audiences expectations are based on faulty beliefs? In particular some given topic might have a bunch of entrenched assumptions so that there are positions that can’t be expressed without violating expectations. In the very limit if the communication doesn’t violate expectations then it can’t convey information, the Shannon entropy is zero. There are probably multiple kinds of surprise here. The “easy” kind would be if nobody expected anybody to say “the sky is red”. The “hard” kind would be if one means the lowest wavelength kind of light with “the sky is blue”. Exhausting the easy kind can be done relatively effectively and straighforwardly. But when there are conceptual problems then the hard kind of thing is the main source of progress. If you encounter evidence that can’t be handled with your current conceptual palette you must come up with new concepts in order to accomodate reality. Those updates tend to be laboursome but they tend to be the valuable ones.
A high status person violating norms for trendsetting/ counter-signalling is violating expectations for a specific purpose very much like a comedian violates them for laughs. I agree that violating expectations helps achieve certain goals.
But, if my goal is to argue well, communicate well, find more accurate beliefs, then I should be focused on not violating expectations for the sake of clarity.
[Note: I am finding a lot of value in our conversation thread so far, and I appreciate your input. It’s really forcing me to figure out when and why and how this concept is useful or when it’s not.]
What if the audiences expectations are based on faulty beliefs? In particular some given topic might have a bunch of entrenched assumptions so that there are positions that can’t be expressed without violating expectations. In the very limit if the communication doesn’t violate expectations then it can’t convey information, the Shannon entropy is zero. There are probably multiple kinds of surprise here. The “easy” kind would be if nobody expected anybody to say “the sky is red”. The “hard” kind would be if one means the lowest wavelength kind of light with “the sky is blue”. Exhausting the easy kind can be done relatively effectively and straighforwardly. But when there are conceptual problems then the hard kind of thing is the main source of progress. If you encounter evidence that can’t be handled with your current conceptual palette you must come up with new concepts in order to accomodate reality. Those updates tend to be laboursome but they tend to be the valuable ones.