I interpreted Level 4 as signalling that you’re on whatever side is winning solely because it’s winning where Level 3 is signalling whatever side you personally prefer, winning or not.
Mm, not quite, they both have no true allegiance. The difference is that an L3 agent wants a person’s socially-perceived allegiance to be consistent with their signaling pattern – they want the society to view someone as belonging to the group to which they’ve most strongly signaled belonging to. They care about the “truth” of this.
Hence we get people dredging up someone having sent a wrong signals in order to “cancel” them, hence we get some reluctance to outright lie/fabricate evidence of wrong signaling, hence we get movements trying to “claim” someone as belonging to them because of things they said, hence we get a “war on knowledge” because not knowing what a signal means somewhat excuses you for having sent a wrong one, et cetera.
L3 agents genuinely care about people being accurately sorted. They care about coherency of people’s social images. Not about what is physically true or what people genuinely believe, but what they’ve historically signaled they believe.
Conversely, L4 agents are shameless. They don’t care about maintaining a consistent persona. They can say one thing today and a diametrically opposed thing tomorrow. And unless you can stage the reveal of this information as an attack – unless you can immediately follow it up with some sort of play that gives you power over them – it won’t move them at all.
That sounds basically like signalling that you’re on whatever side is winning? If you don’t care about maintaining a consistent persona, then you can just pick whatever would give you the biggest advantage at the moment.
I think there are more limits than that because plausibility matters. The set of positions Ibram X Kendi could plausibly take is very different from the positions available to Donald Trump. Too big a reach and you’ll look insincere, opportunistic, or weak. It’s easy to alienate your social coalition and much harder to gain acceptance in a new one.
I interpreted Level 4 as signalling that you’re on whatever side is winning solely because it’s winning where Level 3 is signalling whatever side you personally prefer, winning or not.
Mm, not quite, they both have no true allegiance. The difference is that an L3 agent wants a person’s socially-perceived allegiance to be consistent with their signaling pattern – they want the society to view someone as belonging to the group to which they’ve most strongly signaled belonging to. They care about the “truth” of this.
Hence we get people dredging up someone having sent a wrong signals in order to “cancel” them, hence we get some reluctance to outright lie/fabricate evidence of wrong signaling, hence we get movements trying to “claim” someone as belonging to them because of things they said, hence we get a “war on knowledge” because not knowing what a signal means somewhat excuses you for having sent a wrong one, et cetera.
L3 agents genuinely care about people being accurately sorted. They care about coherency of people’s social images. Not about what is physically true or what people genuinely believe, but what they’ve historically signaled they believe.
Conversely, L4 agents are shameless. They don’t care about maintaining a consistent persona. They can say one thing today and a diametrically opposed thing tomorrow. And unless you can stage the reveal of this information as an attack – unless you can immediately follow it up with some sort of play that gives you power over them – it won’t move them at all.
That sounds basically like signalling that you’re on whatever side is winning? If you don’t care about maintaining a consistent persona, then you can just pick whatever would give you the biggest advantage at the moment.
I think there are more limits than that because plausibility matters. The set of positions Ibram X Kendi could plausibly take is very different from the positions available to Donald Trump. Too big a reach and you’ll look insincere, opportunistic, or weak. It’s easy to alienate your social coalition and much harder to gain acceptance in a new one.