This feels like it’s missing the most common form of “social punishment”, which is just a threat to at some distant point in the future take resources from you, in a way that ultimately relies on physical force, but just does so through many intermediaries. I agree the map-distorting kind of social punishment is real, but also, lots of social punishment is of the form “I think X is bad, and I will use my ability to steer our collective efforts in the direction of harming X”.
A single step removed, this might simply be someone saying “X is bad, and if I see you associating with X I will come and throw stones through your window”. Another step removed it becomes “X is bad, and I will vote to remove X from our professional association which is necessary for them to do business”. Another step removed it becomes “X is bad and I am spending my social capital which is a shared ledger we vaguely keep track of to reduce the degree to which X gets access to shared resources, and the basis of that social capital is some complicated system of hard power and threats that in some distant past had something to do with physical violence but has long since become its own game”.
I don’t think most social punishment is best modeled as map distortion. Indeed, I notice in your list above you suspiciously do not list the most common kind of attribute that is attributed to someone facing social punishment. “X is bad” or “X sucks” or “X is evil”. Those are indeed different statements, and those statements should usually more accurately be interpreted as a threat in a game grounded in social capital that is more grounded in physical violence and property rights than in map distortion.
Indeed, I notice in your list above you suspiciously do not list the most common kind of attribute that is attributed to someone facing social punishment. “X is bad” or “X sucks” or “X is evil”.
I’m inclined to still count this under “judgments supervene on facts and values.” Why is X bad, sucky, evil? These things can’t be ontologically basic. Perhaps less articulate members of a mass punishment coalition might not have an answer (“He just is; what do you mean ‘why’? You’re not an X supporter, are you?”), but somewhere along the chain of command, I expect their masters to offer some sort of justification with some sort of relationship to checkable facts in the real world: “stupid, dishonest, cruel, ugly, &c.” being the examples I used in the post; we could keep adding to the list with “fascist, crazy, cowardly, disloyal, &c.” but I think you get the idea.
The justification might not be true; as I said in the post, people have an incentive to lie. But the idea that “bad, sucks, evil” are just threats within a social capital system without any even pretextual meaning outside the system flies in the face of experience that people demand pretexts.
I agree that in common parlance there is still some ontological confusion going on here, but I think it’s largely a sideshow to what is happening.
If there was a culture in the world that had an expression that more straightforwardly meant “I curse you” and so wasn’t making claims about checkable attributes about the other person, and that expression was commonly used where we use statements like “You suck”, I don’t think that culture would be very different from ours. Indeed, “I curse you”, or the more common “fuck you” is a thing people say (or in the former case used to say), and it works, and usually has very similar effects to saying “you suck”, despite the latter being ontologically a very different kind of statement if taken literally.
I agree that there is often also a claim smuggled in about some third-party checkable attribute. This is IMO not that crazy. Indeed, a curse/direct-insult is often associated with some checkable facts, and so calling attention to both makes it efficient to combine them.
It is indeed common that if you were wronged by someone by your own lights, that this is evidence that other people will be wronged by their lights as well, and so that there will be some third-party checkable attribute of the person that generalizes. So it’s not that surprising that these two kinds of actions end up with shared language (and my guess is there are also benefits in terms of plausible deniability on how much social capital you end up spending that encourage people to conflate here, but this doesn’t change the fact that the pure curse kind of expression exists and is a crucial thing to model to make accurate predictions here).
I admit I am a bit confused about the thesis here… I get that accurate behavioral accounting is sometimes tightly related to social punishment such that the attempt to give or defend oneself from punishment provides incentive to lie about the behavior (and attempts to describe the behavior have direct implications for punishment).
But are you further claiming that that all social punishment is identical[1] to truth-claims about other things (i.e. “reasons for the punishment”)? This seems like an ideal that I aspire to, but not how most people relate to social punishment, where social ostracism can sometimes simply be a matter of fashion or personal preference.
Personally I use phrases like “X is lame” or “X isn’t cool” to intentionally and explicitly set the status of things. I endeavor to always have good reasons for why and to provide them (or at least to have them ready if requested), but the move itself does not require justification in order to successfully communicate that something is having its status lowered or is something that I oppose. People would often happily just accept the status-claims without reasons, similar to learning what is currently ‘in fashion’.
On reflection I don’t quite mean identical to, but something more like “Is a deterministic function of truth-claims about good/bad behavior, taking that-and-only-that as input”.
This feels like it’s missing the most common form of “social punishment”, which is just a threat to at some distant point in the future take resources from you, in a way that ultimately relies on physical force, but just does so through many intermediaries. I agree the map-distorting kind of social punishment is real, but also, lots of social punishment is of the form “I think X is bad, and I will use my ability to steer our collective efforts in the direction of harming X”.
A single step removed, this might simply be someone saying “X is bad, and if I see you associating with X I will come and throw stones through your window”. Another step removed it becomes “X is bad, and I will vote to remove X from our professional association which is necessary for them to do business”. Another step removed it becomes “X is bad and I am spending my social capital which is a shared ledger we vaguely keep track of to reduce the degree to which X gets access to shared resources, and the basis of that social capital is some complicated system of hard power and threats that in some distant past had something to do with physical violence but has long since become its own game”.
I don’t think most social punishment is best modeled as map distortion. Indeed, I notice in your list above you suspiciously do not list the most common kind of attribute that is attributed to someone facing social punishment. “X is bad” or “X sucks” or “X is evil”. Those are indeed different statements, and those statements should usually more accurately be interpreted as a threat in a game grounded in social capital that is more grounded in physical violence and property rights than in map distortion.
I’m inclined to still count this under “judgments supervene on facts and values.” Why is X bad, sucky, evil? These things can’t be ontologically basic. Perhaps less articulate members of a mass punishment coalition might not have an answer (“He just is; what do you mean ‘why’? You’re not an X supporter, are you?”), but somewhere along the chain of command, I expect their masters to offer some sort of justification with some sort of relationship to checkable facts in the real world: “stupid, dishonest, cruel, ugly, &c.” being the examples I used in the post; we could keep adding to the list with “fascist, crazy, cowardly, disloyal, &c.” but I think you get the idea.
The justification might not be true; as I said in the post, people have an incentive to lie. But the idea that “bad, sucks, evil” are just threats within a social capital system without any even pretextual meaning outside the system flies in the face of experience that people demand pretexts.
I agree that in common parlance there is still some ontological confusion going on here, but I think it’s largely a sideshow to what is happening.
If there was a culture in the world that had an expression that more straightforwardly meant “I curse you” and so wasn’t making claims about checkable attributes about the other person, and that expression was commonly used where we use statements like “You suck”, I don’t think that culture would be very different from ours. Indeed, “I curse you”, or the more common “fuck you” is a thing people say (or in the former case used to say), and it works, and usually has very similar effects to saying “you suck”, despite the latter being ontologically a very different kind of statement if taken literally.
I agree that there is often also a claim smuggled in about some third-party checkable attribute. This is IMO not that crazy. Indeed, a curse/direct-insult is often associated with some checkable facts, and so calling attention to both makes it efficient to combine them.
It is indeed common that if you were wronged by someone by your own lights, that this is evidence that other people will be wronged by their lights as well, and so that there will be some third-party checkable attribute of the person that generalizes. So it’s not that surprising that these two kinds of actions end up with shared language (and my guess is there are also benefits in terms of plausible deniability on how much social capital you end up spending that encourage people to conflate here, but this doesn’t change the fact that the pure curse kind of expression exists and is a crucial thing to model to make accurate predictions here).
I admit I am a bit confused about the thesis here… I get that accurate behavioral accounting is sometimes tightly related to social punishment such that the attempt to give or defend oneself from punishment provides incentive to lie about the behavior (and attempts to describe the behavior have direct implications for punishment).
But are you further claiming that that all social punishment is identical[1] to truth-claims about other things (i.e. “reasons for the punishment”)? This seems like an ideal that I aspire to, but not how most people relate to social punishment, where social ostracism can sometimes simply be a matter of fashion or personal preference.
Personally I use phrases like “X is lame” or “X isn’t cool” to intentionally and explicitly set the status of things. I endeavor to always have good reasons for why and to provide them (or at least to have them ready if requested), but the move itself does not require justification in order to successfully communicate that something is having its status lowered or is something that I oppose. People would often happily just accept the status-claims without reasons, similar to learning what is currently ‘in fashion’.
On reflection I don’t quite mean identical to, but something more like “Is a deterministic function of truth-claims about good/bad behavior, taking that-and-only-that as input”.