First, I will summarize what seems to be your core thesis.
In a comment below, Dagon said:
I don’t think you’re “dropping all effort” to signal, you’re rather getting good at signaling, by actually being truthful and information-focused.
You reply:
I agree with what I think you’re saying. I think there’s been a definitional sliding here. When I say “Drop all effort to signal”, I’m describing the experience on the inside. I think you’re saying that from the outside, signaling is still happening, and the benefits of “dropping all effort to signal” can be understood in signaling terms.
I agree with that.
So you seem to be focused in this post on ways togenerate signals. You seem to suggest that there are two broad strategies, and that we have a choice about which to engage in:
Authentic (“drop all effort to signal!”, “I feel care for someone”, “I don’t have to put in effort. It just happens, kind of like drinking water from my cup in my hand when I’m thirsty just happens.”, “having taken the truth all the way into your body”, “grokked it”, “transparent”).
Shallow acting (“the Goodhart thing”, “seems innocent enough”, “make more of an effort”, “in fact doesn’t care about these others and is only interested in how he benefits from others’ actions”, “”appreciation”“, “(correctly!) feel dehumanized”, “control his signals”, “come across as genuine”, “”feeding psychopaths””, “manipulating their signals”).
Method acting.“Hacking your own signal” can allow acting to perhaps (“people pick up on this stuff pretty automatically”) accurately produce the same results as authentic signal generation, as long as “you happen to never notice and fear this, and the people you’re expressing appreciation for never pick up on this.” This is probably a temporary success at best (“It’s just very unstable”).
You also claim that authentic signal generation is “almost strictly more effective,” because “If there’s an answer… it’ll be much, much easier to find. If there isn’t a solution, we correctly conclude that much, much more quickly and effortlessly,” and also because ”… you end up quite a bit ahead if you let some of these communications fail instead of sacrificing pieces of your integrity to Goodhart’s Demon.”
It feels like there’s also an implication that authentic signal generation is more virtuous than acting, but that’s never explicitly stated.
So as a summary of these claims:
Signals can be generated via authenticity, method acting, or shallow acting. Authenticity is typically more effective and reliable than either form of acting at achieving the results you want, and is also perhaps more virtuous.
This tends to frame authenticity and acting as opposites (“just be yourself”). Others, of course, frame acting as a means by which we can achieve authenticity (“fake it ’til you make it”). Here’s the first convenient post on Psychology Today, which says “However, it turns out that the relationship between your emotions and your behavior is a little more reciprocal than that. This means that if you force a smile when you are feeling down, you will lift your mood, and alternatively, if you frown when you are happy, you will feel down.”
So a more charitable explanation for Raymond’s response is that Raymond is trying to “fake it ‘til he makes it.” By “making more of an effort,” he is trying to cultivate authenticity. It might be wise to affirm that possibility, or to make an argument directly against the “fake it ’til you make it” strategy if that is your intention.
Of course, “authenticity” and “caring” are ill-defined terms, referring both to a short-term emotional state and a longer-term intention or sense of meaning about a relationship. Pinning down which is meant might allow us to draw upon the psychology literature to see if there is any strong consensus on whether or not “fake it ‘til you make it” is an effective way to alter one’s own internal state or as a method of creating perceptions in other people. My prior is that it’s unlikely that a sufficiently broad and deep evidence base exists to conclusively answer these questions conclusively, but that there’s at least some evidence in favor of some versions of the “fake it ’til you make it” strategy in some contexts.
Method acting. “Hacking your own signal” can allow acting to perhaps (“people pick up on this stuff pretty automatically”) accurately produce the same results as authentic signal generation, as long as “you happen to never notice and fear this, and the people you’re expressing appreciation for never pick up on this.” This is probably a temporary success at best (“It’s just very unstable”).
I know one local rationalist who does method acting all the time. One of the main reasons he does it is because it’s a way to disassociate chronic physical pain. That means he does it very more consistently than someone who just does it in some social situations to get signaling benefits. I’ll call him Bob for this story.
One time I had a conversation with Alice and Bob and Alice remarked that Bob is hard to read and mysterious because the emotions she reads in him don’t seem to translate into direct action. Then I said “Of course not, he does his acting thing [I had deeper conversations with him before]” and then Bob clarified and said, “It’s method acting”.
Alice and Bob later got together into a relationship.
Right, I am including that aspect in my summary. I put it in different words (“shallow acting” vs. “attention to signals”) to make the concepts a little easier to work with for my style of writing.
My impression was that you agreed that dropping efforts to signal brought the main benefits you’re concerned with here, by changing the signals you’re sending, typically in ways that come across as more trustworthy. Here are some additional quotes that gave me this impression:
Maybe I bias toward signals that (a) are harder for a dishonest version of me to send and (b) that Bob can tell are harder for sleazy-me to send.
One result is that those signals that would be costly to sleazy-me to send would appear much, much more effortlessly here… They just happen, because the emphasis is on letting truth speak simply for itself.
Even if this latter scenario works, it can’t work as efficiently as dropping all effort to signal and just being honest does. The signals just automatically reflect reality in the latter case.
Raymond D: My main takeaway from this post is that it’s important to distinguish between sending signals and trying to send signals, because the latter often leads to goodharting.
You: That is a wonderful summary.
As such, I interpret “drop all efforts to signal,” which I labeled as “authenticity,” as an approach to generating signals, which you’re claiming is morally and instrumentally better than signal manipulation (labeled “shallow acting”). You claim that what makes shallow acting/attention to signals problematic is that it “tends to create Goodhart drift,” and alleviating this problem is what makes dropping efforts to signal a superior way to generate signals. The brevity of your response makes me think you perceive me as having fundamentally misunderstood your post, but it doesn’t give me a lot to go on as far as updating my understanding, if so.
First, I will summarize what seems to be your core thesis.
In a comment below, Dagon said:
You reply:
So you seem to be focused in this post on ways to generate signals. You seem to suggest that there are two broad strategies, and that we have a choice about which to engage in:
Authentic (“drop all effort to signal!”, “I feel care for someone”, “I don’t have to put in effort. It just happens, kind of like drinking water from my cup in my hand when I’m thirsty just happens.”, “having taken the truth all the way into your body”, “grokked it”, “transparent”).
Shallow acting (“the Goodhart thing”, “seems innocent enough”, “make more of an effort”, “in fact doesn’t care about these others and is only interested in how he benefits from others’ actions”, “”appreciation”“, “(correctly!) feel dehumanized”, “control his signals”, “come across as genuine”, “”feeding psychopaths””, “manipulating their signals”).
Method acting. “Hacking your own signal” can allow acting to perhaps (“people pick up on this stuff pretty automatically”) accurately produce the same results as authentic signal generation, as long as “you happen to never notice and fear this, and the people you’re expressing appreciation for never pick up on this.” This is probably a temporary success at best (“It’s just very unstable”).
You also claim that authentic signal generation is “almost strictly more effective,” because “If there’s an answer… it’ll be much, much easier to find. If there isn’t a solution, we correctly conclude that much, much more quickly and effortlessly,” and also because ”… you end up quite a bit ahead if you let some of these communications fail instead of sacrificing pieces of your integrity to Goodhart’s Demon.”
It feels like there’s also an implication that authentic signal generation is more virtuous than acting, but that’s never explicitly stated.
So as a summary of these claims:
Signals can be generated via authenticity, method acting, or shallow acting. Authenticity is typically more effective and reliable than either form of acting at achieving the results you want, and is also perhaps more virtuous.
This tends to frame authenticity and acting as opposites (“just be yourself”). Others, of course, frame acting as a means by which we can achieve authenticity (“fake it ’til you make it”). Here’s the first convenient post on Psychology Today, which says “However, it turns out that the relationship between your emotions and your behavior is a little more reciprocal than that. This means that if you force a smile when you are feeling down, you will lift your mood, and alternatively, if you frown when you are happy, you will feel down.”
So a more charitable explanation for Raymond’s response is that Raymond is trying to “fake it ‘til he makes it.” By “making more of an effort,” he is trying to cultivate authenticity. It might be wise to affirm that possibility, or to make an argument directly against the “fake it ’til you make it” strategy if that is your intention.
Of course, “authenticity” and “caring” are ill-defined terms, referring both to a short-term emotional state and a longer-term intention or sense of meaning about a relationship. Pinning down which is meant might allow us to draw upon the psychology literature to see if there is any strong consensus on whether or not “fake it ‘til you make it” is an effective way to alter one’s own internal state or as a method of creating perceptions in other people. My prior is that it’s unlikely that a sufficiently broad and deep evidence base exists to conclusively answer these questions conclusively, but that there’s at least some evidence in favor of some versions of the “fake it ’til you make it” strategy in some contexts.
I know one local rationalist who does method acting all the time. One of the main reasons he does it is because it’s a way to disassociate chronic physical pain. That means he does it very more consistently than someone who just does it in some social situations to get signaling benefits. I’ll call him Bob for this story.
One time I had a conversation with Alice and Bob and Alice remarked that Bob is hard to read and mysterious because the emotions she reads in him don’t seem to translate into direct action. Then I said “Of course not, he does his acting thing [I had deeper conversations with him before]” and then Bob clarified and said, “It’s method acting”.
Alice and Bob later got together into a relationship.
No. I’m focused on how attention to signals tends to create Goodhart drift.
Right, I am including that aspect in my summary. I put it in different words (“shallow acting” vs. “attention to signals”) to make the concepts a little easier to work with for my style of writing.
My impression was that you agreed that dropping efforts to signal brought the main benefits you’re concerned with here, by changing the signals you’re sending, typically in ways that come across as more trustworthy. Here are some additional quotes that gave me this impression:
As such, I interpret “drop all efforts to signal,” which I labeled as “authenticity,” as an approach to generating signals, which you’re claiming is morally and instrumentally better than signal manipulation (labeled “shallow acting”). You claim that what makes shallow acting/attention to signals problematic is that it “tends to create Goodhart drift,” and alleviating this problem is what makes dropping efforts to signal a superior way to generate signals. The brevity of your response makes me think you perceive me as having fundamentally misunderstood your post, but it doesn’t give me a lot to go on as far as updating my understanding, if so.