It seems to have much more to do with negotiating territorial boundaries and dominance relations (e.g. who’s allowed to touch whom in what ways) than safety in a sense that isn’t mediated by such social positioning.
Hmm, I don’t think I super buy this, though I agree with your arguments for these alternative considerations being more important than one might naively consider. My guess is there is a simulacra level thing going on here where some of the initial premises of cultural norms around touch were based on violence, and those premises have been re-used/co-opted for other purposes, but the underlying structure of concern with violence still looms large.
I overall agree with you that the case for highly asymmetric payoffs and as such strong need for costly differential signaling and associated negotiation is a bunch stronger for violence than for speech, and so a simple analogy with violence is not sufficient to establish that “predominantly” is a wrong descriptor, but I think the structural analogy is sufficient (as in, if we actually look at the mechanics that the violence analogy highlights).
For speech, my current take is that the degree to which costly differential signaling is necessary is highly dependent on a few different things:
Whether the domain of discussion has obvious relevance to conflict. E.g. discussing mathematical proof rarely has immediate relevance to conflict (though not never), and is cheap to verify, whereas discussing e.g. moderation norms and the logic of associated examples is very conflict-adjacent.
The general background level of people playing descriptive/conflicty mimicry games (as estimated by the participants, which is a very noisy measure, and often terribly mistaken in both directions)
The sensitivity of collective resource allocations to the things said in the conversation, i.e. how much is at stake in this social environment (a board meeting of a multi-billion dollar company will tend much more heavily towards needing differential signaling than a low-stakes purchase transaction in a grocery store, or an undergraduate science class)
The sensitivity of the surrounding environment to spot and identify people playing mimicry games and punish them if they do that (which often requires the ability for the environment to talk about these kinds of things, or have some abstractions to handle this)
And of course the degree to which people get rewarded, whether materially or socially, for making correct object-level observations
In addition to that, the differential signaling investments pay interest, in that a group of people who have built mutual trust that they are communicating descriptively will have to do less of that over time, unless some external factor changes their dynamics.
All of this makes me think that under some set of social premises, when the stakes are high, it’s hard to detect subterfuge, group membership is unstable and short-lived, and the reward for truth is weak, then you basically will always need to be concerned with some amount of differential signaling, even if you have largely successfully kept things descriptive so far.
I think I agree with you that there are forces pulling spaces and groups closer into stable attractors here, so there are feedback loops. I don’t believe those attractors are that stable however, and the long-term history of basically any social space will shift over the years, and it requires active governance to notice and redirect it towards different attractors (and beyond that, I don’t believe in there being just two stable attractors, though I am not fully sure whether you are arguing that).
My guess is there is a simulacra level thing going on here where some of the initial premises of cultural norms around touch were based on violence, and those premises have been re-used/co-opted for other purposes, but the underlying structure of concern with violence still looms large.
I agree with this as stated, and think it’s consistent with the perspective I’ve articulated. The crux might be the extent to which ritualized conflict can and does deviate strongly from physical conflict, and relatedly whether legalizing (high-skill) duels would be proepistemic, albeit less so than reviving accessible courts of law, denormalizing ritualized legal boilerplate, and both legalizing bets and and normalizing them as the sort of thing you do if you’re serious.
I think that on this particular spectrum, there are two locally stable attractors for closed social systems, though these attractors have different effects on the nonsocial environment, which can eventually push a system into the other attractor—this is approximately why there’s a large cyclical element to history.
So if a system isn’t clearly falling towards one attractor or the other, we can infer that it’s a frontier between other systems that are changing over time, and doesn’t self-govern.
Hmm, I don’t think I super buy this, though I agree with your arguments for these alternative considerations being more important than one might naively consider. My guess is there is a simulacra level thing going on here where some of the initial premises of cultural norms around touch were based on violence, and those premises have been re-used/co-opted for other purposes, but the underlying structure of concern with violence still looms large.
I overall agree with you that the case for highly asymmetric payoffs and as such strong need for costly differential signaling and associated negotiation is a bunch stronger for violence than for speech, and so a simple analogy with violence is not sufficient to establish that “predominantly” is a wrong descriptor, but I think the structural analogy is sufficient (as in, if we actually look at the mechanics that the violence analogy highlights).
For speech, my current take is that the degree to which costly differential signaling is necessary is highly dependent on a few different things:
Whether the domain of discussion has obvious relevance to conflict. E.g. discussing mathematical proof rarely has immediate relevance to conflict (though not never), and is cheap to verify, whereas discussing e.g. moderation norms and the logic of associated examples is very conflict-adjacent.
The general background level of people playing descriptive/conflicty mimicry games (as estimated by the participants, which is a very noisy measure, and often terribly mistaken in both directions)
The sensitivity of collective resource allocations to the things said in the conversation, i.e. how much is at stake in this social environment (a board meeting of a multi-billion dollar company will tend much more heavily towards needing differential signaling than a low-stakes purchase transaction in a grocery store, or an undergraduate science class)
The sensitivity of the surrounding environment to spot and identify people playing mimicry games and punish them if they do that (which often requires the ability for the environment to talk about these kinds of things, or have some abstractions to handle this)
And of course the degree to which people get rewarded, whether materially or socially, for making correct object-level observations
In addition to that, the differential signaling investments pay interest, in that a group of people who have built mutual trust that they are communicating descriptively will have to do less of that over time, unless some external factor changes their dynamics.
All of this makes me think that under some set of social premises, when the stakes are high, it’s hard to detect subterfuge, group membership is unstable and short-lived, and the reward for truth is weak, then you basically will always need to be concerned with some amount of differential signaling, even if you have largely successfully kept things descriptive so far.
I think I agree with you that there are forces pulling spaces and groups closer into stable attractors here, so there are feedback loops. I don’t believe those attractors are that stable however, and the long-term history of basically any social space will shift over the years, and it requires active governance to notice and redirect it towards different attractors (and beyond that, I don’t believe in there being just two stable attractors, though I am not fully sure whether you are arguing that).
I agree with this as stated, and think it’s consistent with the perspective I’ve articulated. The crux might be the extent to which ritualized conflict can and does deviate strongly from physical conflict, and relatedly whether legalizing (high-skill) duels would be proepistemic, albeit less so than reviving accessible courts of law, denormalizing ritualized legal boilerplate, and both legalizing bets and and normalizing them as the sort of thing you do if you’re serious.
I think that on this particular spectrum, there are two locally stable attractors for closed social systems, though these attractors have different effects on the nonsocial environment, which can eventually push a system into the other attractor—this is approximately why there’s a large cyclical element to history.
So if a system isn’t clearly falling towards one attractor or the other, we can infer that it’s a frontier between other systems that are changing over time, and doesn’t self-govern.