Replacing A with ‘coffee’ and B with ‘tea’ may be useful, here. It seems reasonable to me to not know offhand whether you prefer coffee or tea—I suspect most people have never thought about that directly—but most people would still know that they’d prefer (for example) an espresso from Starbucks (A1) to a cup of Earl Grey (B1), and either of those to a cup of coffee from the local diner where the coffee always tastes like soap (A2).
AdeleneDawner
I personally knew someone who has done that, so the example’s not completely off the mark. He wasn’t Mormon, and he posited pedophilia rather than torture, but he was pretty persistent about it.
I suspect most theists aren’t so obnoxious as to actually say that kind of thing, whether they think it or not, so it’s hard to guesstimate frequency, but it’s not un-heard of.
“To beat your opponent’” is only one form of the idea of winning—“to get the most valuable thing” may be a more useful one.
If what you could learn from taking an unusual strategy or playing against a harder opponent is more valuable than whatever you get from just beating your opponent, then yes, the first option is the better one. There are probably other examples of this kind of thing, too—the things that society defines as ‘good’ or ‘winning’ are not always going to match what we value most.
This sounds just like something I’ve always wondered about: the percentages they give in weather reports, for likelihood of rain. Does ’30% chance of rain’ mean that they estimate a 30% chance of getting any rain, or that they think it’ll rain for 30% of the day, or what?
Interesting (I hope) tangent:
I’m autistic, which means among other things that my native modes of signaling are ‘nonstandard’. I don’t easily understand what most other people are trying to signal, and most other people don’t easily understand what I’m signaling. (This appears to be due to both different modes of signaling and different goals.) Unlike some auties, I do emit signals in the ‘normal’ mode—they’re just usually not very accurate signals of what I actually think or value.
I don’t like being misunderstood, so I made a conscientious effort for a long time to cut my ‘normal-style’ signaling behaviors down to near-zero, if they were happening incidentally to something else—wearing the most neutral clothing I could find, for example, and not discussing my own preferences about anything without a clear reason to do so. Most of the specific tricks I picked up, I integrated as habits, so that the whole process didn’t take a disruptive amount of mental effort, with the side effect that it’s hard for me to pick out specific examples, but I did eventually get quite good at not signaling much at all. (If anyone’s interested in specific examples, I’m willing to take the time to pull some out of long-term memory, but that may take me as much as a couple of days.)
The response to that was interesting. Most people appear to be very uncomfortable dealing with someone who doesn’t signal, and the pressure to do so was significant. It also appears that refusal to signal is taken as a signal of either untrustworthiness, extreme shyness, or disdain, depending on the heuristics being used by the person observing it.
So my experience is basically that we as a society are in a nasty feedback loop when it comes to signaling—it’s simply not a viable option not to signal, in most situations. People will read extra information into your actions whether you want them to or not, and if you don’t choose actions that signal good things, your actions will be taken as a signal of bad things.
(I’m a stubborn cuss who cares more about her own ideology than she does about her social standing, so I continued not signaling anyway. The way I see it, other peoples’ assumptions are not really my problem, but if I were to promote incorrect information, even nonverbally, that’d be wrong of me. Fortunately I’ve recently been able to move to a situation where I can signal accurately to the people I interact with, and do so regularly, and it works much better.)
Not exactly.
I’m in a fairly unique position to be able to figure that out, but it’d take a significant amount of effort, and in most cases I haven’t bothered; if there’s data other than signaling in the behavior, I tend to note the data and ignore the signal. If there’s not much data other than the signal, or the static to data ratio is too bad, I just write the whole thing off as NT weirdness. Mostly, we tend to figure out the minimum about normal signaling to get by, and ignore the rest as an inefficient use of time.
I was able to figure out which things I was doing were signaling things to normal folks without figuring why or how by noting when the reactions I got were responding to something other than the message I’d been intending to send.
Edit: Brain fart. :P
You’re unlikely to find things this way, because you’re thinking of named activities that you noticed happening. Both of those limitations select for things that are socially relevant—the ‘named things’ one especially, because the things that there are names for are things that are socially interesting, that people would want to talk about, and that’s going to be almost entirely social-signaling things.
It seems like you’d do better to think about actions that don’t have specific, short names, and that people don’t usually pay attention to, either in themselves or in others. For example, where in a (communal) closet one hangs one’s coat, or what direction one faces when in the shower.
Picking one’s nose in public signals “I have poor hygiene” (even though, according to what I’ve read, ingesting the results of that activity helps one’s immune system… go figure) and “I don’t care about societal norms” or “I don’t care whether you’re offended by me”, depending on context. It can also signal poor social awareness, in some contexts.
Doing body maintenance in public in general is considered impolite, really… something about reminding others that we’re squishy critters doesn’t fly very well in this society. We’re supposed to signal self-control and perfection, instead. :P
Wow, I came late to this party.
One takeaway here is, don’t reduce your search space to zero if you can help it. If that means that you have to try things without substantial evidence that they’ll work, well, it’s that or lose, and we’re not supposed to lose.
I can think of a few situations where it’d make sense to reduce your search space to zero pending more data, though. The general rule for that seems to be that if you do allow that to happen, whatever reason you have for allowing that to happen is more important to you than the goal you’re giving up by not looking for solutions. In situations where you’re choosing not to look for solutions to avoid danger, as an example, that makes sense, or if trying the solutions would mean taking resources away from other projects that were also important.
Hmmmmm, this is interesting. I haven’t run into that phenomenon, and it doesn’t seem to be from lack of non-mixed-company opportunity.
Perhaps talking about that is a signal that everyone present is considered socially in-group? I was considered out-group or borderline in most of the relevant situations, and the few situations where the topic did come up were ones where the women initiating it had in general been especially trying to get me involved in the social group present.
“Socially distant” as I understand the term doesn’t seem relevant—the majority of the opportunities were with co-workers in my department, who I saw every day and knew reasonably well; I just wasn’t part of the supposedly-congruent social group.
We’re definitely heading into territory where how I categorize things is unusual, though, here, so I could easily be misunderstanding you.
Good point.
Most of the ways I can think of for that require a very solid sense of self-awareness (would you keep doing X if every social group you were currently involved with, or had recently been involved with, mildly disapproved of it, but you still found it useful?) and thus probably aren’t very useful to most people.
Things you’d be surprised to find that others had noticed at all, while a small subset of non-signaling things, seems like one of the more robust ways of finding accurate ones, which is what I was trying to get at in my original comment. And yes, that’ll vary widely from one social group to another. (Implication: Picking your social groups wisely is important.)
I expect much more success attacking the second half of the sentence. Knowing that signaling is a core component of preferences, train your decision apparatus to acknowledge it, and take it into account.
This seems very sensible to me, and I know that it’s a learnable skill, because I’ve already taught one person to do it. I don’t know how a normal-brained person would go about learning it on their own, but having an autistic friend to whom social signaling comes across as nonsense question you every time you stop making sense works for that, and also gives you good practice expressing yourself clearly at the same time.
I’m almost tempted to offer my services at that, but I tend to be too busy to do it intensively these days… still, if someone thinks they can make a case that it’d be a good use of my time to work with them on that, I’m willing to listen, and can be reached here, or in Second Life with this username.
Off the top of my head:
It could be a general signal that you are willing to ignore nonsensical social rules—this is a dominance/confidence signal, in most cases, that you either have the social standing to not be questioned about such a decision, or are confident that you have the correct skills to defend yourself if confronted, or both.
It could be a signal that you value convenience above appearing normal, assuming that you value appearing normal at all. It could also be a signal that you value appearing unusual. Further context would be useful in determining which.
It could be a signal that you belong to a particular group, most likely the group from which you got the idea to use the bag. This could be true even if those around you are unlikely to recognize the signal—it can still be a self-signaling mechanism, or a ‘secret password’ type signal that would increase your chance of meeting other members of the group who may live near you, or a recruitment mechanism (‘conversation starter’), or some combination of those.
It could be a specific signal that you reject heteronormative limitations—I refused to carry a purse for a long time out of a combination of that and generalized rebelliousness.
If most of the groups and relationships you’re in are with people who actually value honesty, yep, that’ll work very well. Unfortunately, that’s not most people’s highest priority.
There’s also the issue that when you’re dealing with people that you can’t entirely trust, dishonest signaling is intrinsic to staying safe. Autistics have a lot of trouble with that concept as a general rule—I found it counter-intuitive to have to do, and very hard to learn the skill—which is why we have such a reputation for being ‘too trusting’ and ‘gullible’. I still have to consciously notice that I’m in an unsafe situation and specifically engage that skill, and I suspect that if you don’t have to do that consciously, you’re going to badly underestimate how often you do it.
I brought this topic up in the meditation/discussion group that I’m a member of, and we discussed it for a couple of hours. The log is here.
Of course. Race, gender, disability, height, weight, age, beauty, and on and on and on. Most if not all prejudice can be described as signals, and most of the work of activists dealing with those issues is to get society to react to those signals in a way that’s neutral rather than positive or negative. (Not all activists realize that, which is how you get some of the really crazy-looking ones, like feminists who freak out every time a male has more power in a given situation than a female does.)
And yes, I’ve seen more instances than I can count of people processing the signals and ignoring the message, or, more annoyingly, expecting me to do just that, and then blaming it on me when I don’t understand them, or go do what they said instead of what they meant. I’d even go so far as to say that most of the time when someone’s logic really doesn’t make sense, they’re not using the logic for logic, they’re using it as a carrier for the signals, and hoping (or, assuming—I’m probably giving them too much credit if I imply that it’s being done consciously) that you’ll play along. In fact, there are times when that seems to be the most useful communication strategy, and it’s one I’ve been working on learning for the last few months.
Dennett’s intentional stance.
Interesting reading. And yes, it’s pretty disturbing how most people can be best understood by taking a design stance rather than an intentional stance—seeing the average Joe as being designed to respond to social, internal, or situational cues rather than intentionally following a path may be impolite, but it works more often than not.
‘Ideology’ may have a fairly neutral sense (of “a way of looking at things”), but I don’t think that is what it usually means to people, or is how it’s used in the original post.
Shouldn’t we be working on being better at ignoring social signaling than this?
Why are you assuming that ‘ideology’, even given the social-signaling meaning of it, is a bad thing, rather than just a thing?
(Thank you for providing a good example of something I’ve been trying to find a way to point out for the last few days.)
I dunno, this looks like it’s relatively easily resolved, to me. The confusion is that there are three possible outcome-states, not two. If you go on the roller coaster, you may or may not receive an update that lets you appreciate roller coaster rides. If you do receive it, it’ll allow you to enjoy that ride and all future ones, but there’s no guarantee that you will.
One possible ordering of those three outcomes is: go on TBMRR and receive update > go on teacups > go on TBMRR but don’t receive update
Your most logical course of action would depend on how much you valued that update, and how likely it was that riding TBMRR would provide it.