So, I think part of being sociable means making people around you more comfortable in your presence, and if tweaking your Facebook profile picture has some part in that (which I think it does), then I don’t see a hard line between that particular signaling decision and an actual increase in your sociability. The traits I signaled out above (being funny and being sociable) both themselves have some signaling component to them, so I think this observation generalizes to any social trait that has signaling components to it.
Tweaking your facebook profile correctly might require some degree of sociability, I suppose. My point was that if you deliberately signal greater sociability than you have, you increase the noise surrounding that signal, increasing the chance that people will choose wrongly (including choosing you over someone more social.) In other words, it is functionally equivalent to lying. and should be treated however you treat lying.
It is generally agreed that some lies, at least, do more good than harm (these are usually known as “white lies”.) However, lying itself is generally not considered morally neutral, for whatever reason (in fact, lying in order to have someone sleep with you who would otherwise have refused is often considered a form of rape.[EDIT: not by me])
lying in order to have someone sleep with you who would otherwise have refused is often considered a form of rape.
This sounds like something that would appeal to those who have been lied to. They get to feel more righteous indignation in their victim-hood. It is less kind to those who have actually been raped through any one of coercion, drugs, violence or abuse of power. Their plight becomes trivialized for the purpose of someone getting a solid dig in against lying (or against people that have been declared liars).
Oh, I personally wouldn’t call it rape. But then, I only count literal coercive unwanted intercourse as rape, with lesser evils that often get bundled up with that as distinct if similar wrongs.
I find this more useful then other, more standard definitions because while obviously discovering you had sex, say, without birth control when you specified that you only wanted it with birth control is traumatic, I suppose, it’s not traumatic in the same way as being forced to have sex with someone at gunpoint.
But these looser definitions are common, and often have legal force, so it’s worth noting when an act could be classified as rape even if I myself would not do so. I considered adding a disclaimer to the effect that I would not consider it “rape” but decided not to bother, on the basis that we’re not discussing my opinions and there was no point starting an argument over definitions. I see I may have been suffering from the illusion of transparency somewhat.
(in fact, lying in order to have someone sleep with you who would otherwise have refused is often considered a form of rape.)
There is a difference between outright lying and kind-of sort-of lying (a.k.a. “gilding the lily”). For instance, outright lying in order to have someone give you money who would otherwise have refused is usually called “fraud” and nearly universally shunned, whereas gilding the lily in order to have someone give you money who would otherwise have refused is usually called “marketing” and it is said that “advertising is the life of trade”. And what certain PUAs do surely sounds to me much more like marketing than like fraud.
Most people are in favor of punishing advertisements that mislead consumers. Companies—who ideally would use advertisement solely to raise awareness of their product—have a financial incentive to make their ads as persuasive as possible, and so constantly push at the legal boundaries. Advertisement will always be biased, no matter how strict our regulations. But then, what we should do and what should be legal are two different questions.
I know what “tap out” implies, I just wondered what about this conversation prompted it. Are you worried about the political overtones of my last comment?
No. (I don’t have any strong opinion on whether the current legislation on advertising is too lax or too strict, mainly because I don’t know much about how lax or how strict the current legislation on advertising is.) It’s just that if I carried on this discussion I’d be just reinstating points already made elsewhere in this thread with different words or talking nonsense.
Most people seem to think so. I’m not going to bother defending the point here (all I’m trying to do is establish identity) but possible reasons include the claim that humans terminally value knowing the truth and the point that humans share a morality, so providing them with information gives them as good a chance as you of making the right choice based on the evidence (unless you’re superintelligent or they’re mentally subnormal, but what if it’s the opposite?)
That’s a virtually meaningless comment. There are many kinds of lying, and many are socially approved of.
There are also many kinds of stupidity, violence, and other potentially-bad things that are socially approved of. If we grant that social approval is evidence that those kinds are net good, that’s still not very relevant to whether the grandparent is meaningful.
The content / meaning I got from the grandparent is approximately: “Don’t think of facebook tweaking as a free +1 agreeableness potion, think of it as more like (closer in conceptspace) lying and less like traditional costly sociability signaling”. Perfectly valid and meaningful, as far as I can tell.
No judgment from me as to whether that’s good advice, since I don’t know well how facebook profiles tie in to social dynamics and all that, though.
There are also many kinds of stupidity, violence, and other potentially-bad things that are socially approved of. If we grant that social approval is evidence that those kinds are net good, that’s still not very relevant to whether the grandparent is meaningful.
I wasn’t arguing “net good, therefore meaningless”, i was arguing that lying of various kinds is pervasive and
sometimes beneficial, it is far too simplistic to argue “lying degrades the signal, and is therefore bad”.
i was arguing that lying of various kinds is pervasive and sometimes beneficial, (...)
And I argued that this is irrelevant to the claim that you were apparently arguing against.
it is far too simplistic to argue “lying degrades the signal, and is therefore bad”.
I don’t see that claim being made directly, and there’s only a hint of it in connotation. Going further up the comment thread, I can see that MugaSofer apparently believes that having correct information on this is important and that lying is in this case bad, but this is not (as far as I can tell) appealed-to anywhere as argument for the claims in the comment you called “meaningless”.
So I don’t see the two claims as being causally related, and certainly not something of the form quoted above. If this is implied, it is not obvious to me and I would ask for clarification or more explanation, rather than assume it implicitly and argue against (what is then most likely) a strawman.
Lying, in general, is considered Bad. Of course, Bad Things may have benefits that outweigh their Badness, such as telling kids Santa is real or their pet hamster went on holiday. Whether society is right to consider lying itself Bad or these examples as net wins regardless are not the point; the point is that we should treat “false signals” the way we treat lies (as Bad, generally, but if you think lies are inherently good my point still works.) Lying, of course, is simply a verbal “false signal”.
I’ll say it again:both false non-verbal signals and verbal lies are asbsolutely pervasive in some contexts, eg most women wear makeup.There is a syndrome whereby lying degrqades infromation for everybody, and there is another syndrome where everyone exagerates their posiive atttributes, so that honest people end up looking worse than they are since a certain quantity of exageration is expected and compensated for. That applies to facebook. Everyone on FB has exagerated their sociability, and everyone takes that into account.
If everyone is taking it into account, then exaggerating your sociability in your profile is sending an accurate signal, and not doing so will mislead viewers into underestimating your sociability.
Not necessarily. What can happen is that there are two functions that rely on sociability, one of which is relative/zero-sum and the other of which isn’t. So you wind up in situations where, if you overreport your sociability, you send out signals that cause others to correctly gauge your relative sociability but incorrectly overestimate your static sociability, whereas if you don’t overreport, they correctly gauge your static sociability but incorrectly understimate your relative sociability.
Basically, if everyone is exaggerating their signals, you can’t just assume that it gets corrected for if there are any non-zero-sum aspects to the signaled-for trait, since you get a Lake Woebegone Effect.
I was not assuming that the only kind of correction is through zero-sum effects. if all men over-report their heught (to be polite) that is not zero zum, but listeners can still substract the extra inch or whatever.
Peterdjones specifically claimed that people were taking the universal exaggeration into account in their estimations. If he is correct in this, then it’s not deceptive to exaggerate. If he is incorrect, then it is deceptive, which is the hypothetical I was discussing in the first place, so see my comments above.
So, I think part of being sociable means making people around you more comfortable in your presence, and if tweaking your Facebook profile picture has some part in that (which I think it does), then I don’t see a hard line between that particular signaling decision and an actual increase in your sociability. The traits I signaled out above (being funny and being sociable) both themselves have some signaling component to them, so I think this observation generalizes to any social trait that has signaling components to it.
Tweaking your facebook profile correctly might require some degree of sociability, I suppose. My point was that if you deliberately signal greater sociability than you have, you increase the noise surrounding that signal, increasing the chance that people will choose wrongly (including choosing you over someone more social.) In other words, it is functionally equivalent to lying. and should be treated however you treat lying.
You present a compelling argument in favor of lying.
It is generally agreed that some lies, at least, do more good than harm (these are usually known as “white lies”.) However, lying itself is generally not considered morally neutral, for whatever reason (in fact, lying in order to have someone sleep with you who would otherwise have refused is often considered a form of rape.[EDIT: not by me])
This sounds like something that would appeal to those who have been lied to. They get to feel more righteous indignation in their victim-hood. It is less kind to those who have actually been raped through any one of coercion, drugs, violence or abuse of power. Their plight becomes trivialized for the purpose of someone getting a solid dig in against lying (or against people that have been declared liars).
Oh, I personally wouldn’t call it rape. But then, I only count literal coercive unwanted intercourse as rape, with lesser evils that often get bundled up with that as distinct if similar wrongs.
I find this more useful then other, more standard definitions because while obviously discovering you had sex, say, without birth control when you specified that you only wanted it with birth control is traumatic, I suppose, it’s not traumatic in the same way as being forced to have sex with someone at gunpoint.
But these looser definitions are common, and often have legal force, so it’s worth noting when an act could be classified as rape even if I myself would not do so. I considered adding a disclaimer to the effect that I would not consider it “rape” but decided not to bother, on the basis that we’re not discussing my opinions and there was no point starting an argument over definitions. I see I may have been suffering from the illusion of transparency somewhat.
There is a difference between outright lying and kind-of sort-of lying (a.k.a. “gilding the lily”). For instance, outright lying in order to have someone give you money who would otherwise have refused is usually called “fraud” and nearly universally shunned, whereas gilding the lily in order to have someone give you money who would otherwise have refused is usually called “marketing” and it is said that “advertising is the life of trade”. And what certain PUAs do surely sounds to me much more like marketing than like fraud.
Most people are in favor of punishing advertisements that mislead consumers. Companies—who ideally would use advertisement solely to raise awareness of their product—have a financial incentive to make their ads as persuasive as possible, and so constantly push at the legal boundaries. Advertisement will always be biased, no matter how strict our regulations. But then, what we should do and what should be legal are two different questions.
I guess I’d better tap out now.
… may I ask why?
I don’t think I have much else to say, short of mind-killing myself, which I kind-of would rather not do.
I know what “tap out” implies, I just wondered what about this conversation prompted it. Are you worried about the political overtones of my last comment?
No. (I don’t have any strong opinion on whether the current legislation on advertising is too lax or too strict, mainly because I don’t know much about how lax or how strict the current legislation on advertising is.) It’s just that if I carried on this discussion I’d be just reinstating points already made elsewhere in this thread with different words or talking nonsense.
Ah, OK. Thanks for explaining.
...and lying is Wrong?
Most people seem to think so. I’m not going to bother defending the point here (all I’m trying to do is establish identity) but possible reasons include the claim that humans terminally value knowing the truth and the point that humans share a morality, so providing them with information gives them as good a chance as you of making the right choice based on the evidence (unless you’re superintelligent or they’re mentally subnormal, but what if it’s the opposite?)
OK. If you’re not going to bother defending the point, I won’t further pursue it.
That’s a virtually meaningless comment. There are many kinds of lying, and many are socially approved of.
There are also many kinds of stupidity, violence, and other potentially-bad things that are socially approved of. If we grant that social approval is evidence that those kinds are net good, that’s still not very relevant to whether the grandparent is meaningful.
The content / meaning I got from the grandparent is approximately: “Don’t think of facebook tweaking as a free +1 agreeableness potion, think of it as more like (closer in conceptspace) lying and less like traditional costly sociability signaling”. Perfectly valid and meaningful, as far as I can tell.
No judgment from me as to whether that’s good advice, since I don’t know well how facebook profiles tie in to social dynamics and all that, though.
I wasn’t arguing “net good, therefore meaningless”, i was arguing that lying of various kinds is pervasive and sometimes beneficial, it is far too simplistic to argue “lying degrades the signal, and is therefore bad”.
And I argued that this is irrelevant to the claim that you were apparently arguing against.
I don’t see that claim being made directly, and there’s only a hint of it in connotation. Going further up the comment thread, I can see that MugaSofer apparently believes that having correct information on this is important and that lying is in this case bad, but this is not (as far as I can tell) appealed-to anywhere as argument for the claims in the comment you called “meaningless”.
So I don’t see the two claims as being causally related, and certainly not something of the form quoted above. If this is implied, it is not obvious to me and I would ask for clarification or more explanation, rather than assume it implicitly and argue against (what is then most likely) a strawman.
Lying, in general, is considered Bad. Of course, Bad Things may have benefits that outweigh their Badness, such as telling kids Santa is real or their pet hamster went on holiday. Whether society is right to consider lying itself Bad or these examples as net wins regardless are not the point; the point is that we should treat “false signals” the way we treat lies (as Bad, generally, but if you think lies are inherently good my point still works.) Lying, of course, is simply a verbal “false signal”.
I’ll say it again:both false non-verbal signals and verbal lies are asbsolutely pervasive in some contexts, eg most women wear makeup.There is a syndrome whereby lying degrqades infromation for everybody, and there is another syndrome where everyone exagerates their posiive atttributes, so that honest people end up looking worse than they are since a certain quantity of exageration is expected and compensated for. That applies to facebook. Everyone on FB has exagerated their sociability, and everyone takes that into account.
If everyone is taking it into account, then exaggerating your sociability in your profile is sending an accurate signal, and not doing so will mislead viewers into underestimating your sociability.
Not necessarily. What can happen is that there are two functions that rely on sociability, one of which is relative/zero-sum and the other of which isn’t. So you wind up in situations where, if you overreport your sociability, you send out signals that cause others to correctly gauge your relative sociability but incorrectly overestimate your static sociability, whereas if you don’t overreport, they correctly gauge your static sociability but incorrectly understimate your relative sociability.
Basically, if everyone is exaggerating their signals, you can’t just assume that it gets corrected for if there are any non-zero-sum aspects to the signaled-for trait, since you get a Lake Woebegone Effect.
I was not assuming that the only kind of correction is through zero-sum effects. if all men over-report their heught (to be polite) that is not zero zum, but listeners can still substract the extra inch or whatever.
Peterdjones specifically claimed that people were taking the universal exaggeration into account in their estimations. If he is correct in this, then it’s not deceptive to exaggerate. If he is incorrect, then it is deceptive, which is the hypothetical I was discussing in the first place, so see my comments above.