And I wonder whether our society makes it worse than it was historically, when people at level N were not privy to signaling that level N+2 aimed at level N+1.
I haven’t seen anybody talk about the audience factor in signaling in any depth within the rat and rat-adjacent community. I think this is a great angle to pursue. After all, you’re always signaling to someone. When an N’s trying to differentiate themselves from N-1, are they aiming that signal at other Ns, at N-1s, or at N-2s and below?
I also think that signaling’s typically framed from the perspective of the signal sender, as though the clever sending of signals is a key skill for navigating life. But it must be at least as important to focus on the signal receiver. Learning how to pick up on, interpret, and respond to these signals critically is a key life skill, which is what you’re getting at in your comment.
We can also think about re-signaling, which is what we do when we want to announce how we’ve received a signal. This can be a big deal. Think of the way people can respond to a birthday card. The card is a signal, and if it makes somebody tear up, those tears serve as a form of re-signaling. They don’t have to be consciously intended as a signal in order to have that function, and indeed, they probably wouldn’t work as well in that case, as Valentine pointed out recently.
I think the purpose of signaling (done by a person at level N) is to show how different you are from those losers at level N-1, and how actually you could and should be treated the same as level N+1 because those guys are no better than you, they only think so. The levels beyond that are just too far; if they are used at all, they are used instrumentally.
For example, you could say: “Consider people at levels N-2 and N-1, in my opinion they are pretty much the same.” The idea is that everyone in your bubble agrees that N-2 are losers, so making an analogy between N-2 and N-1 supports your argument that N-1 are losers.
Similarly, you could say: “There is huge difference between levels N+2 and N+1, and those guys at N+1 are crazy if they don’t see it.” Again the idea is that everyone in your bubble agrees that N+2 is way out of your league, so you exaggerate the difference between N+2 and N+1 to show that people at N+1 are really not that different from you. -- In both cases, the levels N-2 and N+2 were only used instrumentally, to make a point about levels N-1 and N+1, which are the ones you actually care about.
(But this all is a bit circular and unfalsifiable, because there is no definition of what exactly “+1” and “+2″ refer to, so I can always change their meaning to make the statements seem true.)
For example, in American politics, if you imagine that minorities are at level 0, white working class is at level 1, educated elites are at level 2, and millionaires are at level 3, that would explain some of the observed behavior. Democrat politicians present themselves as level 2, trying to get votes of levels 2 and 0, both of them having level 1 as a common natural enemy. Trump presented himself as level 3, and made level 2 his enemy, which allowed him to get those mostly untapped level 1 votes.
I haven’t seen anybody talk about the audience factor in signaling in any depth within the rat and rat-adjacent community. I think this is a great angle to pursue. After all, you’re always signaling to someone. When an N’s trying to differentiate themselves from N-1, are they aiming that signal at other Ns, at N-1s, or at N-2s and below?
I also think that signaling’s typically framed from the perspective of the signal sender, as though the clever sending of signals is a key skill for navigating life. But it must be at least as important to focus on the signal receiver. Learning how to pick up on, interpret, and respond to these signals critically is a key life skill, which is what you’re getting at in your comment.
We can also think about re-signaling, which is what we do when we want to announce how we’ve received a signal. This can be a big deal. Think of the way people can respond to a birthday card. The card is a signal, and if it makes somebody tear up, those tears serve as a form of re-signaling. They don’t have to be consciously intended as a signal in order to have that function, and indeed, they probably wouldn’t work as well in that case, as Valentine pointed out recently.
I think the purpose of signaling (done by a person at level N) is to show how different you are from those losers at level N-1, and how actually you could and should be treated the same as level N+1 because those guys are no better than you, they only think so. The levels beyond that are just too far; if they are used at all, they are used instrumentally.
For example, you could say: “Consider people at levels N-2 and N-1, in my opinion they are pretty much the same.” The idea is that everyone in your bubble agrees that N-2 are losers, so making an analogy between N-2 and N-1 supports your argument that N-1 are losers.
Similarly, you could say: “There is huge difference between levels N+2 and N+1, and those guys at N+1 are crazy if they don’t see it.” Again the idea is that everyone in your bubble agrees that N+2 is way out of your league, so you exaggerate the difference between N+2 and N+1 to show that people at N+1 are really not that different from you. -- In both cases, the levels N-2 and N+2 were only used instrumentally, to make a point about levels N-1 and N+1, which are the ones you actually care about.
(But this all is a bit circular and unfalsifiable, because there is no definition of what exactly “+1” and “+2″ refer to, so I can always change their meaning to make the statements seem true.)
For example, in American politics, if you imagine that minorities are at level 0, white working class is at level 1, educated elites are at level 2, and millionaires are at level 3, that would explain some of the observed behavior. Democrat politicians present themselves as level 2, trying to get votes of levels 2 and 0, both of them having level 1 as a common natural enemy. Trump presented himself as level 3, and made level 2 his enemy, which allowed him to get those mostly untapped level 1 votes.