Can you talk more about the movement of signaling frontiers? I’d be super appreciative of an example if possible. I assume your mention of Goodharting is the idea that as soon as something becomes legible as a reliable signal of a quality, it’ll be optimized for and cease being reliable. This is the movement of the signaling frontier, I take it?
I’ve read through the papers you recommended in a previous comment, which I incorporated into The Dark Miracle of Optics, but I’d love to continue this conversation with you. Is there somewhere—your own post, or elsewhere—I should explore re: this moving frontier, and the constant Goodhart-led inflation of signals?
The easiest way to think about it is the creation of new platforms: radio, tv, internet, social media. Each develops its own vocabulary which is initially extremely effective due to the lack of anti-bodies in the general population, leading to rapid spread and fixation in the population (like herpes simplex). Banner ads->google ad words->instagram influencing etc.
I’m glad you linked your post, I check LW intermittently and missed it.
WRT what exists out there: AFAIK this is pretty close to the frontier and not much game theory etc work has been done yet. The airforce has funded some agent based modeling recently.
Looking at fashion might yield a lot of this pattern. You first have high class people dress a certain way. Afterwards lower class people copy the way of dressing and it stops being a high class signal.
Yeah! That was my thought as well. Unfortunately, despite combing through fashion theory, there’s not much literature on the subject; I’ve had to make a lot of it up as I go. I wrote a bit in the essay linked above about it:
In the Upper-Middle Paleolithic Transition, human societies and economies grow increasingly complex. Trade deals and diplomacy are performed among credible spokesmen, and social hierarchies need preservation across interactions between strangers. Fashion enters as a technology for maintaining and navigating the social graph. “By the production of symbolic artefacts that signified different social groups and kinds of relationships, Aurignacian people were able to maintain wider networks that could exist even between people who had never set eyes on each other,” giving them a competitive advantage. The practice spreads through the law of cultural evolution: “The surface of the body… becomes the symbolic stage upon which the drama of socialisation is enacted, and body adornment… becomes the language through which it was expressed.”[5] We have entered the second stage of simulacra. The territory has a map, and there are parties interested in manipulating it.
Once this association between optics and essence, between appearance and reality, between signal and quality (the biological frame) or public and private information (the economic one), is formed, it can be freeridden. It becomes, in most cases, easier to pay “lip service”—to outwardly express the associated public characteristic—than it is to to develop the private characteristic. This is not entirely the fault of the freerider; it is a difficult situation he finds himself in. Imagine he “chooses” (I’m anthropomorphizing evolution) to remain with his blue and yellow colors: even if his “product” is “good” (I’m mixing metaphors, but I mean to say, his advertising is honest), it will take some time for a trusted association between signal and quality, public and private, to form. As consumers, we may initially disbelieve an advertiser’s claims, and for good reason, since there is incentive to deceive. And thus it is with the sun-basking lizard, deciding which butterfly to eat. Far easier for a precarious insect to ride coattails, to imitate and pretend toward what he is not—and so, quite simply, it does.
The connection with fashion should come into view now. The “barberpole” metaphor of fashion, where lower classes continually imitate higher classes, who are themselves engaged in a continual quest for “distinction” from the chasing masses, is a popular one in rationalist circles for good reason. Its cyclical nature is the result of limited options and a continual evasion of freeriders who exploit an associative proxy: clothing for caste.
Recently I’ve been considering the frame of a discoordination game, in which it is one actor’s interest to synchronize with the other actor, and in the other actor’s interest to stay de-synchronized (“distinguished” or “distinct” a la Bourdieu).
Can you talk more about the movement of signaling frontiers? I’d be super appreciative of an example if possible. I assume your mention of Goodharting is the idea that as soon as something becomes legible as a reliable signal of a quality, it’ll be optimized for and cease being reliable. This is the movement of the signaling frontier, I take it?
I’ve read through the papers you recommended in a previous comment, which I incorporated into The Dark Miracle of Optics, but I’d love to continue this conversation with you. Is there somewhere—your own post, or elsewhere—I should explore re: this moving frontier, and the constant Goodhart-led inflation of signals?
The easiest way to think about it is the creation of new platforms: radio, tv, internet, social media. Each develops its own vocabulary which is initially extremely effective due to the lack of anti-bodies in the general population, leading to rapid spread and fixation in the population (like herpes simplex). Banner ads->google ad words->instagram influencing etc.
I’m glad you linked your post, I check LW intermittently and missed it.
WRT what exists out there: AFAIK this is pretty close to the frontier and not much game theory etc work has been done yet. The airforce has funded some agent based modeling recently.
Looking at fashion might yield a lot of this pattern. You first have high class people dress a certain way. Afterwards lower class people copy the way of dressing and it stops being a high class signal.
Yeah! That was my thought as well. Unfortunately, despite combing through fashion theory, there’s not much literature on the subject; I’ve had to make a lot of it up as I go. I wrote a bit in the essay linked above about it:
Recently I’ve been considering the frame of a discoordination game, in which it is one actor’s interest to synchronize with the other actor, and in the other actor’s interest to stay de-synchronized (“distinguished” or “distinct” a la Bourdieu).