It ends with a call-to-action for creating Beeminder goals to post to the forum. Would love to hear if it persuades anyone. (It also gets you an invite to the Discord, which, as the blog post points out, is extremely high-quality and not overwhelming – in part because of how exclusive it is).
In case beeminding forum posts sounds too hard, let me repeat the dirt simple instructions:
@dreev, this seems like a good moment to express interest in a few additional insights that I am looking forward too in future blog posts (hopefully they have not reached the “too late” stage of the writing process highlighted in your post)
In a future post, I plan to talk about the general case, how all systems need anti-entropy measures and how Beeminder is an elegant and general anti-entropy tool in that sense. (But I might never get around to doing that, because all of us, realistically, are going to gradually forget I ever formed this intention.)
Ah, that’s an elegant use of RSSminder! Goal created!
On the “costly signals” thing: the first example I recall, which therefore sticks in my head as canonical, is the male peacock’s tail. Wikipedia tells me this comes from Amotz Zahavi’s work on “the handicap principle”, and honest signals in evolutionary biology.
I appreciate and generally agree with the blog post and I appreciate and generally agree with Andy Matuschak. But, personally, the “books don’t work” mindset has led me down some unfruitful paths. For a long time, I was obsessed with finding the perfect system for capturing everything I needed to remember from the things I read. Anki, Obsidian, Beeminder, Roam, Mem, Logseq, notecards, etc. I was so afraid of wasting my time by reading without remembering the things I needed to remember.
And I never felt like my system was good enough. So I never really read anything, because I couldn’t stomach wasting my time.
But eventually I realized that, much like food, the media and books I consume shape me whether I remember everything or not. I realized that I can be a good reader by just gently engaging with the book. And so I just started reading. And reading, and reading, and reading. And (I believe!) I’ve learned a lot more in the time since than I ever did while trying to craft the perfect system.
Yeah, that one still kind of breaks my brain, with the intentional self-handicapping. Like, if I’m a female peacock and a male peacock is saying “look how insanely fit I must be to survive with this ridiculous anchor on my butt” and another one is saying “look at me, anchor-free!” then why do I prefer the crazy tail exactly? Is it not a survival advantage to be unencumbered? Like, yes, you crazy show-off, I’m impressed that you’re even still alive having to haul that thing around but why would I want that for my kids?
I think the answer is that it’s a kind of literal Keynesian beauty contest: I like the fancy tail because I want my kids to have fancy tails because that’s what female peacocks like and I care about their reproductive success. In other words, it’s totally self-fulfilling. Runaway selection, I guess biologists call it.
An example of costly signaling that doesn’t break my brain is gazelles randomly leaping in the air to show off how strong they are. That’s an honest signal to lions: “I’m so strong that you’ll have a hard time catching me so maybe we save us both the trouble?”. And it’s costly in the sense that you have to actually be strong to jump so high.
Ah, classic case of the perfect being the enemy of the good, it sounds like! Maybe a book brigade is a happy medium here?
I don’t think costly signals need to be directionally correct, in the sense that gazelle stotting is - they just need to be costly. Buying an expensive diamond ring isn’t productive, but it is a costly signal of your feelings. Burning a bunch of valuable stuff in an offering to your gods isn’t helpful, but it is costly, and thus a sign of your worthiness. (Unless the vestal virgins get to eat the burned offerings after you’ve left, in which case it’s just a scam on their part to get tasty food)
I’ve just started reading “The Status Game”, by Will Storr, which (a) would make a great book-brigade book as it’s brilliant and very insightful, and (b) is all about how we spend our entire time signalling and doing other stuff to get higher in the various status hierarchies that we humans have invented for ourselves, even if they’re artificial and pointless.
That book is on my to-read shortlist, and your recommendation of it makes me bump it up a few places. If you want to do a book club/book brigade for it, I’m game.
I do, however, think it’s very important to point out one thing: signalling is not pointless. Vestigial, in some cases, yes. But always and everywhere signalling originates from an important need. Remember, costly signaling is costly, by definition! It’s only worth paying that cost if there’s something to be gained by it.
Inevitably the aim will be some form of coordination. The only way the gazelle and the lion can coordinate on skipping the whole expensive chase is by the gazelle proving to the lion that it is strong enough to make the chase difficult.
Likewise with humans. Humans are very social creatures, and a vast amount of human activity is devoted to coordinating as a group. That said, humans live in a very different environment than we evolved in, so to some large extent we retain vestigial adaptions that are no longer particularly useful. Nowadays we have powerful social technologies to coordinate more efficiently and thus on a wider scale than ever before, so some of the behaviors we retain may be superseded in usefulness.
I feel this is really really important to understand when considering signalling. It’s not pointless and wasteful; it’s purposeful and valuable, at least in its original context. Failing to understand that is failing to understand signalling. You must always ask what incredibly important purpose was (at least originally) worth more than the cost of the costly signal, even if since then that purpose has faded in its burning importance.
You’re of course right, even costly signals are can be very helpful to us, achieving some productive goal. It’s the goals that we need to examine. In pursuit of an unhelpful or vestigial goal, they can be pointless.
I think the challenge now is separating out the helpful from the unhelpful, based on the goal rather than the signals. Not being eaten by a lion? Helpful. Some of the human constructed status hierarchies in the modern world? Not always so helpful. We can see a purpose to the construction of particular hierarchies in the ancestral environment, just as we can see a evolutionary purpose to regarding the out-group as potentially dangerous, but that doesn’t always mean those behaviours are helpful in the world we now inhabit.
(hopefully they have not reached the “too late” stage of the writing process highlighted in your post)