Proof of X
julian.digital
julian.digital
Maybe for the author.
People also use social networks without expecting or requiring any net social "capital" benefit through "signalling".
Examples:
- keeping in touch with people (privately or publicly)
- inform others about something they may be interested in (without needing or requiring acknowledgement)
- lessening loneliness
- gathering or dispensing intel on a topic
- filling in time / looking for entertainment
I can readily think of many more reasons than the singlular one of signalling to heighten social status. I'm sure that occurs, but listing it as a primary reason cast the article immediately in disfavour for this reader.
It's hard to see how you would go about falsifying it. It's way too convenient as an explanation for whatever you want. It's less a theory and more a very particular lens to view the world through. Nearly anything can be slotted into it.
Person A: "Social signalling explains all of human behavior!"
Person B: "But how do we know that's true?"
Person A: "Who cares? It explains everything."
Person B: "So what can we do with this knowledge?"
Person A: "Explain things we already observed to be true."
Person B: "So what have we gained from this information?"
Person A: "A theory that explains everything."
Person B: "But that theory doesn't actually teach us anything new?"
Person A: "Yep! We already know everything! Wooo!"
It's not that life's passing me by as I punch a keyboard at a big multinational, no siree, it's those those people posting pictures of themselves having fun who are the real fools.
A lot of behaviour that otherwise seems nonsensical can be explained by social signaling.
Why do rich people often spend tons of money on things they don't need or use? To impress other rich people.
A lot of behaviour that otherwise seems nonsensical can be explained by the flying spaghetti monster.
Why do rich people often spend tons of money on things they don't need or use? To impress the flying spaghetti monster.
The social sciences for a long time were just ancient white men writing ever larger treatises "explaining" everything. None of it had any explanatory power and fell apart at the slightest mention of an actual experiment.
This doesn't refute anything, in fact it reinforces the theory! Why did I make a claim about what you did over the weekend at all other than to signal to you about it? And of course I care what you think, because that's the entire point of social signalling.
I could say your entire response was a signal itself, and you're not consciously aware of how signalling is driving your behavior. At this point the theory becomes useless.
A good theory has hypotheses that can be (in)validated.
We could think of a scenario where his neighbor shares information about his (the authors) garden. In this case, if the author would seek measures to delete these posts, it might be interpreted as “signaling that he does not care and even doesn’t want others to know”.
I agree with you that signaling always shows intention (ie wanting something). You can “want not to want something”, though (:
But I think that's far too broad a definition of "signaling." The original article says "Building social capital through signaling."
When you post about your gardening to see if there are any other gardeners you can connect with, I don't think it's necessarily to "build your social capital," yet you can prove that it isn't.
> Why did you do X? Why, to show other people
Try this approach instead:
Would X ("a trip to Athens") happen if there was no perspective to ever mention X in any future communication between humans? (Yes/No)
In this take the theory can become verifiable with some work.
Alas, the assumption is that you know you'll be cut off from transferring* bits of information from your brain to other brains. As humans are very social, this is almost useless. In actual world, even if you're going solo to Mars one-way, you probably will communicate back to Earth and more colonists may come join you (think => social status). If I am sailing around the world alone, I can still expect to return and write memoirs. So the only remaining things are the most shameful i-am-never-telling-that-anyone personal secrets. And that's quite a narrow use.
So, saying that Ivy League wouldn't happen in <some out-of-this-world scenario where humans do not socially interact> is very impractical.
[*] I'm saying the theory doesn't judge whether the signal (the information that flows) is to be trusted or untrusted. I think most commenters here wrongly conflate "signalling" with "slightly lying".
I might be wrong though, didn't put a lot of thought on it, but friendster, orkut, myspace, and many others were not quite as good in signaling or proof of x as the ones that are now well stablished.
You push a marble with your finger, and it moves. Why? Because the momentum from your finger was transferred into the marble when you touched it (proximate cause); equally correctly, it moved because you pushed it (ultimate cause).
People are complex. Maybe you post for more than one reason.
But it goes beyond just being a supermarket. It has a unique selling point: the ability to signal. In my experience, the number of people who use social networks merely as email/news/entertainment replacements without succumbing to status signalling is very small.
Any pointers to an actual scientific study to back this?
I don't know what to think of that. In one way the articles of Julian are always interesting articles, but in another way it just shows that even on HN bruteforce-posting works
Obviously (2020)
Through the short lifetime of entries on the first page, only a small part of HN readers will likely see it.
This one may interest you https://hnblogs.substack.com/ daily blog posts of HN (disclaimer I'm the owner) and this specific article was included in the 6 august 2020 post
Is there any mechanism in place (aside from upvotes ranking, and astute HN commenters) to prevent endless duplicate submissions?
What safety guardrail would prevent a malicious/selfish/merely annoying self-promoter from flooding HN with submissions?
Isn't this basically Duolingo? Complete with internet points, leaderboards, and reinforcement mechanisms for signing up your friends.
"Proof mechanisms" are vacuous. It would be more interesting to see why some social networks nail building feedback loops that give us that sweet dopamine hit and compel us to come back for more (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook) and why others suck at it (Google+, MySpace)
The implementation is a constant source of complaints here and other places, but it does have the basic idea the author wishes for.
Does American English have "streakers" and "streaking" meaning "to run naked in a public place, particularly during a sporting event"?
Text-only cache link (full wouldn't load either): https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Eh061j...
It's pretty simplistic in its design.
It's funny, to me, the only things a Patagonia vest signals are (a) a lack of style (b) a lack of understanding of how heat escapes from the body and (c) a craven desire to fit in to a particular social scene.
> The cost to participate in TikTok’s status game is a lot higher than Instagram’s (compare a well-made dance choreography on TikTok to your median Instagram travel post)
TikTok is dominated by teenagers dancing in their bedrooms. What does he mean by "cost"? Because if it's financial cost, making a viral TokTok costs nothing, whereas taking an instagram photo with your partner on a hill in Athens at least costs two tickets to Athens. It's not technical skill either, most TikTok stars have not studied for years.
The cost is massive for what the dance brings.
I think of social networks like brains. They're both a graph of interconnected nodes that pass messages. The problem with our networks now as I see it is that the social networks are set up to maximize message transmission (i.e. attention) rather than truth.
We need a layer on top, like the neocortex, to connect the nodes and give them different weights to generate reliable outputs like a machine learning model does. That's what I'm building.
Imagine if in the past, journalists could only write about what their readers asked them about. It wouldn't have generated the best result.
We need a system that allows people to put forth their ideas and let them be evaluated by peers. We need the scientific method at scale.
1. Nobody can critique the answers
2. Nobody can critique the critique (if you could have such)
3. The Quora-format does not really invite posts like "I think this is the way it is, is there anything wrong with my analysis?"
4. There is no mechanism to vote on consensus about what is the "truth"
1. It's interesting; a lot of human behavior involves presentation to other human beings, and social media platforms can definitely be seen as a medium for signalling.
2. It's dismal and reductive and other words that signal that I don't like it for personal reasons.
I'm aware of it but it's not enough to make it disappear. How did you handle it?