On signalling

by Ian Pollock

[Note: neither character in this dialogue represents any particular person, apart from the “people” who are always arguing about philosophy in my own head. I acknowledge that this conversation is totally unrealistic as a real-life event, for several reasons. (Some of which are signalling reasons!)]

Salviati: Hello, Sagredo!

Sagredo: Hi, Salviati. Good to see you. I’m just finishing up a blog post.

Salviati: On what?

Sagredo: It’s about this creationist, biblical literalist theory to the effect that there was once a water canopy around the earth. The idea is to account for where all the water in Noah’s flood came from.

Salviati: I take it you disapprove of the theory.

Sagredo: Of course! I don’t understand how anyone could possibly believe it.

Salviati: ...Hm, hang on a minute. I want to press you on something.

Sagredo: What is it?

Salviati: Well, when people say they can’t understand so-and-so’s behaviour, they can mean two things. Either they mean that they literally don’t comprehend the behaviour, or they mean they understand it in an intellectual sense, but are trying to morally distance themselves from it.

Sagredo: I think I mean that I literally don’t comprehend people who believe in stuff like this.

Salviati: Then you are at a disadvantage in writing your blog post, aren’t you - I mean, you should understand your opponents’ motivation, if possible. Anyway, what’s your argument?

Sagredo: A scientific takedown of the theory, followed by a critique of its motivations as being basically designed to reduce cognitive dissonance. Creationists know that all the water in the biblical flood needed to come from somewhere, so they invented this wild theory to account for it.

Salviati: Wait, so you do understand people who believe this stuff! They’re just reducing cognitive dissonance.

Sagredo: I guess, in a sense, yes.

Salviati: Why are you writing this post in the first place?

Sagredo: To combat this crazy pseudoscientific drivel.

Salviati: Do you know people who take this water canopy theory seriously?

Sagredo: Well, not personally, but some creationists buy into it.

Salviati: Some? Meaning it is critiqued by the creationists themselves?

Sagredo: Yes, to a certain extent.

Salviati: ...Okay, do you mind hearing some criticism?

Sagredo: I guess not. I’ll try to take it constructively.

Salviati: All right, I am just going to be blunt, then. This blog post you are writing is pure signalling.

Sagredo: Oh, not this “signalling” crap. Since when are you Robin Hanson?

Salviati: So you’re familiar with this line of argument.

Sagredo: I’ve heard it a lot from various “cynics.” But go ahead and make your case, I guess.

Salviati: All right. Here is the situation as I see it. You belong to an intellectual community of skeptics and atheists, in which creationism is the standard example of terrible pseudoscience.

Sagredo: Well, it is, and lots of people believe in it. The cost we are paying for science illiteracy is huge.

Salviati: Sure, I mostly agree, but that is another discussion. The point is, you belong to a group where you can gain status pretty easily by beating up on creationism - do you deny this?

Sagredo: I don’t deny it, but that’s not my motivation in writing this post.

Salviati: To be totally and suicidally frank, I don’t believe you. Here’s why: this blog post is focused on an incredibly tiny problem, and it’s actually pretty much useless in terms of dealing with that problem. I think you know that, in your heart of hearts.

Sagredo: Science illiteracy is not a tiny problem!

Salviati: But this particular crazy theory is. As far as I understand from you, only a small minority of creationists believe in it. Granting that combating creationism is important, combating an unpopular idea among creationists just seems like a really weird goal. It’s like you’re fighting a war and you decide to concentrate on intercepting the enemy’s supply of brussels sprouts - that’ll break their spirit!

Sagredo: It’s part of a general pushback against pseudoscience. You have to do that kind of stuff piecemeal.

Salviati: Sure, sure. The other thing is that even if we assume that it’s really important to debunk the water canopy theory, I’m going to take a wild stab in the dark and say it’s already been done.

Sagredo: It has, but the message needs to be repeated in order to get through.

Salviati: Right, but there are diminishing returns here. That’s what I meant when I said your post is probably close to marginally useless. Being a doctor is uncontroversially important, right? Doctors save lives. But becoming a doctor only saves marginal lives if there’s a shortage of doctors in the area where you’re going to work - otherwise, you’re just replacing or supplementing some other person who was a doctor anyway, and who would have saved those lives anyway. That’s a roundabout way of saying that I think your post is one of many debunkings of the canopy theory, so it’s not making much difference above and beyond what the others are doing. And apart from that, as I said, the canopy theory just seems like a really tiny problem in the first place.

Sagredo: Well, so what? I suppose this isn’t the most important problem in the world, and I may not be combating it in the optimal way. I guess I just find the subject interesting. Didn’t you write some sort of gobbledigook about metaethics last week? Don’t tell me that solves some pressing problem of humanity. I still don’t buy the idea that my post is just “signalling.” I promise you, getting praise from fellow skeptics wasn’t going through my head at all when I thought of the idea.

Salviati: First of all, when I said that your post was pure signalling, I wasn’t accusing you of something unusually terrible. I think that a huge part of the stuff all people say and do is signalling - it’s in our nature as social creatures. That applies to myself as well: to the extent that I can understand my motivations for writing, some of them seem to be aiming at a sort of intellectual showing off. I just respect you and I want you to be a bit more self-aware about your own motivations. Like me, you obsess over logical fallacies and cognitive biases, but you seem to be blind to these other psychological forces that are driving your own behaviour.

Sagredo: I really wasn’t thinking about getting praise when I decided to write the post. Honestly!

Salviati: I both believe you and do not believe you. I believe you in that I don’t think you explicitly thought “let’s beat up on some dumb creationists to get validation from the in-group.” As in, I don’t think those words passed through your stream of consciousness. But I do think it’s very likely that the unconscious expectation of praise and status points was a major factor in what made this idea seem like a good one to you.

Sagredo: That’s totally unfalsifiable!

Salviati: It is invisible, true, even to your own introspection. But we can infer it from your behaviour. Again, I don’t want to beat up on you too much, but when somebody chooses to devote several hours of time and energy to “solving” an incredibly tiny problem in an incredibly ineffective way, and you know that they are smart enough to be able to realize this, you start looking for other explanations for their behaviour. That’s why I look at all the people writing reams of stuff about how Bigfoot doesn’t exist and can’t help but shake my head. Signalling fits nicely as an explanation, though. As an analogy... if a person says that something is 90% probable, and then it doesn’t happen, they could just be unlucky. But if they keep saying “90% probable” and these things keep not happening, you can infer that the person is likely overconfident.

Sagredo: When I say it’s unfalsifiable, I don’t just mean that you’re inferring something about my psychology. Being psychoanalyzed is really annoying, but sometimes it’s possible to do that. I mean that there is literally no way of proving it wrong. As for how that relates to this water canopy thing...

Salviati: Maybe we should stop talking about your blog post, so that the argument’s conclusion doesn’t involve any embarrassment for you personally. No offense, but that would lower the emotional stakes for you.

Sagredo: Yeah, ok, I am kind of feeling like an insect pinned in a display case right now. Well, one of Hanson’s examples I remember is charity. He says “charity is not about charity” and stuff like that. The idea is that people give to such ineffective charities, in such ineffective ways, that the whole point of charity must not be to help people or causes, it must just be to look good.

Salviati: I’m with you so far.

Sagredo: But then you have this whole movement for effective charity centered around Givewell and Giving What We Can and other organizations. What about the people donating to them? And then the Hansonian reply (apart from other criticisms of the ways people donate) is that these people are just signalling to more sophisticated in-groups. Do you see how that looks a lot like epicycles?

Salviati: Sure, superficially.

Sagredo: But that’s not the worst of it! The “everything is signalling” crowd still needs to explain altruistic acts by individuals who are totally anonymous and know that they are.

Salviati: Right. One idea here is that the people who are best at showing off in front of groups are not the people who are most explicit about showing off, but instead the people who are totally oblivious to the fact that they’re showing off, and totally convinced that their behaviour is motivated by other, good reasons. So donating anonymously to charity is a way to, as it were, convince yourself of your own altruism, in order to signal more effectively at others in other circumstances.

Sagredo: Wow, seriously? ...You might as well just be a Freudian at this point.

Salviati: Well, as a human, given that you are going to be deceptive, a really effective way to do it is to actually believe the deception (at least at the conscious level). It’s cognitively cheaper than trying to be some straight up Machiavellian plotter who believes A but says B - you don’t have to watch your tongue or your body language if you “believe” your own lies. And if the “beliefs” involved don’t come in contact with reality too often, it doesn’t hurt your interests very much if they’re technically false. But I concede that that explanation is a bit suspicious-looking and seemingly unfalsifiable. By the way, another theory that occurs to me for explaining anonymous donations is that they often aren’t very anonymous after all. Maybe anonymous donors usually do tell key people in their in-group and trust the word to spread. That might be worth investigating empirically.

Sagredo: What is the big appeal of this theory, anyway? Why are you seeing signals behind every bush like some phallus-obsessed Freudian?

Salviati: I’ve noticed that tendency myself, yes. But I honestly do think that you will just fail to understand people if you don’t take signalling motives into account all the time. Fail miserably. And you will also be selectively blind to your own motivations. We could talk about all sorts of behaviours, from table manners to military strategy... Here’s a throwaway example. Why does everybody talk about crime going up and being out of control, when we both know that in North America and the UK the crime rate has been going down for a while?

Sagredo: They’re misinformed by politicians and members of the media, who are themselves either misinformed or looking for votes.

Salviati: Okay, but why do you think things are always skewed in the direction of high crime as opposed to low crime? Well, look, here’s what we can say from the perspective of signalling. A signal is basically an action (often a speech-act) A that also carries information about some hidden variable B. In the case of politics, the “hidden variable” typically refers to inferred personal characteristics of the speaker, characteristics that look good or bad to their in-group.

Sagredo: How does this apply to the crime issue?

Salviati: So let’s say you’re a member of the public who doesn’t know very much about crime rates. Some high-profile shooting happens in your city’s downtown, and Politician #1 comes on TV and says “Crime is out of control! We must do something about shootings like this! We need more police, more censorship of video games, parents need to teach traditional values...” you know the usual social-conservative spiel. On the left, it would focus more on gun control and other causes celebres, but otherwise it’d be pretty similar. Then Politician #2 comes on TV and says “Actually, crime is pretty much under control, and getting more so every year. This act was terrible, but our laws are necessarily a balance between freedom and security, not to mention between security and scarce resources that can be used elsewhere. I don’t think we should take any additional steps in the wake of this shooting, current laws are adequate.”

Sagredo: Yeah, point taken, I see how the first politician looks much better as a person. The second politician sounds complacent, even callous. And that’s before somebody comes up with a devastating meme about their indifference to human life, referencing the recent shooting as emotional ammunition.

Salviati: It can be even worse in extreme cases! How would you like to argue the case against some new anti-paedophilia law? In the wake of a high-profile case whose details have been luridly reported by the media? It’s an especially horrifying self-perpetuating phenomenon because even people who agree with you will wonder, deep down, what kind of person you are if you’re willing to, ahem, stick your neck out for paedophiles. Free speech advocates run into the same problem, because in practice, they end up defending people like Holocaust deniers, or those tiresome artists who take a crap on a crucifix and put it in a gallery, or anti-Islamic types who are often motivated by xenophobia more than principle. Signalling incentives are horrible, so unless corrected, society tends to drift in whatever direction it’s easiest to moral-grandstand in favour of.

Sagredo: Do you have some solution for this problem?

Salviati: Not a comprehensive one. But at least we can raise people’s consciousness to the problem, so that the pundit who goes on TV and says something like “If this law saves even one child from a horrible fate, it will be worth any cost whatsoever!” gets shouted down for cheap, empty signalling. But on an individual level, it’s just another piece of the puzzle for understanding how the social world works. That’s why I decided to harass you about it, because I think you’d want to know more about how people tick, including yourself. There are a lot of other details to it, and more botanizing that you can do about signalling incentives, harmful signalling arms races, and application to other stuff besides politics, like philosophy or education. This is just the elevator pitch.

Sagredo: I guess I see your point; I can imagine how this idea would apply to lots of stuff. But I still think there is a huge danger of over-application and unfalsifiability.

Salviati: I agree with you there - it’s a powerful idea, but it can definitely eat your brain if you’re not careful.