Motive Ambiguity

I tried looking for situations that have many of the same formal features, but that I am glad exist (whereas I intuitively dislike the examples in the OP and wish they happened less). I got:

1. Some kids set out to spend the night outdoors somewhere. They consider spending it in a known part of the woods, or in an extra scary/risky-seeming part of the woods. They choose the latter because it is risky. (And because they care more about demonstrating to themselves and each other that they can tolerate risk, then about safety.)

2. A boy wants to show a girl that he cares about her, as he asks her on a first date. He has no idea which flowers she does/doesn’t like. He considers getting her some common (easy to gather) flowers, or seeking out and giving her some rare flowers. (Everybody in town knows which flowers and common and which are rare.) He decides on the rare flowers, specifically because it’ll cause her to know that he spent more time gathering them, which will send a louder “hey I’m interested in you” signal. (This is maybe the same as your gift-giving example, which I feel differently good/bad about depending on its context.)

3. Critch used to recommend (probably still does) that if a person has e.g. just found out they’re allergic to chocolate, and is planning to try to give up chocolate but expecting to find this tricky, that they go buy unusually fancy/expensive/delicious chocolate packages, open them up, smell them, and then visibly throw them away without taking a bite. (Thus creating more ability to throw out similar things later, if they are e.g. given fancy chocolates as a gift.) For this exercise, the more expensive/fancy/good the chocolates are (and thus, the larger the waste in buying them to throw away), the better.

4. Some jugglers get interested in a new, slippery kind of ball that is particularly difficult to juggle. It is not any more visually beautiful to watch a person juggle (at least, if you’re an untrained novice who doesn’t know how the slippery balls work) — it is just harder. Many of the jugglers, when faced with the choice between training on an easier kind of ball or training on the difficult slippery ones, choose to train on the difficult slippery ones, specifically because it is harder (i.e., specifically because it’ll take more time/effort/attention to learn to successfully juggle them).

5. My anonymous friend Alex was bullied a lot in school. Then, at age 18, Alex was in a large group house with me and… made cookies… all through the afternoon. A huge batch of cookies. Twelve hungry people, including me, sat around smelling the cookies, expecting the cookies. (Food-sharing was ubiquitous in this group house.) Then, when the cookies were made and we showed up in the kitchen to ask for them, Alex… said they were the boss of the cookies (having made them) and that no one could have any! (Or at least, not for several hours.) A riot practically broke out. I was pretty upset! Partly in myself, and partly because lots of other people were pretty upset! But later Alex said they were still glad they did this, basically to show themselves that they didn’t always have to lose conflicts with other people, or have to be powerless in social contexts. And I still know Alex, and haven’t known them to do anything similar again. So I think I in fact feel positively about this all things considered. And the costs/value-destruction was pretty intrinsic to how Alex’s self-demonstration worked — Alex had no other reason to prefer “making everybody wait hours without cookies” to “letting people eat the cookies”, besides that people strongly dis-prefered waiting. (This is a true story.)

(I don’t have a specific thesis in sharing these. It’s just a step for me in trying to puzzle out what the dynamics in the OP’s examples actually are, and I want to share my scratch work. More scratch work coming probably.)

I remember encountering this same idea in Orwell's '1984':

‘How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?’
Winston thought. ‘By making him suffer,’ he said.
‘Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough.
Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own?'

One (admittedly idealistic) solution would be to spread awareness of this dynamic and its toxicity. You can't totally expunge it that way, but you could make it less prevalent (i.e. upper-middle managers probably can't be saved, but it might get hard to find enough somewhat-competent lower-middle managers who will play along).

What would it look like to achieve an actually-meaningful level of awareness? I would say "there is a widely-known and negative-affect-laden term for the behavior of making strictly-worse choices to prove loyalty". 

Writing this, I realized that the central example of "negative-sum behavior to prove loyalty" is hazing. (I think some forms of hazing involve useful menial labor, but classic frat-style hazing is unpleasant for the pledges with no tangible benefit to anyone else). It seems conceivable to get the term self-hazing into circulation to describe cases like the one in OP, to the point that someone might notice when they're being expected to self-haze and question whether they really want to go down that road.

I wonder if the following are also examples of motive ambiguity:

• Mothers choosing to stay at home.
• Researchers choosing to be bad at teaching.
• Mathematicians choosing to work on problems with no applications.

This is obvious, but, if you are in a position of power, however small, seek to reward people who are making the first kind of decisions rather than the second. Even, or especially?, if the object level decision is one you disagree with.

Crucial example that is both high leverage and ubiquitous is being a parent and what behavior you reward in your kids.

This post is based on the book Moral Mazes, which is a 1988 book describing "the way bureaucracy shapes moral consciousness" in US corporate managers. The central point is that it's possible to imagine relationship and organization structures in which unnecessarily destructive behavior, to self or others, is used as a costly signal of loyalty or status.

Zvi titles the post after what he says these behaviors are trying to avoid, motive ambiguity. He doesn't label the dynamic itself, so I'll refer to it here as "disambiguating destruction" (DD). Before proceeding, I want to emphasize that DD is referring to truly pointless destruction for the exclusive purpose of signaling a specific motive, and not to an unavoidable tradeoff.

This raises several questions, which the post doesn't answer.

1. Do pointlessly destructive behaviors typically succeed at reducing or eliminating motive ambiguity?
2. Do they do a better job of reducing motive ambiguity than alternatives?
3. How common is DD in particular types of institutions, such as relationships, cultures, businesses, and governments?
4. How do people manage to avoid feeling pressured into DD?
5. What exactly are the components of DD, so that we can know what to look for when deciding whether to enter into a certain organization or relationship?
6. Are there other explanations for the components of DD, and how would we distinguish between DD and other possible interpretations of the component behaviors?

We might resort to a couple explanations for (4), the question of how to avoid DD. One is the conjunction of empathy and act utilitarianism. My girlfriend says she wouldn't want to go to a restaurant only she loves, even if the purpose was to show I love her. Part of her enjoyment is my enjoyment of the experience. If she loved the restaurant only she loves so much that she was desperate to go, then she could go with someone else. She finds the whole idea of destructive disambiguation of love to be distinctly unappealing. The more aware she is of a DD dynamic, the more distasteful she finds it.

Another explanation for (4) is constitutional theory. In a state of nature, people would tend to form communities in which all had agreed not to pressure each other into DD dynamics. So rejecting DD behavior is a way of defending the social contract, which supercedes whatever signaling benefit the DD behavior was supposed to contribute to in particular cases.

As such, for a DD dynamic to exist consistently, it probably needs to be in a low-empathy situation, in which there is little-no ability to enforce a social contract, where the value of motive disambiguation is very high, and where there are destructive acts that can successfully reduce ambiguity. It could also be the result of stupidity: people falsely believing that DD will accomplish what it is described as accomplishing here and bring them some selfish benefit. As such, a description of DD might constitute an infohazard of sorts - though it seems to me to be very far from anything like sharing the genome of smallpox or the nuclear launch codes.

It seems challenging to successfully disambiguate motives with destructive behavior, because they expose the person enacting DD to perceptions of incompetence. Maybe they poisoned the water supply because they wanted to show loyalty, or maybe they did it because they're too incompetent to know how to maintain the factory without causing pollution. Maybe they took you to a restaurant they hate because they love you, or maybe it's because they're insecure or trying to use it as some sort of a bargaining chip for future negotiations.

All that said, I can imagine scenarios in which a person makes a correct judgment that DD will work as described, brings them the promised benefits, and provides supporting evidence in favor of DD as an effective strategy for acquiring status. This does indeed seem bad. One way to explain how this could be done is the idea of a cover story, a reasonable-sounding explanation for the behavior that all involved know is false, and serves simultaneously as evidence to external parties that the behavior was reasonable and evidence to internal parties that the behavior ought to be interpreted as DD.

But we also need to explain why DD is not only the best way to affirm loyalty, but the best overall way to affirm the things that loyalty is meant to accomplish. For example, loyalty is often meant to contribute to group survival, such as among soldiers. Even if DD is the best way to contribute to display a soldier's loyalty, it could be that it has side effects that diminish the health of the group, such as diminishing the appeal of military service to potential recruits.

Band of Brothers is a dramatic reenactment of the true story of Easy Company, paratroopers in WWII. Their captain, Herbert Sobel, put them through all kinds of hazing rituals. Examples include offering the company a big spaghetti dinner only to surprise them in the middle by forcing them to run up a mountain, causing the soldiers to vomit halfway up; or forcing the soldiers to inflict cruel punishments on each other.

Ultimately, Sobel loses the loyalty of his troops, not due to his strictness, but due to his incompetence in making command decisions in training exercises. They mutiny, and Sobel is replaced. Despite their dislike of Sobel, some soldiers think he did cause the soldiers to become particularly loyal to each other, though there are also many other mechanisms by which the soldiers were both selected for loyalty and had opportunities to demonstrate it. It's not at all clear that Sobel's pointlessly harsh treatment was overall beneficial to the military, though his rigor as a trainer does seem to have been appreciated. 

This suggests another explanation for DD, which is that the person enacting it may find the capacity to be strict and punitive to be useful in other contexts, and just not have the discernment to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate contexts. Or DD might be a form of training in order to enable the perpetrator to enact strictness in non-destructive contexts. To really work as a motive disambiguation, these also need to be ruled out.

Taken all together, we have lots of reasons to think that DD ought to be rare.

• We can create constitutions, explicit or implicit, that bar DD. These constitutions can be on many group levels: a management group, corporation, and whole industry might create multi-layered anti-DD constitutions, on the level of explicit contracts or, more likely, implicit or informal norms.
• DD needs to affirm loyalty without creating overal negative side effects for the group or for the person sending the signal.
• DD needs to reduce ambiguity on net, and destructive behaviors invite explanations other than loyalty signals.

All of these suggest to me that we should have a low prior that any given act is best explained as an example of DD. First, we'd want to resort to explanations such as tradeoffs, incompetence, negative outcomes from risky decisions, value differences, an attempt to "rescue" a mistake or example of incompetence and reframe it as a signal of loyalty post-hoc, and our own lack of information. These are common causes of destructiveness. Loyalty-based relationships are extremely common, so destructive behavior will often be associated with a loyalty-based relationship, and test those bonds of loyalty. There are so many plausible alternative explanations that we should require some extraordinary evidence that a particular behavior is a central case of destructive disambiguation.

I think a counterargument here is that DD is the "cover story" hypothesis I referred to earlier. If we are supposing that DD is common enough to be a serious problem in our society, perhaps we are also assuming that cover stories are effective enough that it will be very hard to find examples that are obvious to outsiders. It's a little like sex in a stereotypical "Victorian" society: it's obviously happening (we see the children), but everybody's taking pains to disguise it, and if you didn't know that sex existed, you might never figure it out and it would sound very implausible if explained to you.

Of course, with the sex analogy, even Victorians would eventually figure out that sex existed. Likewise, if DD is happening all the time, then people ought to be able to consult their lived experience to find ready examples. I personally find it to be alien to my experience, and others seem to feel the same way in the comment section here. My girlfriend goes further, feeling that it's not only alien, but a repugnant concept to even discuss. I can recall conversations with my uncle, who spent his career in the wine industry, and he says his company took a strong stand against doing any business in corrupt countries, even if there were profits to be made. These are just anecdotes, but I think it's necessary to start by resorting to them in this case.

If DD has been operationalized and subjected to scientific study, I would be interested to read the studies. But I would subject them to scrutiny along the lines I've outlined here. It would be a disturbing finding if robust evidence led us to conclude that DD is pervasive, but I suspect that we'd find out that the disturbing features of human behavior have alternative explanations.

I tried to directly respond to the points in this post. But the framing of this post is so off-kilter from mine that it's confusing to try to "meet" your frame while maintaining my own.

I'm just going to have to give my own take, and let people be confused how the two integrate. 

//

I'm the middle manager with the widget factory. I imagine ~two possible scenarios:

• My higher-ups actually would want me to make the saner choice, but I am personally very confused, or there's been a lot of miscommunication / lack of clarity. Maybe my ability to read their signals of what they'd want is very wrong, or they just don't give much feedback at all. (I've seen this happen lots. This seems totally plausible to me.) In MY world, the higher-ups need me to demonstrate loyalty by showing an ability to make the worse decision. I am desperate for their approval and am confused about how to get it. In REALITY, the game of dishing out approval is not something the company optimizes for, and so the higher-ups haven't a clue about my internal drama. If they could read my mind, they'd pity me. They assume that I'm just learning the ropes, and they're willing to eat the cost of some middle manager making mistakes, and they don't have time to fix all the errors. They let it go without comment (perhaps a sign of the problem). I am twiddling my fingers in anxiety, hoping they like me / don't fire me.
• My higher-ups will in fact promote me for making the insane choice, and my read about that is totally correct. In this world, lots of systems and people are corrupt. Bribery, cheating, scams, embezzling, etc. are prevalent. There isn't much rhyme or reason to choice-making because people can NOT be expected to be rewarded for doing good work; the only reward is having the right connections. If you don't have the right connections, you're probably fucked. Think the USSR under Stalin. In this world, basically everyone is insane. They've let integrity go out the window. "This is why we can't have nice things." Clean effort does not result in reward. People resort to other means.

I honestly don't see the example making any sense outside of something similar to the above scenarios, unless you remove information from the system (e.g. I don't know that the water-poisoning factory costs the SAME as the not-water-poisoning factory) or there's info left out ("no additional cost" isn't taking into account things like legibility or robustness or something). 

//

I'm the spouse planning dinner. I can imagine the following scenarios, which carry some element of insanity:

• I have some core belief that Love = Suffering or Love = Sacrifice. ("Core belief" is a technical term here.) This leads me to doing some insane things like always doing the thing I don't want to do, whenever I get a sense my partner wants that something, with the expectation that this is "how love works" or something. My partner does not want me to do this, but I'm kind of stuck / can't get distance from the pattern.
• My partner is stuck in a zero-sum mentality about romantic relationships. They get upset when I don't make grand gestures or display active self-sacrifice. They feel insecure in the relationship. When I seem happy at their "expense", they assume I don't love them / care about them. I feel obligated to pick places they like even when I don't like them, and I am carrying some slight resentment about it. It doesn't feel worth rocking the boat. In fact, they do seem more relaxed when I seem "less openly excited or happy"—because to them, this means I need them more, and they feel less likely to be abandoned or rejected. (In this case, let's say that this is the wrong assumption in this particular relationship, but hasn't been wrong in past relationships, and they are dealing with trauma in the area.)
• Or, as is all too common, both me and my partner are carrying some kind of trauma-based insanity about relationships. We're codependent and playing out a weird stereotypical trope of sacrificing our own preferences for the sake of the other. We don't see a problem actually, with this, if you asked us, but we're both suffering more than otherwise.

I can imagine the following scenarios, which are not insane:

• I enjoy giving my spouse the gift of taking them to their beloved restaurant, regardless of my own preferences. I see this as practicing generosity. I put my preference aside, but this leaves no negative residue. I'm genuinely happy to take them to a restaurant they love. In our relationship, we don't prioritize "having good experiences" as much as we do giving / building / quality attention / etc.
• I am practicing relinquishing my preferences because I want to be able to enjoy myself regardless of particular external circumstances. I believe it's good to take each moment as it is and appreciate the present, over necessarily trying to make myself experience particular things. Giving my spouse a nice dinner is an excellent bonus.
• If we always went to the restaurant we both love, we'd get less variety of restaurant choices for our romantic dinners. So sometimes I pick the restaurant they love, and sometimes they pick the restaurant I love, and sometimes we pick the restaurant we both love. Overall, this is value-positive in the long term.

//

These examples are outputs from my model of how reality works, from what I can tell. 

Thanks for writing this; I really appreciated getting to read this post, especially the examples, which seem helpful for trying to bring something into focus.

I wish I had a better model of how common it is to actually have people destroying large amounts of value on purpose, for reasons such as those in the OP. And if it is common, I wish I had a clearer model of why. (I suspect it’s common. I’ve suspected this since reading Atlas Shrugged ~a year ago. But I’m not sure, and I don’t have a good mechanistic mode, and in my ignorance of the ‘true names’ of this stuff it seems really easily to blatantly misunderstand.)

To try to pinpoint what I don’t understand:

• I agree that we care about each others’ motives. And that we infer these from actions. And that we care about others’ models of our motives, and that this creates funny second-order incentives for our actions.
• I also agree that there are scenarios, such as those in the OP, where these second-order incentives can lead a person to destroy a bunch of value (by failing to not-poison the river, etc.)
• I’m uncertain of the frequency and distribution of such incentive-impacts. Are these second-order incentives mostly toward “actions with worse physical consequences”, or are they neutral or positive in expectation (while still negative in some instances)? (I agree there are straight-forward examples where they’re toward worse, and that Zvi lists some of these. But there are also examples the other way. Like, in Zvi’s widget-factory example, I could imagine the middle manager choosing the policy that will avoid poisoning the water (whether or not he directly cares about it) so that other people will think he is the sort of person who cares about good things, and will be more likely to ally with him in contexts where you want someone who cares about good things (marriage; friendships; some jobs).)
• If the distribution does have a large amount of cases second-order incentives push toward destroying value — why, exactly?

Differently put: in the OP, Zvi writes “none of this assumes a zero-sum mentality. At all.” But, if we aren’t assuming a zero-sum mentality, why would the middle manager’s boss (in the widgets example) want to make sure he doesn’t care about the environment? Like, one possibility is that the boss thinks things are zero-sum, and expects a tradeoff between “is this guy liable to worry about random non-company stuff in future situations” and “is this guy doing what’ll help the company” in future cases. But that seems like an example of the boss expecting zero-sum situations, or at least of expecting tradeoffs. And Zvi is saying that this isn’t the thing.

(And one possibility for why such dynamics would be common, if they are, is if it is common to have zero-sum situations where “putting effort toward increasing X” would interfere with a person’s ability to increase Y. But I think this isn’t quite what Zvi is positing.)

I notice that many of these examples involve something like vice signalling - the person is destroying value in order to demonstrate that they have a quality which I (and most LWers) consider to be undesirable. It seems bad for the middle manager, politician, and start-up founder to aim for the shallow thing that they're prioritizing. And then they take the extra step of destroying something I do value in order to accentuate that. It's a combination that feels real icky.

The romantic dinner and the handmade gift examples don't have that feature. And those two cases feel more ambiguous - I can imagine versions of these where it seems good that the person is doing these things, and versions where it seems bad. I can picture a friend telling me "I took my partner out for their birthday to a restaurant that I don't really care for, but they just adore" and it being a heartwarming story, where it seems like something good is happening for my friend and their relationship.

Katja's recent post on Opposite Attractions [LW · GW] points to one thing that seems good about taking your spouse to a restaurant that only they love - your spouse's life is full of things that you both like, and perhaps starved of certain styles of things that they like and you don't, and they could be getting something out of drawing from that latter category even if there's some sense in which they don't like it any more than a thing in the "youboth like it" category. And there's something good about them getting some of those things within the relationship, of having the ground that the relationship covers not be limited to the intersection of "the things you like" and "the things your spouse likes" - your relationship mostly takes advantage of that part of the territory but sometimes it's good to explore other parts of it together. And I could imagine you bringing an attitude to the meal where you're tuned in to your spouse's experience, trying to take pleasure in how much they enjoy the meal, rather than being focused on your own food. And (this is the part where paying a cost to resolve motive ambiguity comes in directly) going to a restaurant that they love and you don't like seems like it can help set the context for this kind of thing - putting the information in common knowledge between you two that this is a special occasion, and what sort of special occasion it's trying to be. It seems harder to hit some of these notes in a context where both people love the food.

(There are also versions the one-sided romantic dinner which seem worse, and good relationships where this version doesn't fit or isn't necessary.)

The world would be better if people treated more situations like the first set of problems, and less situations like the second set of problems. How to do that?

It sounds like the question is essentially "How to do hard mode?".

On a small scale, it's not super intimidating. Just do the right thing and take your spouse to the place you both like. Be someone who cares about finding good outcomes for both of you, and marry someone who sees it. There are real gains here, and with the annoyance you save yourself by not sacrificing for the sake of showing sacrifice, you can maintain motivation to sacrifice when the payoff is actually worth it -- and to find opportunities to do so. When you can see that you don't actually need to display that costly signal, it's usually a pretty easy choice to make.

Forging a deeper and more efficient connection does require allowing potential for conflict so that you can distinguish yourself from the person who is only doing things for shallow/selfish reasons. Distinguish yourself by showing willingness to entertain such accusations, knowing that the truth will show through. Invite those conflicts when you have enough slack to turn it into play, and keep enough slack that you can. "Does this dress make my ass look fat?" -- can you pull off "The *dress* doesn't, no" and get a laugh, or are you stuck where there's only one acceptable answer? If you can, demonstrate that it's okay to suggest the "unthinkable" and keep poking until you can find the edge of the envelope. If not, or when you've reached the point where you can't, then stop and ask why. Address the problem. Rinse and repeat with the next harder thing, as you become ready to.

On a larger scale, it gets a lot harder. You can no longer afford to just walk away from anyone who doesn't already mostly get it, and you don't have so much time and attention to work. There are things you can do, and I don't want to suggest that it's "not doable". You can start to presuppose the framings that you've worked hard to create and justify in the past, using stories from past experience and social proof to support them in the cases where you're challenged -- which might be less than you think, since the ability to presuppose such things without preemptively flinching defensively can be powerful subcommunication. You can start to build social groups/communities/institutions to scale these principles, and spread to the extent that your extra ability to direct motivation towards good outcomes allows you to out-compete the alternatives.

I just don't get the impression that there's any "easy" answer. If you want people to donate to your political campaign even though you won't play favorites like the other guy will, I think you have to genuinely have to be able to expect that your donors will be more personally rewarded by the larger total pie and recognition of doing the right thing than they will in the alternative where they donate to have someone fight to give them more of a smaller pie -- and are perceived however you let that be perceived.
 

In the first example, you care more about your spouse’s view of how much you care about their experience than you care about your own experience. 

This is an interesting example. It assumes that your spouse doesn't care about you caring about your own experience. 

There's the discourse that asserts that woman don't like nice guys, and I think it applies here. For a majority of women that behavior isn't attractive. 

Curated. This was a concept which came up in the Moral Mazes discussion, but was nicely "factored-out-able", and am glad to have a standalone post referencing it.

I posit four basic categories of value: resources, experiences, esteem, and agency. You've listed a group of esteem games.

In the first example, let's assume your spouse likes the other restaurant significantly better than the one you both like. You deny yourself a specific potential positive experience by using your agency to grant her a more positive experience, and in doing so, you obtain the esteem of the sacrificial as well as the esteem of the generous in your spouse's eyes.

If it's a healthy relationship, that esteem is a side benefit which gets folded into the gestalt benefit of relational harmony enhanced through generosity. But if the esteem is the main goal, the sacrificer is exhibiting unhealthy codependent behavior. Alternatively, if your spouse likes both restaurants equally well, the esteem is the only benefit; gaming that system is more obvious and may negate the granting of any esteem.

I won't go through the other examples, but in each case, your actions are a gamble, a statement about yourself that pays off with esteem from someone whose esteem you value.

DIfferent but related: kakonomics

You know how there's standard advice to frame desires / recommendations / policy proposals / etc. in positive rather than negative terms? (E.g., to say "It's good to X" and not "It's bad to Y"?)

I bet this is actually good advice, and that it's significantly about reducing the "doing costly things just to visibly not be like Y" dynamic Zvi is talking about. I bet it happens both between multiple people (as in Zvi's examples) and within a person (as in e.g. the examples in "pain is not the unit of effort [LW · GW]").

A politician can choose between two messages that affirm their loyalty: Advocating a beneficial policy, or advocating a useless and wasteful policy. They choose useless, because the motive behind advocating a beneficial policy is ambiguous. Maybe they wanted people to benefit!

I think this is a bad description. If we take the EMA decision to approve the COVID-19 vaccine later then other agencies, the had the choice between benefitial policy (early approval) and useless policy (late approval). They chose the late approval to signal that they care strongly about safety and displaying their loyality to the ideal of safety. 

I don't think anybody who's the target of the signal is supposed to think "The EMA didn't care about benefiting people".

Politicians signal loyality to lobbyists by doing exactly what the lobbyists tell them. If a politician takes the amendment that a lobbyist gives them and adds his own words to it that make it a more wasteful policy for the general population that's not a sign of loyality towards the lobbyist. It's rather a sign if he pushes the amendment without changing any words. And maybe not asking boring questions such as "what would be the effect if this amendment makes it into law?"

I can see politicians making laws to punish the outgroup and signaling tribal loyality with that but when it comes to that I doubt any of the target audience is supposed to think "the politician doesn't want the people to benefit". 

Do you have an example where Maybe they wanted people to benefit! would actually be an important signal in Western politics?

Initial reaction: I like this post a lot. It's short, to the point. It has examples relating its concept to several different areas of life: relationships, business, politics, fashion. It demonstrates a fucky dynamic that in hindsight obviously game-theoretically exists, and gives me an "oh shit" reaction.

Meditating a bit on an itch I had: what this post doesn't tell me is how common this dynamic, or how to detect when it's happening.

While writing this review: hm, is this dynamic meaningfully different from the idea of a costly signal?

Thinking about the examples:

You are married, and want to take your spouse out to a romantic dinner. You could choose a place you both love, or a place that only they love. You choose the place you don’t love, so they will know how much you love them. After all, you didn’t come here for the food. ... you care more about your spouse’s view of how much you care about their experience than you care about your own experience.

Seems believably common, but also kind of like a fairly normal not-very-fucky costly signal.

(And, your spouse probably wants to come to both restaurants sometimes. And they probably come to the place-only-they-love less than they ideally would, because you don't love it.)

Gets fuckier if they'd enjoy the place-you-both-love more than the place-only-they-love. Then the cost isn't just your own enjoyment; it's a signal you care about something, at the cost of the thing you supposedly care about. Still believable, but feels less common.

A middle manager must choose how to improve widget production. He can choose a policy that improperly maintains the factory and likely eventually poisons the water supply, or a policy that would prevent that at no additional cost. He knows that when he is up for promotion, management will want to know the higher ups can count on him to make the quarterly numbers look good and not concern himself with long term issues or what consequences might fall on others. If he cared about not poisoning the water supply, he would not be a reliable political ally. Thus, he chooses the neglectful policy. ... you care more about being seen as focused on your own success than you care about outcomes you won’t be responsible for.

(Didn't work for me, but I think the link is supposed to highlight the following phrase in the second paragraph: "The Immoral Mazes sequence is an exploration of what causes that hell, and how and why it has spread so widely in our society. Its thesis is that this is the result of a vicious cycle arising from competitive pressures among those competing for their own organizational advancement.")

Ah, so I think this has an important difference from a normal "costly signal", in that the cost is to other people.

I read the immoral mazes sequence at the time, but don't remember in depth. I could believe that it reliably attests that this sort of thing happens a lot.

A politician can choose between two messages that affirm their loyalty [to their biggest campaign contributer]: Advocating a beneficial [to the general public] policy, or advocating a useless and wasteful policy. They choose useless, because the motive behind advocating a beneficial policy is ambiguous. Maybe they wanted people to benefit! ... you care more about being seen as loyal than about improving the world by being helpful.

Again, the cost is to other people, not the politician.

How often do politicians get choices like this? I think a more concrete example would be helpful for me here, even if it was fictional. (But non-fiction would be better, and if it's difficult to find one... that doesn't mean it doesn't happen, real-world complications might mean we don't know about them and/or can't be sure that's what's going on with them. But still, if it's difficult to find a real-world example of this, that says something bad.)

(Is the point of the link to the pledge of allegiance simply that that's a signal of loyalty that costs a bit of time? I'm not American and didn't read the article in depth, I could be missing something.)

A start-up founder can choose between building a quality product without technical debt and creating a hockey stick graph with it, or building a superficially similar low-quality product with technical debt and using that. Both are equally likely to create the necessary graph, and both take about the same amount of effort, time and money. They choose the low-quality product, so the venture capitalists can appreciate their devotion to creating a hockey stick graph. ... you care about those making decisions over your fate believing that you will focus on the things they believe the next person deciding your fate will care about, so they can turn a profit. They don’t want you distracted by things like product quality.

The claimed effect here is: the more investors know about your code quality, the more incentive you have to write bad code. I could tell an opposite story, where if they know you have bad code they expect that to hurt your odds of maintaining a hockey-stick graph.

So this example only seems to hold up if

1. Investors know about your code quality.
2. They care about what your code quality says about loyalty to their interests, more than what it says about your ability to satisfy their interests.

I'm not convinced on either point.

If it does hold up... yeah, it's fucky in that it's another case of "signal you care about a thing by damaging the thing".

You can choose between making a gift and buying a gift. You choose to make a gift, because you are rich and buying something from a store would be meaningless. Or you are poor, so you buy something from a store, because a handmade gift wouldn’t show you care.

Mostly just seems like another fairly straightforward costly signal? Not very fucky.

Old joke: One Russian oligarch says, “Look at my scarf! I bought it for ten thousand rubles.” The other says, “That’s nothing, I bought the same scarf for twenty thousand rubles.” ... the oligarchs want to show they have money to burn, and that they care a lot about showing they have lots of money to burn. That they actively want to Get Got to show they don’t care. If someone thought the scarf was bought for mundane utility, that wouldn’t do at all.

Same as above. I think this is what economists call a Veblen good.

I don't think the article convinces me to be significantly more concerned about regular costly signals than I currently do, where the cost is entirely on the person sending the signal. That's two and a half of the examples, and they seem like the least-fucky. I think... if I'm supposed to care about those, I'd probably want an article that specifically focuses on them, rather than mixing them with fuckier things.

The ones where (some of) the cost is to other people, or to the thing-supposedly-cared-about, are more worrying. But there's also not enough detail here to convince me those are very common. And the example closest to my area of expertise is the one I don't believe. I feel like a lot of my worry about these, in my initial reading, came from association with the others, that having separated out I find more-believable and less-fucky. I don't think it's deliberate, but I feel vaguely Motte-and-Baileyed.

Writing this has moved me from positive on the review to slightly negative. (Strictly speaking I didn't cast a vote before, but I was expecting it would have been positive.) But I won't be shocked if something I've missed brings me back to positive.

what is cool about that post is it self-demonstrating nature. like the maze, it give explanation that give less precise map of the world, with less prediction power then more standard model. and it give more pessimistic and cynical explanation. you trade off your precision and prediction power to be cynical and pessimistic!

and now i can formalize what i didn't like abut this branch of rationality. it's look like cynicism is their bottom line. they already convinced in the depth of their heart that the most pessimistic theory is true, and now they are ready to bite the bitter bullet. 

but from the side, i see no supporting evidence. this is not how people behave. the predictions created by such theories are wrong. it's so strange thing to write on the bottom line! but being unpleasant not making something true, more then being pleasant make it true. 

and as Wizard's first rule say, people believe things they want to believe or things the afraid to believe...

I think the reason situations of problem 2 arise is because of misaligned incentives. When you care more about pleasing some other party, the best action is not necessarily the one that does the most good, but the one that best pleases the other person.

The cost incurred from doing so is then payed by either you (i.e. I pay the price in choosing a restaurant I hate) or society (in the factory example, the water is poisoned because of your choice)