[LINK] Interfluidity on "Rational Astrologies"

I hadn't thought of the "Schelling Fences" article, even though I'd thought of Schelling points as being related when I thought about better names. Good catch. Other related articles are probably Defecting by Accident - A Flaw Common to Analytical People and Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate . If "rationalists should win" then "rationalists in a group should win more dramatically" and this is a process that is central to group coordination.

I really like the idea of having a concept or a name for rational astrologies, but I think the name itself could use some work. A more technical sounding term (more likely to be taken up and used as a difficult-to-inflate keyword in academic research) for the body of beliefs and practices that the original article called a "rationalist astrology" might be a "Faith Insuring Schelling Simplification". I think that covers all the key features: the way a sort of "protective put" is offered to people who "really believe" (or comprehensively pretend to believe) in a theory that is too simple to be technically literally correct but that will be intelligible to many people as affording "the right enough behavior that we can coordinate to bring it about without talking about it too much".

As near as I can tell, issues like inferential distances and dunbar's number mean that for any large group of people to coordinate effectively they will need to have something like a chain of command, or they will need a set of faith insuring schelling simplifications backed by real social capital, or they will need both. A naive prediction is that a really useful FISS would be a theory that affords functional chain-of-command-like behavior. Another interesting angle is that, if you squint, you can probably see that some people might see the whole thing for what it is (falsity and manipulation and all) and yet still believe that the essence of pragmatic morality is supporting their community's FISS set.

No, though they are related.

A signal is a costly behavior that predictably correlates with a more difficult to observe attribute. In particular, the cost of performing the behavior normally depends on the attribute(s) in question. For example, it's cheap to tell an interviewer that I'm interested in the job, and can act in a professional manner on the job. Showing up to the interview early and dressed appropriately signals that interest much more effectively, and the interviewer is far more likely to believe the actions than the words as a result. (While you can fake signaling behaviors, it's usually easier to do the behavior when the underlying attribute is present, so they constitute Bayesian evidence. As in all human things, sometimes this works better than others and the details rapidly get complicated.)

A rational astrology is a behavior you do for purposes of societal approval. In general, that behavior would signal a belief in the common beliefs that underlie that behavior. However, the behavior is not done purely for signaling purposes: it's also done to gain the societal safe harbor protection. If you use the normal medical treatment rather than the quack one, society won't blame you if it fails. This reason is often sufficient to justify the behavior, even ignoring all signaling concerns. It also signals belief in the standard medical establishment. The two effects can be somewhat difficult to disentangle.

(You could also take a more signaling-centric explanation of rational astrologies than I did here. You can explain the decision to visit the regular doctor as a signal of caring about your health, as a signal of non-quack-conspiracy-theorist status, as a signal of general social skills, and as a signal of general scientific knowledge. You can then explain the resultant reaction of society as based on reading those signals, not on the rational astrology conformance directly. However, I think this misses something: the character of my condemnation of a known quack who visits a regular doctor will be very different from my condemnation of an otherwise saner person who uses homeopathic medicine for their ailments. I think this is easier to explain given my model above than the completely signaling-centric model.)