the pondscum collective

❓Signalling and Counter-Signalling

❓ This is intended to be a new, shorter series of quick explanations of given topics. These are intended to be basic explainers to help absorb more complex ideas. They won't be exhaustive, the goal is to get a working understanding of something.

Lying

So you've been asked to lie, but lying is bad! Beyond the basic examples of lying to protect someone you care about, a more developed understanding of "lying" is an understanding of Signalling.

Textual communication (e.g. words, speech, writings) is formed by most people intentionally. Almost everyone has the ability to choose their words, but this carries with it a risk - What if they choose words that convey falsehoods to gain advantages over others? Human communication has developed a neat solution, as it often does - make communication more cognitively costly by including subtextual layers of communication: Signals.

Signals

These signals are, for most people, difficult to control entirely. Even if you control them effectively, you now have to include controlling them in your effort to convey a falsehood. Lying is no longer merely stating something that isn't true, but carefully masking and controlling your natural signalling processes to prevent people from intuitively sensing that there is something wrong. People often find this quite difficult, and often overestimate their capacity to do this effectively.

This is great news for a society that wants to reduce the number of people who can get away with lying!

Small Talk

Signalling is one reason people do small talk, even if you don't like it. The textual conversation is essentially meaningless, but they are communicating entirely in subtextual signals. "Do I like this person? What do they want from me? Do I want them to know I like them? Can I start offering cues to break down some formalities? Do I find them off-putting?" It's important not to jump to a common conclusion that small talk is useless1 - it is itself a pretty serious red flag to others that you're unwilling to participate in this signalling exercise. It implictly suggests you have something to hide, even when you don't! You are essentially signalling that you either don't respect the process of safety checks people engage in, or you don't understand them well enough to perform them correctly - both potential red flags.2

Signals in Dating

Let's expand this to a more complex arena - Dating Apps. Imagine a young woman interested in casual but mutually fun relationships, no strings attached. Given the context of the dating app environment, with many hundreds times more men than women initiating - this woman could just explicitly state their intent. But this would attract those who prioritize the easiest opportunities. This prioritization carries with it some correlations to undesirable traits like desperation, rejection by many other women (possibly for valid common causes), lack of care or interest beyond self-gratification. These people read a woman stating this intent in this contextual environment as someone with no standards.3

By explicitly stating the truth, she has signalled towards a group of people she did not want to engage with. So instead, she should signal to court the demographics she actually wants, filter them, run them through some basic social testing (e.g. small talk in a public space) and then be direct about what she wants. Phrases like "Looking for a connection", "No One Night Stands", "Don't get immediately sexual in messages" will yield a higher calibre of casual partner, at a very minimum one who listens and responds to what a woman says she wants.

But she lied about her intent! She tricked men into thinking she wanted one thing and then surprised them with another! It's not fair!

In isolation this could be a fair critique, but in practice it's ludicrous to expect women to put themselves at risk or even just have a shit time dating for the sake of being direct. The fact that no one IS direct about their intent in dating markets is a context that you have to submit to. You did not ask for it, you may not like it, but these dynamics exist for a reason - often as coping strategies by women to stay safe and prevent bad situations.

So, signalling is the non-textual communication we offer other people.

Signalling is useful to society because it makes it harder for people to lie to each other competently.

Signalling is a crucial tool for accurately arriving at the outcomes you want, despite not always directly representing what you want.

Counter-Signalling

Now we finally come to Counter-Signalling. Counter-signalling requires a better understanding of the landscape of a communication domain to be effective. Essentially it is to signal in the opposite direction of a common signal in order to demonstrate a property you have. Let's go back to dating apps as an example.

There is a statistically anomalous drop off in male height, where fewer men than expected are 5"10 or 5"11, followed by a peak at 6"0. The obvious conclusion is that many men who are slightly shorter than 6"0 lie about their height to avoid being cut off by women who set that as a preference. So there is a common expectation that men will fudge their height up to 6"0 to benefit from boosting their overall sexual market value.

Imagine then, a man who is 5"11. It'd be very easy for them to set it to 6"0 and basically no woman would ever know the difference. Yet they didn't, what could be the signal?

All positive traits that could yield some benefits. In some cases maybe even greater benefits than being 6"0! It now begs the question, should the 6"0 man perhaps drop their height to 5"11, allowing a woman to be pleasantly surprised when it first comes up? Better yet, if someone were to find out you lied about your height, you lied (surely unknowingly!) in a negative direction. You're so confident you don't even need to rely on all of your actual traits to be successful!

This would be countersignalling your height to indicate it isn't necessary to your success in dating, and this is doubly effective when you do actually hold the trait you are counter-signalling that you don't have.

Using this in Politics

This should be intuitive to most people, but we can use Trump v Biden as a simple example to apply these dynamics to. Somehow many liberals remain appalled and confused at Trump's capacity for blatant incompetence. With this framework in mind it's easier to understand Trump as an extremely effective counter-signaller - He does not jump through hoops or display the competence of prior presidents. Why would he have to when he's doing the right thing? His aesthetic evils become counter-signals that demonstrate is lack of need for subterfuge, ironically convincing his base that he is good precisely because he does not act it. Biden, by comparison, has to fight for an aesthetic of competence because it is necessary to signal what his base has been trained to receive. This further explains why no one will give a shit when Trump deteriorates in the same way Biden did. There is no hypocrisy here.

One last example - politics. Let's imagine a hypothetical where partisanship has reached a point where two groups have completely lost trust in each other. The right wing and left wing nearly unanimously agree the other is destroying the country and can't be trusted. There is no way to bridge this gap textually, they have far too many defences against the other sides propaganda built in at this point.

So how do we get around them? In infiltrating a right-wing community, there are some things to keep in mind:

Is this morally justified? It depends on your target and goals. A lie is far kinder than a bullet, and unless you think your opponent is a lost cause and violence is the only answer, or you think doing the same thing liberals have done for 30 years will suddenly start working again, it's probably more effective than one too.

Footnotes

  1. Looking at you Nietzche↩

  2. Yes this is unfortunately ableist, and many people find this difficult even just due to undersocialisation. It's a reality of communication and your best bet is either to suck it up and learn to do it artificially, or spend time around people who don't care. Worse, this does mean that you're pooling a vulnerable, exploitable population together with people that may want to take advantage of the relative ease with which they can be manipulated. Probably best just to learn signalling, or at a minimum understand why it's useful to people rather than dismiss it.↩

  3. Even worse, because all the other women are signalling less intent than they actually have, any woman who states their real intent is actually signalling more intent than they state. In an environment where everyone is fudging their numbers down, not fudging your numbers suggests they're higher than they really are! It is in fact deceitful in this environment to state your direct intent, because it signals something other than your intent within the contextual environment.↩