Inconvenient Associations

Note

Ozzie Gooen · September 2020 · Completeness: ★☆☆ (sketch)

Unpublished QURI draft, posted as-is — rough and unfinished; collaborator comments have been removed.

Ozzie Gooen’s take

This comes from the tradition of research on signaling that Robin Hanson and others worked on. Turning it into a real research post would take a fair bit of work, but the point should be simple enough.

Opus 4.8’s summary

A short essay-sketch proposing that cultural associations can suppress otherwise sensible choices. It opens with examples: backpacks, lace-free shoes, and running to work are functionally good options but carry associations (with children, or with eccentricity) that impose reputational costs. It discusses how associations shift over time through early adopters (hipsters and techies preceding more conservative groups) and gives Facebook’s generational adoption cycle as an example. The author then speculates that a culture could be analyzed by cataloging its positive and negative associations, suggesting that concepts like norms, practices, biases, values, and beliefs might be partly reducible to associations, and notes that associations are politically contested. The draft is brief and ends with an explicit editorial note that it “trails off into rough notes here,” signaling it was not developed past an opening sketch.

On their own, backpacks are highly optimized vessels for carrying a wide variety of possible objects. On their own, velcro or zippers on shoes can be a time saving mechanism. On its own, running is both faster and a more exercising activity than walking, for many professional locations.

But culture makes things complicated. Backpacks and shoes sans laces are associated with children, so anyone trying to seem professional may suffer a reputational loss from this association. Running to work is associated with people who are a bit insane.

These inconvenient associations aren’t uncommon.

One would think that with backpacks, all professionals could coordinate to arrive at the clearly superior equilibrium of acceptance rather than aversion. Many brands have fought to help make this the case, and many others have fought to exactly not make it the case.

With youthful items like backpacks, trends seem to first get taken up by hipsters and techies, and only then considered by the more conservative groups. The negative associations are replaced with positive ones one adapter at a time, as long as the adopters have positive associations by the later adapters.

Association dynamics often seem inevitable. Facebook had positive associations from the elite college scene, which led to the broad college scene, which led to old people. Young people have negative associations of old people, and in part have rejected Facebook for apps like Instagram and Snapchat. It’s possible that this association cycle will repeat itself indefinitely.

I bet you could tell a whole lot about a culture by categorizing and cataloging its positive and negative associations.

I’d be curious to see how far one could go with an analysis of a culture by its associations. I searched for a few breakdowns of “culture”, and arrived at terms like, “practices”, “biases”, “values”, “norms”, and “beliefs”. I think practices and norms could be understood as the result of the expected values of various interventions, where shared associations can represent a substantial part. Biases are arguably one subcategory of associations. Values overlap with some key associations, but I would expect readers would assume “values” to be much more narrow. I imagine that in many cases “beliefs” are the results of epistemic associations.

Associations are political. Making sure that the right groups and ideas have the rights shades of associations is a major factor in governmental politics, and a visible one in social politics.

(The draft trails off into rough notes here.)