Thinking about how the area of identity signaling mechanisms has shrunk while the information you try to communicate has expanded.
Coat of arms: 2 feet x 2 feet, maybe 10-20 bytes?
Military ribbons/medals: 6โx 6โ, maybe 100-200 bytes?
Profile pic: 0.5โx0.5โ, and your whole self?
Conversation
Coat of arms
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Couldnโt find a good chart of how to read military formal ribbon displays (is there a term for the full rack of stuff a military person wears for formal occasions, like โcoat of armsโ?)
The stuff on a very decorated generalโs uniform is like 6 rows of patches
Even a very complex NFT pfp canโt indicate much. Bored ape semiotics seem to be about 1-2 bytes worth.
Regular pfps seem to at most indicate a vibe gestalt, like anime or statue head. Really just 1 bit that sorta parity-checks the whole persona.
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โType of guyโ vibe boards (??) try to convey maybe 8-12 bytes?
Itโs hard to gauge information content, since social media heraldic displays assume a sort of subcultural literacy context. So itโs relative information.
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All the people agonizing about who is/isnโt a postrat should just invent a coat of arms scheme because thereโs too many bits to convey. Some suggested elements
E(x): LW
๐: Basilisk
๐ฆ: UST/Sarah Perry
๐: David Chapman
๐ฎ: Moloch/SSC
๐ถโ๐ซ๏ธ: illegibility
๐: ribbonfarm
๐ซ: tpot
Replying to
You could probably fit 4-6 in a handle before it starts getting noisy and annoying.
I especially like the irony of a legible indicator of illegibility stanning
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Iโd especially like a heraldry scheme for econ twitter, since I follow it in peripheral vision, but not closely enough to quickly parse where someone is coming from. What would be good symbols for Keynesian, monetarist, Austrian, MMT, Georgist, UBIer, behavioral economist?
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Somehow almost all the conditions for a heraldic culture are hereโฆ internet of beefs, knights/mooks, obscure distinctions, nerdy interest in signifiers, suitable tech (NFT pfps)โฆ yet it hasnโt yet quite come together. Wonder why. Too campy/unironic/on-the-nose?
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The signal grammar is just set membership I think. Each symbol indicates membership in one interest or social subgraph or set. The whole is a pointing vector. You need additional info to characterize the sets themselves. Weird Sun is probably the best codified example to date.
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There is also a tendency to make self-referential ironic jokes about signaling behavior itself, as in โingroupโ, but thereโs more unironic heraldic signaling going around than we cop to: Ukraine flags, rose twitter, ((โฆ)) etc
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๐ค
Quote Tweet
Replying to @vgr
twitter.com/areatechnology is one attempt you may find interesting
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