When one occupant of this house visits another he rings three times. That has been agreed, so that no one catches fright. A simple ring could be the police.
During my Ph.D. program, I became interested in the informational structure of markets that turned into the work on signaling, which was the part of my early work that was recognized for the Nobel Prize, but it was not really a subject at the time.
I studied Morse code.
Scientifically, information is a choice - a yes-or-no choice. In a broader sense, information is everything that informs our world - writing, painting, music, money.
The biggest downside of my current job is that I have to wear a suit to work. Wearing uncomfortable clothes on purpose is an example of what former Princeton hockey player and Nobel Prize winner Michael Spence taught economists to call 'signaling.'
It's not just the kid who's spent every penny from his job to upgrade his car to tell the world he cares about sports cars, it's also the person driving around in a fuel-conscious hybrid electric car, because it's more a message to the world than an effective means of saving fuel, to be quite honest.
If you are to reach masses of people in this world, you must do it by a sign language. Whether your vehicle be commerce, literature, or politics, you can do nothing but raise signals, and make motions to the people.
Being flirty is a way of letting a guy know you're interested without making a fool out of yourself.
A fop takes great pains to hang out a sign, by his dress, of what he has within.
I compose with bells a lot. Bells and breath. Both things you react to without thinking about it. Bells traditionally give us orders: come to the desk, the truck is backing up, the ice cream is here, it's time to go to church. They're sounds our brains are already associated with.
In the handbook of Donald Trump, they no longer do whistle calls - they're now using full bullhorns.
Postmodernism surely requires an even greater grasp of symbolism, as it's increasingly an art of gesture alone.
… deterrence success is heavily dependent both on signaling the adversary on your intentions and on that adversary interpreting your signals correctly. Communications, through words and deeds, is thus central to a deterrence relationship.
Like most things in life, the beard always comes first. And it sends out some kind of pheromonal call to the universe that brings the roles appropriate to it.
If you get up in the morning and wear a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and some flip-flops, it's a signal that you might be going to the beach. If you get up in the morning and you wear a breast plate and a back plate and a cape and a pair of golden Satanic horns on your head, it's quite clear that you're doing something else.
Gestures matter.
The sound of a small bell during a dark night, is louder than the din of traffic outside your window during rush hour. Surprise and differentiation have far more impact than noise does.
