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Perplexed comments on The Aliens have Landed! - Less Wrong
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There is an idea, surprisingly prevalent on a rationality website, that costless signaling is an effective way to influence the behavior of rational agents. Or in other words, that it is rational to take signalling at face value. I personally doubt that this idea is correct. In any case, I reiterate that I suggest yielding only to credible threats. My own announcements do not change the credibility of any threats available to agents seeking to exploit me.
Perhaps what is really being expressed is the belief that social costs are real, and that mere pseudonymous posting has costs.
huh?????
Maybe if you provided examples of people seeming to say that "costless signaling is an effective way to influence the behavior of rational agents," we could ask them what they meant, and they might say something like "no signaling is actually costless".
Statements like "Someone going on record as having opinion X has given decent reason to suppose that person (believes he or she) actually holds opinion X," are interpretable of having either of the two meanings above. Since you didn't provide examples, I wasn't persuaded that you are describing people's ideas, and I suspect ambiguous statements like that are behind our clash of intuitions about what people think.
Ok. That makes some sense. Though I still don't have a clue as to why you mention "social costs" or "pseudonymous posting".
So, for the example of people seeming to say that costless signaling is an effective way to influence the behavior of rational agents, I would direct you to the comment to which I was replying. Tim wrote:
I interpreted that as advocating costless signaling as a way of influencing the behavior of would-be extortionists. My response to that advocacy: Announcing that I am on a vendetta is cheap talk, and influences no one. No rational agent will believe such self-serving puffery unless I actually experience a level of personal expense commensurate with what I hope to gain by convincing them. Which makes the signaling not just costly, but irrational.
You seem to be the only one talking about "costless signaling" here.
I think the hidden cost is that if the signaler is called on the bluff, the signaler will be shown to not be fully committed to his or her pronouncements (and it will be reasonable to infer a good deal more flexibility in them than that).
Generally I think if someone has an intuition a case of apparently costless signaling would be valuable, his or her intuition is usually correct, but the intellect hasn't found the cost of the signal yet. The intellect's claim that only signaling that has costs is valuable remains accurate, as you say.
It seems like its irrationality would be made contingent on some variables, so it would sometimes actually be rational costly signalling. Following through on a costly commitment clearly has costs, but why assume benefits to reputation aren't greater?
If you say "I will be careful not to betray lessdazed so long as his costly seeking revenge would be worth it for his reputation," you run into the paradox that such cases might not exist any more than one "[t]he smallest positive integer not definable in under eleven words" exists (Berry's Paradox). So long as my actions are best interpretable as being of negative utility, they get +3 stacking bonus to utility. Of course, I then run into the paradox because with the bonus I no longer qualify for the bonus!
A well made, RPG would state whether or not the bonus counts towards calculating whether or not one qualifies for it, but Azathoth is a blind idiot god, and for all its advanced graphics and immersive gameplay, RL is not a well made RPG.
They inflluence the liklihood of them being made in the first place - by influencing the attacker's expected payoffs. Especially if it appears as though you were being sincere. Your comment didn't look much like signalling. I mean, it doesn't seem terribly likely that someone would deliberately publicly signal that they are more likely than unnamed others to capitulate if threatened with an attempt at extortion.
Credibly signalling resistance to extortion is non-trivial. Most compelling would be some kind of authenticated public track record of active resistance.