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pjeby comments on On the Openness personality trait & 'rationality' - Less Wrong
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Wait, what? What's costly about posting something to Myspace? The "costly" part of "costly signaling" has a rather precise meaning in evolutionary biology: an extravagant expenditure of scarce resources, useful because potential mates who correctly interpret that as entailing your high fitness thereby improve their own. Stotting is a typical example.
Here it seems to me that the author is just throwing scientific-sounding lingo around to bolster pure speculation. Taboo "costly signaling" and the author is saying: "the genes of girls who picked boys who spouted weird antisocial nonsense fared better, because only boys whose splendid health allowed them to pick up such nonsense in the first place would do that".
I'm unconvinced: stripped of the highfalutin' language this makes much less sense. Even if I try to repair the argument by bringing the parasite connection back in: "oh, this boy is quoting David Lynch, cue some social module which infers that he must have spent time with people from foreign tribes, which means that he will have deliberately exposed himself to lice of unusual size, which means that he must be quite confident of his own health to start with; surely he will make a fine father for my offspring".
More abstractly, "costly signaling" theory requires that it should be hard for low-fitness individuals to send a fake signal. Clearly this isn't the case here - anyone can pretend to spout weird antisocial nonsense.
The costly signaling here is social, not health. That is, it's signaling what group(s) you ally yourself with, and the cost is what groups you thereby pit yourself against.
That doesn't seem like an appropriate use of the term; any signal of allegiance could do the same. Interpreting costly signalling so broadly robs it of its usefulness as jargon.
It seems to me that Miller really is saying that we treat memes that are high on the openness scale as risk factors on an unconscious level, and the evidence excerpted here isn't enough to disabuse my skepticism of that.
Joining a small group as opposed to a large one may be costly signalling - "My genes are good enough that I don't need so many allies"
It is not inconceivable but I would still bet against it. I would attribute any benefits to joining small groups to any exclusivity that the group, enhanced cooperation within a small group or some innate reason for more potential cooperation with those people than with others.
As would I; from what limited observational evidence I have, it seems far more a matter of wanting to be in-group for the people already in that group than anything more meta. It just doesn't seem outright inconceivable.