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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on You can't signal to rubes - Less Wrong
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It may be possible to rescue the word "signal", but it's going to take an equally evocative word that covers what people think they mean by "signal". "Stealing associations" isn't going to work because it's not one word. Robin covers a lot of mileage with "affiliate" but many times when people say "signal" they don't mean "costly-signal" or "affiliate".
The biological term is "mimicry", and it fits quite well. A mimic is a "false signaler" that relies on the fact that most signalers in its environment aren't false or that signal verification is costly, and therefore signal receivers are statistically better off trusting a signal than they are attempting to verify it. Mimicry only works within an environment where there is an honest signaller (which is called the mimic's "model"), since the strategy causes the signal to become more noisy.
Note that biologists still consider mimicry to be a form of signaling, so they don't seem to share the idea that a signal has to be honest.
But if we want to continue to use the term "signaling" and be specific about what kind of signaling we're talking about, the biological metaphor seems particularly fertile. Accurate phrasing would look something like:
"Managers who are unnecessarily hostile to their subordinates are attempting to mimic a recognized signal (dominance) of good leadership."
Ultimately, what we seem to be talking about is what happens when a signal gets de-coupled from what it signifies, and an optimization process begins to exploit that decoupling. If your current priors have come to associate signal "a" with fact A, and I want you to believe A about me, it's in my interest to send signal "a" whether or not A happens to be true about me.
[edited for clarity]
That isn't true (or at least doesn't follow). It isn't mimicry to actually dominate when that domination hurts oneself (or a particular goal). It's just a signalling behavior that happens to be counterproductive to some goal.
Successful dominance isn't what's being signaled; "successful dominance" IS the signal. "Good at leadership" is what's being signalled.
Saying that instead of what you actually said would have saved me a whole lot of trouble.
I thought that's what I did say; I apologize if I was unclear. My brain isn't what it used to be, so clear communication is sometimes a struggle.
The more I think about this, the less sure I am that I understand the distinction you're trying to draw here between "attempting to mimic a recognized dominance signal" and "a signalling behavior". Can you expand?
If mimicry absolutely must be dragged in to describe an aspect of the scenario then it could be said that "Managers who are unnecesarily hostile to their subordinates are attempting to mimic a recognized signal of competent leadership" or something similar. It would still be wrong as a point of human psychology but at least it wouldn't be fundamentally muddled thinking about signalling, mimicry and dominance.
I'm not sure this follows. I have had managers who displayed unnecessary hostility towards me when in front of their own superiors, but had no proper dominance or control over me to speak of.
In one case, I held said manager in the palm of my hands and tolerated the hostility in light of the fact that his display of dominance to his superior increased said superiors' allotment of resources to our team, which in turn made my own life easier and overall more enjoyable even after factoring out the hostility itself.
(for context, I had an indirect veto power over that manager: I could credibly threaten to quit, since I wasn't dependent on the job and had a guarantee of having a new one secured for me within a week, while they stood to lose some productivity by having to hire and train a new employee up to my skill level - they had a lot more to lose than me and the costs of hiring and training stood to be far higher than the costs of adjusting for minor demands on my part)
On the other hand, I'm slightly more inclined than usual to believe I'm misinterpreting you, given my current state of mind and (lack of) awareness.
Note that my own assertion was (with emphasis added):
I am not claiming that it is not ever possible to mimic dominance displays in some context without actually having dominance. I am claiming that using behaviors that actually successfully dominate is not mimicking dominance. Said dominance may in turn be done for the purpose of mimicking something else.
Ah, thanks. Oops.
No, the motive of the behavior is "signal to a particular target audience of superiors that one is effective at leadership despite in fact not being effective at leadership. The specific signal that is interpreted as effective leadership happens to be dominance over subordinates, therefore someone who wishes to signal effective leadership will dominate their subordinates."
It's telling that our culture so intertwines the two (effective leadership and dominance over subordinates) that no one even remembers that the actual trait we're trying to signal is "effective leadership"; the mistake that everyone seems to keep making is that dominating subordinates is itself the desired trait.
Note that my replies were to the unedited version and would not make sense as reply to the current claim.
I don't believe the premised claim that active attempts to signal effective leadership are the predominate motive or cause of dominance of subordinates.
But it was the original premise of the quoted post that Patrick was objecting to, so whether we believe that premise or not is immaterial. This discussion is about whether the word "signaling" was used correctly in that post, not about whether that post was factually correct. A discussion about whether the predominate motive for dominating subordinates is to signal effective leadership would be interesting, but seems like a bit of a distraction when we're trying to have a discussion about semantics and word choice.
I appear to be confused - I don't understand why the previous post was downvoted. What am I saying that is incorrect or inappropriate?
I wouldn't worry about a single downvote or two.
That said, while I didn't downvote (or, indeed, previously read) the comment, I would say that discussions purely about semantics and word choice are rarely worth the energy to have.
This is one of those "words are slippery" moments.
Signaling is about displaying traits that can be interpreted by an outside agent as correlating strongly with another desired or undesired trait.
In this case, the signaller (the manager) is attempting to signal a desired trait (leadership ability) by displaying a behavior that our evolutionary ancestry has primed us to see as correlated with it (domination of subordinates). If we accept the premise that we need to separate this kind of signaling from the kind of signal that someone with actual leadership ability would perform, then the closest analogy to what we're seeing here is mimicry (since we have a specimen that does not possess the leadership ability, but still possesses the traits that produce the domination signal).
If signals had zero possibility of error (i.e. no one ever falsely signaled), I suppose the word "prove" would be an appropriate replacement for "signal" (actual meaning). If it's non-zero, I guess "strongly support" or some close one-word equivalent could work. Is it better to rescue "signal" and find a substitute for the false meaning of signal, or to find a substitute for the true meaning of signal and let the word "signal" be used falsely?
We got the word signal from its technical meaning in economics and evolutionary biology. We should strongly avoid giving standard technical words non-standard meanings, or using a non-standard word where a standard one exists.