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hyporational comments on You can't signal to rubes - Less Wrong
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Comments (115)
I think the thesis usually is that signaling is a product of evolution, so this shouldn't be a problem. The peacock genuinely doesn't have a choice growing its tail either and the females don't have a choice genuinely liking those tails.
IMO one had better avoid making it unclear which side of the evolutionary-cognitive boundary one is talking about.
I agree. Thanks for the relevant link. Now I just wish you would've made this comment directly on the op.
ISTM that the OP actually meant that cognitively rather than just evolutionarily; see this comment.
Why did he use the peacock as an example then? Does it make sense to use the word signaling on both sides of the boundary, especially if you're trying to constrain the concept?
I meant the peacock example evolutionarily. I got it from The Selfish Gene.
I thought so. I think it might be useful to have a different word for signaling on each side of the e-c boundary, since signaling clearly can't mean the same thing on both sides.
Why not? Can't we regard evolutionary signalling as completely analogous to cognitive signalling, just as played by genes over a much longer time scale?
But going by the evolutionary origin of behaviors makes the whole concept of signaling uselessly broad, which is the exact opposite of what Patrick was trying to do in this article. E.g. this article suggests that all of these behaviors could have their evolutionary origins in signaling:
I think some of those behaviours are still (i.e., cognitively) signalling (according to the OP's definition) for a large part of the people who engage in them. (How many people actually terminally value dressing up in expensive fashionable clothing? Hint: Do they also do that at home?)
I agree that the concept is uselessly broad, and probably could be ditched altogether without too much information lost. All of the behaviours in that quote could reasonably fit Patrick's criteria, which I guess goes to show that they're pretty weak. I appreciate the effort come up with such criteria, though.
If we add to the criteria that signaling should be of evolutionary origin, shouldn't it just constrain the concept even more?
I agree that the concept is broad and the phenomenon pervasive, and these siggest to me that the concept needs breaking down: we need words for costly-signalling, spam-signalling, practical-signalling and so on.