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Academian comments on You can't signal to rubes - Less Wrong
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Comments (115)
You're describing costly signaling. Contrary to your opening statement,
people on LessWrong are usually using the term "signalling" consistently with its standard meaning in economics and evolutionary biology. From Wikipedia,
In particular, the ev bio article even includes a section on dishonest signalling, which seems to be what you're complaining about here:
This post is still interesting as a highlight reel of different examples of signalling, and shows that the term is, in its standard usage, rather non-specific. It's just not an illustration that people here are using it wrongly.
And psychology.
Well I'm happy to use "costly signalling". I was under the impression that costly signalling was signalling. If it isn't costly, at least for potential fakes, then I'm not sure how it can serve as an explanation for behavior. Why should I signal when the fakes can signal just as easily? What is there to gain? I think at the very least, there has to be some mechanism for keeping out cheats, even if it's rarity. From the wikipedia article on signalling theory:
" If many animals in a group send too many dishonest signals, then their entire signalling system will collapse, leading to much poorer fitness of the group as a whole. Every dishonest signal weakens the integrity of the signalling system, and thus weakens the fitness of the group."
But what am I? Some kind of prescriptivist? Evidently my understanding of the term is a minority, and people far cleverer than I don't use it my way. I'll stick to "costly signal" in future.
Did you just use the appeal 'weakens the fitness of the group' to predict or describe the signalling behaviors of individuals?
A lot of signalling is bad for the group, whether honest or dishonest. When it happens to be good for the group that is, well, good for the group but not something one should necessarily expect from an individual.
You're accusing me of group selectionism? We might disagree on a point of terminology, but come on, I'm not a completely nutter. Anyway, my point in quoting the wikipedia article is that too much dishonest signalling makes signalling completely pointless ('weakens the integrity of the signalling system'), so for signalling to work you need some way of keeping out the cheats. I'm not proposing anything as daft as "groups without cheats will prosper". Indeed, that's why I was making such a big deal about criterion 4 and cost asymmetry, because the analysis of signalling has to work on an individual basis, including the individuals that might be tempted to cheat.
In my limited imagination, the only way I could think of for keeping out the cheats was having an asymmetric cost structure for honest signalling compared to dishonest signalling. Thus cheating wouldn't be worth it. I now realize this is not the only way. ialdaboth called my attention to Batesian Mimicry, where cheaters are "kept out" simply by the fact that mimics are comparatively rare. Doubtless other ways could be invented.
I think I prefer MagnetoHydroDynamics definition of signalling, and would reserve my criteria for describing costly signalling.
No, I carefully avoided that particular charge because it doesn't strictly apply even to the author that you quote---at least not without additional context.
Nevertheless, thankyou for elaborating on which part of the quote you intended to emphasize. You are indeed a non-nutter.
Do you conclude from that tha lying is extremely rare in human society?
No. I think that because lying is common in human society, a credible signal must be costly to liars.
Both status and signaling as concepts have at least in some circles pervaded common language. This will inevitably cause new members to use these words imprecisely. I don't recall the exact quote, but Daniel Dennett has said about consciousness that everyone feels like they're an expert on it. I think this applies to signalling and status too once one learns about them, since they're such a constant and seemingly direct part of our experience.
I too now feel guilty of not studying these concepts more, and seem to have quite incompetently participated the discussion.
I looked at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_%28economics%29 Huh? That isn't what "signalling" means! If that article is correct, it looks like a case of confusing terminology.