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ThrustVectoring comments on Call for discussion: Signalling and/vs. accomplishment - Less Wrong
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When signalling (or whatever the actual human decision-making algorithm is ) promotes activities that are correlated enough with good actual objectives, you'll wind up getting that stuff done anyways. If making cool products promotes your status and makes you millions of dollars as a startup, you'll wind up with high geek status and millions of dollars.
My point is that signalling isn't orthogonal to accomplishing things. They're actually pretty well correlated. Making millions of dollars is high-status. Fixing societal problems is high-status. Getting a project done is high-status. High-status things generally aren't that useless.
The question is not whether signalling is real, or whether signalling can be pro-social. (It is, and it can be).
Instead, I read the OP as raising the more meta-question of how we can tell useful signalling talk from hand-waving just-so-story signalling talk. I think everyone agrees that the later is not useful analysis. But there does not appear to be widespread agreement about how to tell the difference (or even if very much anti-insightful signalling talk even exists).
Well, one way to start is whenever someone proposes a signaling model ask the following question:
1) What is being signaled?
2) Why is the allegedly signaling behavior a credible signal, either now or in the EEA?
That's a great test of whether a model is actually a signalling model, but not so useful for determining whether any particular signalling model is insightful or true.
If we could identify things that were high status and useless, how easy would it be to lower their status and thereby optimize society's status budget?
So...you, the person who is low status because of not doing the useless status-enhancing thing, are going to try to expropriate status from the high-status useless people? Let me know how that goes!