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Pavitra comments on Is Molecular Nanotechnology "Scientific"? - Less Wrong
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Comments (51)
You're signaling poorly for this community.
For example, starting your post with an all-caps sentence asserting that something is "undisputedly" true makes you look like a crank. It might be obviously true, or indisputably true, but if it were actually undisputed then why would you need to point it out? It would be like saying "THE SUN IS UNDISPUTEDLY BRIGHT AND HOT". This statement is true, but why does it deserve the all-caps treatment?
Similarly, "challenging" people to dispute an assertion sounds like you're setting up your arguments as soldiers to defend territory against enemies, which is generally frowned upon around here.
Your comment seems to be hovering around 0 with multiple upvotes and downvotes. I suspect this is because you replied to an individual who appears with great certainty to either be a troll or to be someone with a mental illness (I don't know if being a general crank is a mental illness per se). This individual is 1) claiming that he has revolutionary ideas relating to ancient Egypt 2) claiming that some of his ideas have been stolen from him by a popular rap-artist, 3) writing "E=MC" when he apparently means "E=MC^2" 4) claiming that his ideas are "copyrighted" 5) claiming that nanotechnology is some sort of UN plot. Given those data points one can conclude with a high confidence that interacting with the individual will not produce any useful results and is likely to simply damage the signal to noise ratio.
Wait, how does interacting with a troll damage the signal to noise ratio? Whose signal? Whose noise?
EDIT: It has been pointed out to me that the relevant signal-to-noise ratio is in the Recent Comments feed, which makes plenty of sense. I have been convinced, and will not interact with people I perceive as trolls. Note that at no point did I reply to anything Shoga said, nor do I defend Shoga's views, nor do I welcome Shoga's participation on Less Wrong. I was simply trying to understand Joshua Z's comment.
It clutters up the Recent Comments feed. We'd rather it contained neither trolls nor responses to trolls.
Thanks.
Signaling is not the problem here. Communication of inability to think clearly was quite reliable.
There's an interesting point to be had here, actually: there's an awful lot of signaling where the cost isn't correlated with the truth of the signal. It takes just as much effort to dress up true ideas is scientific-sounding language as false ones, for example. Maybe it's just me, but it seems that the distinction is usually drawn between cheap vs. costly signaling, rather than empty vs. demonstrative signaling.
The salient question is, signaling of what, not signaling in what sense.
Cheap signaling of undesirable qualities is indistinguishable from failure to expensively signal desirable qualities. (Edit: not really, but it's close enough for rock'n'roll.)