= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
ialdabaoth comments on Self-Congratulatory Rationalism - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (395)
Not if you want to be accepted by that group. Being bad at signaling games can be crippling - as much as intellectual signaling poisons discourse, it's also the glue that holds a community together enough to make discourse possible.
Example: how likely you are to get away with making a post or comment on signaling games is primarily dependent on how good you are at signaling games, especially how good you are at the "make the signal appear to plausibly be something other than a signal" part of signaling games.
You're right, being bad at signaling games can be crippling. The point, though, is to watch out for them and steer away from harmful ones. Actually, I wish I'd emphasized this in the OP: trying to suppress overt signaling games runs the risk of driving them underground, forcing them to be disguised as something else, rather than doing them in a self-aware and fun way.
Borrowing from the "Guess vs. Tell (vs. Ask)" meta-discussion, then, perhaps it would be useful for the community to have an explicit discussion about what kinds of signals we want to converge on? It seems that people with a reasonable understanding of game theory and evolutionary psychology would stand a better chance deliberately engineering our group's social signals than simply trusting our subconsciouses to evolve the most accurate and honest possible set.
The right rule is probably something like, "don't mix signaling games and truth seeking." If it's the kind of thing you'd expect in a subculture that doesn't take itself too seriously or imagine its quirks are evidence of its superiority to other groups, it's probably fine.