I didn't, and still don't... but now I'm a little bit disturbed that I don't, and want to look a lot more closely at Hermione for ways she's awesome.

Upvoted; whatever its relationship to what the OP actually meant, this is good.

Saying that it's good because it's vague, because it's harder to screw up when you don't know what you're talking about, is contrary to the spirit of LessWrong.

Reminding yourself of your confusion, and avoiding privileging hypotheses, by using vague terms as long as you remember that they're vague doesn't seem so bad.

I kept expecting someone to object that "this Turing machine never halts" doesn't count as a prediction, since you can never have observed it to run forever.

More sympathetically, people might (well, I'm sure some people do) see avoiding stereotype-based jokes as a step towards there being things you can't say, and prefer some additional risk of saying harmful things to moving in that direction (possibly down a slippery slope).

But the blogger's position is one that is often met with hostility round these parts, for reasons that are unclear to me.

I think some of it is a defensive reaction to perceived possible vaguely-defined moral demands/condemnation. Here's a long comment I wrote about that in a different context.

Also simple contrarianism, though that's not much of an explanation absent a theory of why this is the thing people are contrarian against.

the parts of social engineering that I think LW is worst at.

What are those?

It/s a lesswrongian prejjudice that the only game anyone would want to play is Highly Competent But Criminally Underappreciated Backroom Boffin.

Yes. The general case of this prejudice is probably something like 'behavior morally should be evaluated according to its stated far-mode purpose; other purposes are possible and important, but dirty'. Of course, this has the large upside of making us seriously evaluate things according to their stated purpose at all....

Out of curiosity, what are the connotations of the word "rube" that make you suspicious?

Low status, contemptibility, etc. I expect making status hierarchies salient to make people less rational (hence fully generic suspicion), and I had the specific hypothesis that you might see people using 'signaling' models as judging others as contemptible and be offended by this.

Relatedly, I dislike calling the behavior in question "pandering", since I expect using condemnatory terms for phenomena to make them aversive to look at closely, and to lead to bias in attribution (against seeing them in oneself/'good' people and towards seeing them in 'bad' people, as well as towards seeing people who unambiguously exhibit them as 'bad').

I have a hard time telling whether you're trying to say that 'signaling' models are inaccurate, or just that calling them 'signaling' is misleading. I agree with the latter insofar as 'signaling' means this specific economic model, because the behaviors in question aren't directed at economically rational agents. I also can't tell if you dislike models that postulate stupidity (the strong status connotations of the word "rube" make me suspicious).

If you mean the former: I think you greatly overestimate median rationality in your take on the manager and butcher examples. All positive traits get conflated with each other by default. People can and do override their affective impressions with explicit reasoning, but more often than not they don't, especially when evaluating performance is difficult — and it's almost always more difficult than evaluating "does this person look like a winner?".

I also used to think that simple non-costly signaling couldn't possibly stably work, but experience (often with my own irrationality) changed my mind. This is less confusing if I think of it as social-primate (rather than general-intelligence) behavior; liking things/people other people like is socially useful. (This would likely be significant in the manager example in real life, e.g., I'll look better to my superiors if I make similar evaluations of my subordinates to them.)

The quality proposed was "status", but outrage is cheap. Any fool can be outraged at a blog post mentioning rape.

Now, status signaling is overused as an explanation. If the "HOW DARE YOU" comments are signaling (or 'signaling') anything, the obvious thing is alignment with the perceived-as-socially-powerful (implicit-Schelling-point-)faction condemning Robin, not status.

I agree with this policy.

I and the one person currently in the room with me immediately took "by all means necessary" to suggest violence. I think you're in a minority in how you interpret it.