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What exactly counts as "signalling"? I started to write down a definition, but I think it's better you give yours.
Meetup : Less Wrong Melbourne September Dojo: Vagueness
Discussion article for the meetup : Less Wrong Melbourne September Dojo: Vagueness
This month's dojo will be split into two parts: Theory and practice. The theory part will consist of a lecture, and selected readings. The practice part will consist of various rationality drills. The lecture will cover vagueness: why it's bad, and how to get around it. Groups will read one of the following excerpts 1. "The Virtue of Narrowness" 2. "Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions." 3. "Making beliefs pay rent (in anticipating experiences)" Schedule below: 3:30pm Arrive 4:00pm: Welcome, intro to less wrong 4:05pm: Lecture on Vagueness 4:30pm: Q&A 4:35: group reading from Rationality: AI to Zombies 4:50: break 5:00 group presents what they've learned 5:15pm: Lightning Talk: Willpower 5:25pm: Meditation 5:30pm: Break 5:40pm: Paired Debugging 5:55pm: Lightning Talk: Trigger Action Planning 6:00pm: Trigger Action Planning (DIY) 6:05pm: Present to paired debugging partner(s) 6:15pm: Being Strategic 6:25pm: Feedback 6:30pm: Support Lottery / Announcements / Wrap up 6:35pm: Dinner
Discussion article for the meetup : Less Wrong Melbourne September Dojo: Vagueness
The colloquial definition is "Useless but impressive and flatters my vanity".
The probabilistic definition is "Observable thing X signals quality A means P(A|X) > P(A)".
The economic definition is "Alice signals P to Bob by X if the net cost of X to Alice is outweighed by the benefits of Bob 'believing' A, and X causes Bob to 'believe' A even when Bob takes in to account that Alice wants him to 'believe' A." (note 'believe' A means 'act as if A were true'.)
In response to
Meetup : Melbourne Social Meetup
I will attend. Is it OK if I bring my boyfriend (User:MixedNuts) along via my iPad?
In response to
Co-Working Collaboration to Combat Akrasia
I'm open to coworking generally.
My ideal coworker is someone who is funny and interested in maths, physics and computer science. My plan would be to read books like Mathematics Form and Function or The Feynman Lectures on Physics and try to summarize / explain the content. For co working where I shut up, I am working on re-implementing MC-AIXI for my honours thesis.
Please contact me if interested, my email is patrick.robotham2@gmail.com my skype nick is grey_fox26
Meetup : Tokyo Meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : Tokyo Meetup
Email Usmar Padow at usmar@i.softbank.jp Include "Less Wrong Meetup" in the subject line.
Discussion article for the meetup : Tokyo Meetup
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."
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.
" 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."
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.
In response to
You can't signal to rubes
You're describing costly signaling. Contrary to your opening statement,
The word 'signalling' is often used in Less Wrong, and often used wrongly.
people on LessWrong are usually using the term "signalling" consistently with its standard meaning in economics and evolutionary biology. From Wikipedia,
In economics, more precisely in contract theory, signalling is the idea that one party credibly conveys some information about itself to another party
Within evolutionary biology, signalling theory is a body of theoretical work examining communication between individuals. The central question is when organisms with conflicting interests should be expected to communicate "honestly".
In particular, the ev bio article even includes a section on dishonest signalling, which seems to be what you're complaining about here:
Seriously though, "signalling" is being used to mean "tricking people in to thinking that you are".
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.
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.
“No! I must resolve the muddle” he shouted
The radio said “No, Patrick. You are the muddled one”
And then Patrick was a zombie.
In response to
You can't signal to rubes
A good way of remembering this criterion is the slogan "You can't signal to rubes."
This doesn't seem like it describes your fourth criterion; it reads more like "Rubes can't signal."
I do think that the claim "you can't signal to rubes" is a good one to keep in mind, but like Psychohistorian points out, that limits you to a narrow component of signalling, which I might characterize as spending resources on authority, which is only worthwhile if the audience can recognize authority. If a moviemaker decides to actually use an Bald Eagle cry instead of a Red-tailed Hawk cry, most movie-goers will think (TVTropes link) they got it wrong, and only ornithologists will notice it's correct.
A rube is a sucker, someone easily deceived.The slogan means that potential signalling explanations shouldn't assume that the receiver of the signals is stupid.
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Attracting academics to Less Wrong is not incompatible with approaching them through academic channels (which MIRI has been doing), and does not require separating them from academic communities (which I doubt MIRI intends to do).
Point me to where Luke denied that academia has any advantages over LW. If you're going to claim that LW is obviously not "the highest-quality relatively-general-interest forum on the web", it would help your case to provide an obvious counterexample (academic channels themselves are generally not on the web, and LW has some advantages over them, even if the reverse is also true). LW is also not as homogeneous as you appear to believe; plenty of us are academics.
It is at least as unreasonable to claim without justification that it is impossible to attract intellectual elites to LW, or that it would be bad for those people if they did.
You're straw-manning here. Not conceding isn't the same thing as denying. To not concede something, one just has to omit the concession from one's writing. But this is just quibbling. The real issue is the attitude, or the arrogance, that LW may have with respect to academia. Nobody wants to waste time justifying themselves to a bunch of arrogant amateurs after all.
Anyway, some web channels where academics hang out:
(Cracked.com probably does a better job of being a smart, general interest forum than Less Wrong, it's a great deal more popular at least. But being the highest quality popular forum is a bit like being the smartest termite in the world. Specialized forums are where the elite action is.)