I don't think you understand signaling well.
Eliezer managed signaling well enough to get a billionaire to fund him on his project. A billionaire who fund people who drop out of college systematically in projects like his 20 Under 20 program.
Trying to go the traditional route wouldn't fit into the highly effective image that he already signals.
I'm not certain that getting a degree now counts as the traditional route. Also, I don't think that an additional degree is particularly damaging to his image. People aren't going to lose interest in FAI if he sells out and gets a traditional degree. Or they are and I have no idea what kind of people are involved.
I don't think you understand signaling well.
Eliezer managed signaling well enough to get a billionaire to fund him on his project. A billionaire who fund people who drop out of college systematically in projects like his 20 Under 20 program.
Trying to go the traditional route wouldn't fit into the highly effective image that he already signals.
Impressing Thiel is independent of a future degree or not, because he's already impressed. Where's the next billionaire going to come from, and will they coincidentally also be as contrarian as Thiel? Maybe MIRI doesn't need another billionaire, but I don't think they'd turn one away.
I don't think you understand signaling well.
Eliezer managed signaling well enough to get a billionaire to fund him on his project. A billionaire who fund people who drop out of college systematically in projects like his 20 Under 20 program.
Trying to go the traditional route wouldn't fit into the highly effective image that he already signals.
Eddie has some math talent. He can invest some time, money, and effort C to get a degree, which allows other people to discern that he has a higher probability of having that math talent. This higher probability confers some benefit in that other people will more readily take his advice in mathematical matters, or talk with him about his math.
The fun twist is that Eddie lives in a society with many other individuals with varying degrees of math talent, each of whom can expend C to get a degree and the associated benefits. People with almost no mathematical talent have a prohibitively high C, because even if they can pony up the time and money, they have to work very hard to fake their way through. But people with high math ability often choose to stand out by getting the degree, because their C is relatively lower, and a very high proportion of them get degrees. This creates a high association between degrees and mathematical ability, and makes it unlikely to see high mathematical ability in the absence of a degree.
That's the basic idea, plus degrees signal other things which may be completely unrelated to math, but are still nice. Even in the case where the degree has no causal effect no math ability, there are benefits to having one, in that the other math people can judge very quickly that they're interested in talking to you.
Hopefully that demonstrates that I understand signalling. My question is about the costs and benefits of a particular signal.
Even if you know that signaling is stupid, it doesn't escape the cost of not signaling.
It's a longstanding trope that Eliezer gets a lot of flack for having no formal education. Formal education is not the only way to gain knowledge, but it is a way of signaling knowledge, and it's not very easy to fake (Not so easy to fake that it falls apart as a credential on its own). Has anyone toyed around with the idea of sending him off to get a math degree somewhere? He might learn something, and if not it's a breezy recap of what he already knows. He comes out the other side without the eternal "has no formal education" tagline, and a whole new slew of acquaintances.
Now, I understand that there may be good reasons not to, and I'd very much appreciate someone pointing me to any previous discussion in which this has been ruled out. Otherwise, how feasible does it sound to crowdfund a "Here's your tuition and an extra sum of money to cover the opportunity cost of your time, I don't care how unfair it is that people won't take you seriously without credentials, go study something useful, make friends with your professors, and get out with the minimum number of credits possible" scholarship?
Am I mistaken, or is this a case of Coasian bargaining?
I attended a talk by Julian Savulescu today, and I'm typing up some notes for a discussion-level post.
On the form, there is a question about Nicotine Usage. Is nicotine usage being conflated with smoking here?
I belong to a group at my university that organizes a backpacking trip for incoming freshmen in the two weeks before orientation week. This organization, which I will refer to as HIKE (not the real name), is particularly interesting in terms of group design. Why? It is approximately 30 years old, is run entirely by current students, and brings together a very large group of people and knits them into a largish community. Pretty much everyone involved agrees that HIKE works very well. During my involvement (I was a participating freshman, and I have since become staff) I have continually wondered, why is this group so much more fun than any other group I've been a part of?
It's also particularly effective. Leading ~80 incoming freshmen, who have no current friends, and who know no one, and who don't generally have any backpacking experience, into the woods for two weeks, is no easy task. HIKE manages its own logistics, staff training, and organization, entirely with student volunteers who staff the trip, with little to no university interaction. (We get them to advertise our trip, and they generally permit us to continue to exist.) It takes some dedication to keep this rolling, and I have seen other campus groups completely fail to find that kind of dedication from their membership.
While it's not a rationalist group, it seems to have stumbled upon a cocktail of instrumentally rational practices.
HIKE uses an interesting process of network homogenization. When staff members (who have generally been on several trips before) are assigned crews, staff members fill out "Who Do You Know?" forms, on which you rank how well you know other staff on a scale from 1 to 5. The people in charge of making groups, usually Project Directors, then group staffers based on how well you don't know other staff. You usually staff a trip with people that you haven't gotten to know very well, and then get to know them. Because of this process of strengthening the weakest bonds, HIKE is able to function as a relatively large social group, even across graduation classes and around existing cliques.
As far as actual interaction, HIKE involves a lot of face time with your crew of 10 freshmen and your co-staffers. There aren't really any breaks (with the exception of solos, see below) and you are hiking, eating, and chatting together for approximately 225 hours (15 waking hours in a day * 15 days). I had 13 hours and 40 minutes of class a week the Spring 2013 semester. HIKE is approximately 7+ weeks of class at that rate.
One of the more beloved HIKE traditions is the solo, where the hiking leaders pick a spot with plenty of isolated spaces, and the participants can choosee to spend ~24 hours alone and, optionally, fasting. It's a novel experience, and people like the time to rest and reflect in the middle of a very social, very intensive hiking trip.
My suspicion for why this all works is that HIKE very closely simulates a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. You travel in ~10 member groups, on foot, carrying your food, on mountain trails. You spend your every waking hour with the crew. The 2-3 hiking leaders are there to facilitate only (read: perform first aid if necessary, guide conversation, teach outdoor skills if necessary, and nudge the group if they get off track), and all decisions are made by consensus (which isn't an all-purpose decision making process, but is very egalitarian, and helps the group gel).
Maybe I'm just praising my friend-group, but I feel like I stumbled into a particularly strong group of people. We all feel very well-connected and we feel a lot of commitment to the program. My experience with other college groups has been that members are pulled apart by other commitments and a lack of familiarity with other members, and HIKE seems to avoid that with a critical mass of consecutive face time. We manage to have continuity of social norms across the years, but a great deal of flexibility (no one remembers what happened 4 years ago, and some traditions disappear and others cement themselves as ancient and hallowed despite being only two years old).
I'm interested in hearing any thoughts on this, and any relevant experience with other groups, ideas for testing cross-application, requests for further elaboration, etc.
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Put another way, the purpose of signaling isn't so nobody will give you crap. It's so somebody will help you accomplish your goals.
People will give you crap, especially if they can get paid to do so. See gossip journalists, for instance. They are not paid to give boring and unsuccessful people crap; they are paid to give interesting and successful people crap.
Well, yes, there is going to be some inevitable crap, but the purpose of signalling is so that you could impress a much larger pool of people. So it might not be much help for gossip journalists, but it might help with the marginal professional ethicist, mathematician, or public figure. In that area, you might get some additional "Anybody who can do that must be damn impressive.". Does the additional damn-impressive outweigh the cost? I don't know, that's why I'm asking.