adb

Psychohistorian doesn't say the idea isn't useful, just that reliance on it is incorrect. If the theory is "people mostly do stuff because of signalling", honestly, that's a pretty crappy theory. Once Signalling Guy fails this test, he should take that as a sign to go back and refine the theory, perhaps to

"People do stuff because of signalling when the benefit of the signal, in the environment of evolutionary adaptation, was worth more than its cost."

This means that making predictions requires estimating the cost and benefit of the behavior in advance, which requires a lot more data and computation, but that's what makes the theory a useful predictor instead of... (read more)