You’ve basically come up with four criteria that describe the use of the word “signal” in a highly specific context—traits that exist for pure signalling purposes in evolution or game theory—and then decided, arbitrarily, that this is the one true meaning of “signal.” I do not think you have provided adequate evidence or argument to back this claim up.
If everyone around me is a Republican and I am not, it might make sense that I would do things that would signal that I am a Republican, even if these are very cheap and have obvious positive returns. Your definition would not allow this—if it is cheap and has obvious positive returns, it is not “signaling” to you. What you’re saying is that if I send a birthday card to a coworker I hate, then I am not “signaling” that I like that person because it’s too cheap to send the card.
It may make sense to speak of weak or strong signals, or reliable or unreliable or misleading signals. But you’ve arbitrarily said that the word applies only when a certain arbitrary threshold is crossed (your 2 and 4).
Incidentally, your theory might actually work if 4 were eliminated and 2 read “the behaviour is more likely to occur if you possess a certain characteristic than if you do not.” This would cover my birthday card example—it’s cheap, but I’m more likely to do it if I like the person, so it does signal liking the person. But this change would also fix the counter-productive manager. She’s doing things that she is more likely to do if she is decisive and in charge. Since she’s being evaluated on those criteria, and not “good manager-ness”—which is not generally observable—it would make sense that she would choose to give those signals rather than not. But revising the theory appropriately seems to nullify most or all of your objections.
I do think that cost asymmetry is a defining feature of signalling. To me, signalling is a way of getting around the problem of cheap talk. To me, a “cheap signal” is like an “unenforceable pre-commitment”. It defeats the point. (Of course, many people talk about pre-commitments without actually discussing the mechanics of enforcement. I view this as a grievous omission.)
I probably was too absolutist in my criteria, they should probably be read with an invisible “ceteris paribus” attached to them. I’m happy to talk of weak and strong signals.
I want to keep 4. because I make the assumption that the audience does not be deceived. Employers do not wish to hire lazy workers, and it’s in every worker’s interest to say that they aren’t lazy.
Regarding your birthday card example, I’d classify that as a white lie. Your coworker probably doesn’t care too much if he’s genuinely liked or not. Same thing with Republicanism. We could also call it a “cover story”.
Re: Good managerness, what you’re talking about is not signalling, but Gresham’s law. Decisiveness is meant as a proxy for good-managerness. Of course good manager-ness isn’t observable, that’s why we would tempted to invoke signalling in the first place! “How can I show that I’m a good manager? I know, I’ll act decisively!”.
I do agree I was being too absolutist, I do not agree that I should modify the theory. It seems to me that once we do that, we’re no longer talking about signalling as it was originally conceived. I don’t know how to argue for that other than to gesture at the economics literature, which talks about deceitful employees and employers without the werewithal to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Annendum: Katja Grace discusses signalling here and uses “costly signal” and “signal” as synonymous with my version of “signal”. (The previous version of this comment falsely attributed it to Robin Hanson, mental note: Always check the byline)
It may be possible to rescue the word “signal”, but it’s going to take an equally evocative word that covers what people think they mean by “signal”. “Stealing associations” isn’t going to work because it’s not one word. Robin covers a lot of mileage with “affiliate” but many times when people say “signal” they don’t mean “costly-signal” or “affiliate”.
It may be possible to rescue the word “signal”, but it’s going to take an equally evocative word that covers what people think they mean by “signal”.
The biological term is “mimicry”, and it fits quite well. A mimic is a “false signaler” that relies on the fact that most signalers in its environment aren’t false or that signal verification is costly, and therefore signal receivers are statistically better off trusting a signal than they are attempting to verify it. Mimicry only works within an environment where there is an honest signaller (which is called the mimic’s “model”), since the strategy causes the signal to become more noisy.
Note that biologists still consider mimicry to be a form of signaling, so they don’t seem to share the idea that a signal has to be honest.
But if we want to continue to use the term “signaling” and be specific about what kind of signaling we’re talking about, the biological metaphor seems particularly fertile. Accurate phrasing would look something like:
Managers will take actions that actively harm the continued progress of the project if that action makes them look “decisive” and “in charge”. I’ve seen this on many projects I’ve been on, and it took me a while to realize that my managers weren’t stupid or ignorant. It’s just that the organization I was working in put a higher priority on process than on results. My managers, therefore quite rationally did things that maximized their apparent value in the eyes of their bosses, even if it meant that the project (and, as a result) the entire organization was hurt.
“Managers who are unnecessarily hostile to their subordinates are attempting to mimic a recognized signal (dominance) of good leadership.”
Ultimately, what we seem to be talking about is what happens when a signal gets de-coupled from what it signifies, and an optimization process begins to exploit that decoupling. If your current priors have come to associate signal “a” with fact A, and I want you to believe A about me, it’s in my interest to send signal “a” whether or not A happens to be true about me.
“Managers who are unnecessarily hostile to their subordinates are attempting to mimic a recognized dominance signal.”
That isn’t true (or at least doesn’t follow). It isn’t mimicry to actually dominate when that domination hurts oneself (or a particular goal). It’s just a signalling behavior that happens to be counterproductive to some goal.
The more I think about this, the less sure I am that I understand the distinction you’re trying to draw here between “attempting to mimic a recognized dominance signal” and “a signalling behavior”. Can you expand?
The more I think about this, the less sure I am that I understand the distinction you’re trying to draw here between “attempting to mimic a recognized dominance signal” and “a signalling behavior”. Can you expand?
“Dominance signal” corresponds to actions which indicate to others (be they lower in status, equals or those higher in status) that the signaler that they are in charge. Dominance is almost entirely mediated by signalling.
“Attempting to mimic” in the context introduced by ialdabaoth indicates that the motive of the behavior is “signal to a particular target audience of superiors that one is dominant over subordinates despite in fact not being dominant over subordinates”.
The distinction is between on one hand any “attempting to mimic a recognized dominance signal” and on the other the set of all signalling behaviors that is any one of “not about dominance”, “not motivated to deceive some class of observer” or “actually indicates or causes dominance within the relevant hierarchy”.
If mimicry absolutely must be dragged in to describe an aspect of the scenario then it could be said that “Managers who are unnecesarily hostile to their subordinates are attempting to mimic a recognized signal of competent leadership” or something similar. It would still be wrong as a point of human psychology but at least it wouldn’t be fundamentally muddled thinking about signalling, mimicry and dominance.
“Attempting to mimic” in the context introduced by ialdabaoth indicates that the motive of the behavior is “signal to a particular target audience of superiors that one is dominant over subordinates despite in fact not being dominant over subordinates”.
No, the motive of the behavior is “signal to a particular target audience of superiors that one is effective at leadership despite in fact not being effective at leadership. The specific signal that is interpreted as effective leadership happens to be dominance over subordinates, therefore someone who wishes to signal effective leadership will dominate their subordinates.”
It’s telling that our culture so intertwines the two (effective leadership and dominance over subordinates) that no one even remembers that the actual trait we’re trying to signal is “effective leadership”; the mistake that everyone seems to keep making is that dominating subordinates is itself the desired trait.
Note that my replies were to the unedited version and would not make sense as reply to the current claim.
It’s telling that our culture so intertwines the two (effective leadership and dominance over subordinates) that no one even remembers that the actual trait we’re trying to signal is “effective leadership”; the mistake that everyone seems to keep making is that dominating subordinates is itself the desired trait.
I don’t believe the premised claim that active attempts to signal effective leadership are the predominate motive or cause of dominance of subordinates.
I don’t believe the premised claim that active attempts to signal effective leadership are the predominate motive or cause of dominance of subordinates.
But it was the original premise of the quoted post that Patrick was objecting to, so whether we believe that premise or not is immaterial. This discussion is about whether the word “signaling” was used correctly in that post, not about whether that post was factually correct. A discussion about whether the predominate motive for dominating subordinates is to signal effective leadership would be interesting, but seems like a bit of a distraction when we’re trying to have a discussion about semantics and word choice.
That said, while I didn’t downvote (or, indeed, previously read) the comment, I would say that discussions purely about semantics and word choice are rarely worth the energy to have.
It’s generally a better idea to criticize actions rather than people: question your actions before you question yourself (the latter leads to a mindset which is more resistant to changing actions). But in any case, the most likely hypothesis, given that many of your posts have only one downvote, is that someone is serially downvoting you.
You’ve done nothing wrong (that I’ve seen), either someone is misusing the downvote as a retaliation tactic or LW is just bad at voting (or both). I’ve been there. It clearly hasn’t affected you over a long period of time, since your karma is in the positive hundreds (as opposed to mine, which hasn’t hit the 20 shreshold). But to be sure, try to avoid dubious assertions/axioms (or if you have to use one, affix the phrase “according to my beliefs” or something similar).
By my reasoning (or more accurately, by the reasoning of my inner Death Eater), if someone is serially downvoting me as a retaliation tactic, then that means I’ve done something wrong (or more accurately, that I’m BEING something wrong).
No one post you’ve said (regardless of how bad it could’ve been) would ever justify downvoting everything in retaliation, because that’s not what the downvote is meant to be used for. I can understand why you, as a rationalist, place doubt upon yourself by default, but there’s no need to defend your (theoretical) aggressor. Well-kept gardens die by pacifism, some die by moderation.
Yes, but what I’m saying is, I think that the retaliatory downvoting is an indication that I’m one of the weeds. (I’m used to this from other fora, so it’s not unreasonable to assume that I’m a weed here, too.)
I understand what you’re saying, and I can’t falsify your (claimed) experiences from other fora. Nonetheless, even if you are a “weed”, staying on lesswrong has to benefit someone. Law of bivalence: either you’re irrational or you’re rational. If you’re rational, others will benefit from your points you’ll make. If you’re irrational, you’ll benefit from the rational points others make. Either way, rationality increases. Q.E.D. (please no constructionism objections)
Oh no, I wasn’t referring to your earlier objections. I was just pre-empting the rejection of the law of bivalence that some bystander may invoke. On a semi-interesting side note, these recent comments haven’t been downvoted, so your aggressor has either stopped or temporarily left (hopefully the latter).
Well, one thing I learned from my childhood—the more viciously self-deprecating and self-abusive I can be, the more likely it is that my aggressors will leave me alone and just watch.
Ah, nice bit of wisdom there. You evade all of your abusers except for one: yourself. Ironically we’ve worked our way back to the topic of the article, because that can be useful as a signal; “don’t bother dominating me, I already have that covered”.
I’m not sure this follows. I have had managers who displayed unnecessary hostility towards me when in front of their own superiors, but had no proper dominance or control over me to speak of.
In one case, I held said manager in the palm of my hands and tolerated the hostility in light of the fact that his display of dominance to his superior increased said superiors’ allotment of resources to our team, which in turn made my own life easier and overall more enjoyable even after factoring out the hostility itself.
(for context, I had an indirect veto power over that manager: I could credibly threaten to quit, since I wasn’t dependent on the job and had a guarantee of having a new one secured for me within a week, while they stood to lose some productivity by having to hire and train a new employee up to my skill level—they had a lot more to lose than me and the costs of hiring and training stood to be far higher than the costs of adjusting for minor demands on my part)
On the other hand, I’m slightly more inclined than usual to believe I’m misinterpreting you, given my current state of mind and (lack of) awareness.
Note that my own assertion was (with emphasis added):
That isn’t true (or at least doesn’t follow).
I am not claiming that it is not ever possible to mimic dominance displays in some context without actually having dominance. I am claiming that using behaviors that actually successfully dominate is not mimicking dominance. Said dominance may in turn be done for the purpose of mimicking something else.
I am not claiming that it is not ever possible to mimic dominance displays in some context without actually having dominance. I am claiming that using behaviors that actually successfully dominate is not mimicking dominance. Said dominance may in turn be done for the purpose of mimicking something else.
This is one of those “words are slippery” moments.
Signaling is about displaying traits that can be interpreted by an outside agent as correlating strongly with another desired or undesired trait.
In this case, the signaller (the manager) is attempting to signal a desired trait (leadership ability) by displaying a behavior that our evolutionary ancestry has primed us to see as correlated with it (domination of subordinates). If we accept the premise that we need to separate this kind of signaling from the kind of signal that someone with actual leadership ability would perform, then the closest analogy to what we’re seeing here is mimicry (since we have a specimen that does not possess the leadership ability, but still possesses the traits that produce the domination signal).
If signals had zero possibility of error (i.e. no one ever falsely signaled), I suppose the word “prove” would be an appropriate replacement for “signal” (actual meaning). If it’s non-zero, I guess “strongly support” or some close one-word equivalent could work. Is it better to rescue “signal” and find a substitute for the false meaning of signal, or to find a substitute for the true meaning of signal and let the word “signal” be used falsely?
We got the word signal from its technical meaning in economics and evolutionary biology. We should strongly avoid giving standard technical words non-standard meanings, or using a non-standard word where a standard one exists.
Alternatively, I can think of two other variations.
Talk is cheap, but not free in some cases. As a subset of this, you can signal for the benefit of one audience (possibly a minority of the overall population, or your own ingroup, by saying things that will meet with moderate or minor social disapproval from the rest of the population
People sometimes expect costs to exist even when they don’t.
I was thinking more of people who make boasts that 99% of the audience would consider ridiculous. If they are already low status, the cost is low and they can still get an RoI on the 1%.
we’re no longer talking about signalling as it was originally conceived.
The word “signal” dates back to the 14th century. The use of the word as a verb dates back to at least the 17th century. The specific meaning you are trying to use seems to have started in the mid-to-late 20th century. That’s the issue. Signaling means what you say it means, but it also has a broader meaning. If I do an action that I wouldn’t do were it not for the fact that others observe me doing it, it seems very likely that part of my motivation is signaling. The manager clearly qualifies for this, as she would not be “acting decisively” but for the fact that she is being observed. (I also think that Gresham’s Law is the wrong one, or that you need a bit of an explanation to tie it into this behaviour, but that’s besides the point; the fact that there is a more precise name for a problem does not make that the only name for the problem.).
Unenforceable pre-commitments are still precommitments. If I promise never to cheat on my spouse again, despite a long history of cheating, I’ve made a commitment. It’s not a very credible commitment, but it still belongs in the set labeled, “commitments.” If you define “commitment” to only count “credible commitment,” you’ve essentially created a new word.
As with any debate over definitions, this can get circular rather quickly. My point is this: if you want people to use the word “signal” to mean something very specific, and to abandon the conventional use of the word, you need to provide a viable alternative definition, and you need to explain why it would be more productive to abandon the conventional use of the term. I do not think your definition is viable, because it necessarily involves an arbitrary cost threshold. Even if your definition were viable, I don’t see how you’ve shown that there is a problem with the conventional use of the term. Yes, there are different types of signals that differ in important ways, but I don’t see why this warrants completely changing how we use the term, rather than specifying weak vs. strong signals.
I think it is worth preserving a distinction between the specific kind of signaling Patrick describes and a weaker definition, because “true signaling” explains a specific phenomenon: in equilibrium, there seems to be too much effort expended on something, but everyone is acting in their own best interest. “High-quality” people do something to prove they are high quality, and “low-quality” people imitate this behavior. If education is a signal, people seem to get “too much” education for what their jobs require.
As in an exam problem I recently heard about: Female bullfrogs prefer large male bullfrogs. Large bullfrogs croak louder. In the dark, small bullfrogs croak loudly to appear large. To signal that they are the true large frogs, large ones croak even louder. When everyone is croaking as loudly as they can, croaking quietly makes a frog look incapable of croaking loudly and therefore small. Result: swamps are really noisy at night.
Or, according to this paper, people “expect a high-quality firm to undertake ambitious investments”. Investment is a signal of quality: low-quality firms invest more ambitiously to look high-quality. Then high-quality firms invest more to prove they are the true high-quality firms. Result: firms over-invest.
In this sense, you can also signal that you are serious about a friendship, job, or significant other, but only where your resources are limited. An expensive engagement ring is a good signal of your seriousness—hence, expensive diamond engagement rings instead cubic zirconium. Or, applying to college and sending a video of yourself singing the college’s fight song is a good signal that you will attend if admitted, and writing a gushing essay is a cheap imitation signal of that devotion. Hence, high school seniors look like they spend way too much effort telling colleges how devoted they are.
So you might use signaling to explain why “too many” people get “useless” degrees studying classics, or why swamps are “too loud”, or engagement rings are “too expensive”. I don’t think it’s true that too many people pretend to be Republicans, or too many birthday cards or sent.
The signals you talk about are low cost, but while the returns obviously are positive, they also are miniscule. I’m not sure if “cheap” applies if you take this into account.
You’ve basically come up with four criteria that describe the use of the word “signal” in a highly specific context—traits that exist for pure signalling purposes in evolution or game theory—and then decided, arbitrarily, that this is the one true meaning of “signal.” I do not think you have provided adequate evidence or argument to back this claim up.
Aren’t you arguing over definitions here? If he had defined a wholly new term as having that meaning, would your objections still apply?
I hadn’t actually read the OP, but it seems like proposing a formal definition of a term being used is rather different to attacking an opponents use of a term on the basis that they haven’t provided “adequate evidence or argument” that their definition is the “one true meaning of ‘signal.’”
My objections would indeed not apply if a new term were used. You can define a new term however you like; that’s the point of making a new term. You can’t just declare that a commonly used term has a specific meaning without providing some justification for abandoning its other existing meanings.
If I wanted to argue that the definition of “bachelor” is “an unmarried man,” I could do so rather easily, by citing this for example. If I were arguing over what counts as “theft,” I could offer an argument as to why a particular act should or should not fit under the general definition. An argument like the OP’s could theoretically include evidence (of common usage, of confusion, etc.) or argumentation, but the OP’s post does not really seem to do this. It declares, “The definition should be X” and then rejects certain usages as not fitting the definition. If you’re using an extremely common word like “signaling,” you don’t get to arbitrarily redefine it.
If you’re using an extremely common word like “signaling,” you don’t get to arbitrarily redefine it.
I’m not totally against redefining, or introducing a technical meaning for a common word that is used in some discipline, but doing that and then complaining about how other people are misusing the word is too much.
It’s a word. It means whatever we agree it means. If he wants to introduce a new, ore precise set of criteria for calling something a “signal” then he’s welcome to. However, reading the OP, he seems to think his definition is the only acceptable one, which is clearly nonsense.
You’ve basically come up with four criteria that describe the use of the word “signal” in a highly specific context—traits that exist for pure signalling purposes in evolution or game theory—and then decided, arbitrarily, that this is the one true meaning of “signal.” I do not think you have provided adequate evidence or argument to back this claim up.
If everyone around me is a Republican and I am not, it might make sense that I would do things that would signal that I am a Republican, even if these are very cheap and have obvious positive returns. Your definition would not allow this—if it is cheap and has obvious positive returns, it is not “signaling” to you. What you’re saying is that if I send a birthday card to a coworker I hate, then I am not “signaling” that I like that person because it’s too cheap to send the card.
It may make sense to speak of weak or strong signals, or reliable or unreliable or misleading signals. But you’ve arbitrarily said that the word applies only when a certain arbitrary threshold is crossed (your 2 and 4).
Incidentally, your theory might actually work if 4 were eliminated and 2 read “the behaviour is more likely to occur if you possess a certain characteristic than if you do not.” This would cover my birthday card example—it’s cheap, but I’m more likely to do it if I like the person, so it does signal liking the person. But this change would also fix the counter-productive manager. She’s doing things that she is more likely to do if she is decisive and in charge. Since she’s being evaluated on those criteria, and not “good manager-ness”—which is not generally observable—it would make sense that she would choose to give those signals rather than not. But revising the theory appropriately seems to nullify most or all of your objections.
I do think that cost asymmetry is a defining feature of signalling. To me, signalling is a way of getting around the problem of cheap talk. To me, a “cheap signal” is like an “unenforceable pre-commitment”. It defeats the point. (Of course, many people talk about pre-commitments without actually discussing the mechanics of enforcement. I view this as a grievous omission.)
I probably was too absolutist in my criteria, they should probably be read with an invisible “ceteris paribus” attached to them. I’m happy to talk of weak and strong signals.
I want to keep 4. because I make the assumption that the audience does not be deceived. Employers do not wish to hire lazy workers, and it’s in every worker’s interest to say that they aren’t lazy.
Regarding your birthday card example, I’d classify that as a white lie. Your coworker probably doesn’t care too much if he’s genuinely liked or not. Same thing with Republicanism. We could also call it a “cover story”.
Re: Good managerness, what you’re talking about is not signalling, but Gresham’s law. Decisiveness is meant as a proxy for good-managerness. Of course good manager-ness isn’t observable, that’s why we would tempted to invoke signalling in the first place! “How can I show that I’m a good manager? I know, I’ll act decisively!”.
I do agree I was being too absolutist, I do not agree that I should modify the theory. It seems to me that once we do that, we’re no longer talking about signalling as it was originally conceived. I don’t know how to argue for that other than to gesture at the economics literature, which talks about deceitful employees and employers without the werewithal to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Annendum: Katja Grace discusses signalling here and uses “costly signal” and “signal” as synonymous with my version of “signal”. (The previous version of this comment falsely attributed it to Robin Hanson, mental note: Always check the byline)
It may be possible to rescue the word “signal”, but it’s going to take an equally evocative word that covers what people think they mean by “signal”. “Stealing associations” isn’t going to work because it’s not one word. Robin covers a lot of mileage with “affiliate” but many times when people say “signal” they don’t mean “costly-signal” or “affiliate”.
The biological term is “mimicry”, and it fits quite well. A mimic is a “false signaler” that relies on the fact that most signalers in its environment aren’t false or that signal verification is costly, and therefore signal receivers are statistically better off trusting a signal than they are attempting to verify it. Mimicry only works within an environment where there is an honest signaller (which is called the mimic’s “model”), since the strategy causes the signal to become more noisy.
Note that biologists still consider mimicry to be a form of signaling, so they don’t seem to share the idea that a signal has to be honest.
But if we want to continue to use the term “signaling” and be specific about what kind of signaling we’re talking about, the biological metaphor seems particularly fertile. Accurate phrasing would look something like:
“Managers who are unnecessarily hostile to their subordinates are attempting to mimic a recognized signal (dominance) of good leadership.”
Ultimately, what we seem to be talking about is what happens when a signal gets de-coupled from what it signifies, and an optimization process begins to exploit that decoupling. If your current priors have come to associate signal “a” with fact A, and I want you to believe A about me, it’s in my interest to send signal “a” whether or not A happens to be true about me.
[edited for clarity]
That isn’t true (or at least doesn’t follow). It isn’t mimicry to actually dominate when that domination hurts oneself (or a particular goal). It’s just a signalling behavior that happens to be counterproductive to some goal.
Successful dominance isn’t what’s being signaled; “successful dominance” IS the signal. “Good at leadership” is what’s being signalled.
Saying that instead of what you actually said would have saved me a whole lot of trouble.
I thought that’s what I did say; I apologize if I was unclear. My brain isn’t what it used to be, so clear communication is sometimes a struggle.
The more I think about this, the less sure I am that I understand the distinction you’re trying to draw here between “attempting to mimic a recognized dominance signal” and “a signalling behavior”. Can you expand?
“Dominance signal” corresponds to actions which indicate to others (be they lower in status, equals or those higher in status) that the signaler that they are in charge. Dominance is almost entirely mediated by signalling.
“Attempting to mimic” in the context introduced by ialdabaoth indicates that the motive of the behavior is “signal to a particular target audience of superiors that one is dominant over subordinates despite in fact not being dominant over subordinates”.
The distinction is between on one hand any “attempting to mimic a recognized dominance signal” and on the other the set of all signalling behaviors that is any one of “not about dominance”, “not motivated to deceive some class of observer” or “actually indicates or causes dominance within the relevant hierarchy”.
If mimicry absolutely must be dragged in to describe an aspect of the scenario then it could be said that “Managers who are unnecesarily hostile to their subordinates are attempting to mimic a recognized signal of competent leadership” or something similar. It would still be wrong as a point of human psychology but at least it wouldn’t be fundamentally muddled thinking about signalling, mimicry and dominance.
No, the motive of the behavior is “signal to a particular target audience of superiors that one is effective at leadership despite in fact not being effective at leadership. The specific signal that is interpreted as effective leadership happens to be dominance over subordinates, therefore someone who wishes to signal effective leadership will dominate their subordinates.”
It’s telling that our culture so intertwines the two (effective leadership and dominance over subordinates) that no one even remembers that the actual trait we’re trying to signal is “effective leadership”; the mistake that everyone seems to keep making is that dominating subordinates is itself the desired trait.
Note that my replies were to the unedited version and would not make sense as reply to the current claim.
I don’t believe the premised claim that active attempts to signal effective leadership are the predominate motive or cause of dominance of subordinates.
But it was the original premise of the quoted post that Patrick was objecting to, so whether we believe that premise or not is immaterial. This discussion is about whether the word “signaling” was used correctly in that post, not about whether that post was factually correct. A discussion about whether the predominate motive for dominating subordinates is to signal effective leadership would be interesting, but seems like a bit of a distraction when we’re trying to have a discussion about semantics and word choice.
I appear to be confused—I don’t understand why the previous post was downvoted. What am I saying that is incorrect or inappropriate?
I wouldn’t worry about a single downvote or two.
That said, while I didn’t downvote (or, indeed, previously read) the comment, I would say that discussions purely about semantics and word choice are rarely worth the energy to have.
Well, now everything I’ve said over the past few days has been downvoted.
Am I not the right sort of person to be posting on lesswrong?
It’s generally a better idea to criticize actions rather than people: question your actions before you question yourself (the latter leads to a mindset which is more resistant to changing actions). But in any case, the most likely hypothesis, given that many of your posts have only one downvote, is that someone is serially downvoting you.
You’ve done nothing wrong (that I’ve seen), either someone is misusing the downvote as a retaliation tactic or LW is just bad at voting (or both). I’ve been there. It clearly hasn’t affected you over a long period of time, since your karma is in the positive hundreds (as opposed to mine, which hasn’t hit the 20 shreshold). But to be sure, try to avoid dubious assertions/axioms (or if you have to use one, affix the phrase “according to my beliefs” or something similar).
By my reasoning (or more accurately, by the reasoning of my inner Death Eater), if someone is serially downvoting me as a retaliation tactic, then that means I’ve done something wrong (or more accurately, that I’m BEING something wrong).
No one post you’ve said (regardless of how bad it could’ve been) would ever justify downvoting everything in retaliation, because that’s not what the downvote is meant to be used for. I can understand why you, as a rationalist, place doubt upon yourself by default, but there’s no need to defend your (theoretical) aggressor. Well-kept gardens die by pacifism, some die by moderation.
Yes, but what I’m saying is, I think that the retaliatory downvoting is an indication that I’m one of the weeds. (I’m used to this from other fora, so it’s not unreasonable to assume that I’m a weed here, too.)
I understand what you’re saying, and I can’t falsify your (claimed) experiences from other fora. Nonetheless, even if you are a “weed”, staying on lesswrong has to benefit someone. Law of bivalence: either you’re irrational or you’re rational. If you’re rational, others will benefit from your points you’ll make. If you’re irrational, you’ll benefit from the rational points others make. Either way, rationality increases. Q.E.D. (please no constructionism objections)
My objections aren’t constructionist; like I said, I have an inner Death-Eater that keeps screaming “Weaklings should suffer!”.
Oh no, I wasn’t referring to your earlier objections. I was just pre-empting the rejection of the law of bivalence that some bystander may invoke. On a semi-interesting side note, these recent comments haven’t been downvoted, so your aggressor has either stopped or temporarily left (hopefully the latter).
Well, one thing I learned from my childhood—the more viciously self-deprecating and self-abusive I can be, the more likely it is that my aggressors will leave me alone and just watch.
Ah, nice bit of wisdom there. You evade all of your abusers except for one: yourself. Ironically we’ve worked our way back to the topic of the article, because that can be useful as a signal; “don’t bother dominating me, I already have that covered”.
That was partially deliberate; I derive wry amusement from taking things meta and then bringing them back around.
I’m not sure this follows. I have had managers who displayed unnecessary hostility towards me when in front of their own superiors, but had no proper dominance or control over me to speak of.
In one case, I held said manager in the palm of my hands and tolerated the hostility in light of the fact that his display of dominance to his superior increased said superiors’ allotment of resources to our team, which in turn made my own life easier and overall more enjoyable even after factoring out the hostility itself.
(for context, I had an indirect veto power over that manager: I could credibly threaten to quit, since I wasn’t dependent on the job and had a guarantee of having a new one secured for me within a week, while they stood to lose some productivity by having to hire and train a new employee up to my skill level—they had a lot more to lose than me and the costs of hiring and training stood to be far higher than the costs of adjusting for minor demands on my part)
On the other hand, I’m slightly more inclined than usual to believe I’m misinterpreting you, given my current state of mind and (lack of) awareness.
Note that my own assertion was (with emphasis added):
I am not claiming that it is not ever possible to mimic dominance displays in some context without actually having dominance. I am claiming that using behaviors that actually successfully dominate is not mimicking dominance. Said dominance may in turn be done for the purpose of mimicking something else.
Ah, thanks. Oops.
This is one of those “words are slippery” moments.
Signaling is about displaying traits that can be interpreted by an outside agent as correlating strongly with another desired or undesired trait.
In this case, the signaller (the manager) is attempting to signal a desired trait (leadership ability) by displaying a behavior that our evolutionary ancestry has primed us to see as correlated with it (domination of subordinates). If we accept the premise that we need to separate this kind of signaling from the kind of signal that someone with actual leadership ability would perform, then the closest analogy to what we’re seeing here is mimicry (since we have a specimen that does not possess the leadership ability, but still possesses the traits that produce the domination signal).
If signals had zero possibility of error (i.e. no one ever falsely signaled), I suppose the word “prove” would be an appropriate replacement for “signal” (actual meaning). If it’s non-zero, I guess “strongly support” or some close one-word equivalent could work. Is it better to rescue “signal” and find a substitute for the false meaning of signal, or to find a substitute for the true meaning of signal and let the word “signal” be used falsely?
We got the word signal from its technical meaning in economics and evolutionary biology. We should strongly avoid giving standard technical words non-standard meanings, or using a non-standard word where a standard one exists.
If you never make a proofreading mistake you are doing too much proofreading.
To me, signalling through cheap talk is like spam: it rarely works, but the costs are low and there’s a lot of it about.
Alternatively, I can think of two other variations.
Talk is cheap, but not free in some cases. As a subset of this, you can signal for the benefit of one audience (possibly a minority of the overall population, or your own ingroup, by saying things that will meet with moderate or minor social disapproval from the rest of the population
People sometimes expect costs to exist even when they don’t.
I was thinking more of people who make boasts that 99% of the audience would consider ridiculous. If they are already low status, the cost is low and they can still get an RoI on the 1%.
That particular post is by Katja Grace.
Don’t I feel like an idiot. Sorry Katja!
The word “signal” dates back to the 14th century. The use of the word as a verb dates back to at least the 17th century. The specific meaning you are trying to use seems to have started in the mid-to-late 20th century. That’s the issue. Signaling means what you say it means, but it also has a broader meaning. If I do an action that I wouldn’t do were it not for the fact that others observe me doing it, it seems very likely that part of my motivation is signaling. The manager clearly qualifies for this, as she would not be “acting decisively” but for the fact that she is being observed. (I also think that Gresham’s Law is the wrong one, or that you need a bit of an explanation to tie it into this behaviour, but that’s besides the point; the fact that there is a more precise name for a problem does not make that the only name for the problem.).
Unenforceable pre-commitments are still precommitments. If I promise never to cheat on my spouse again, despite a long history of cheating, I’ve made a commitment. It’s not a very credible commitment, but it still belongs in the set labeled, “commitments.” If you define “commitment” to only count “credible commitment,” you’ve essentially created a new word.
As with any debate over definitions, this can get circular rather quickly. My point is this: if you want people to use the word “signal” to mean something very specific, and to abandon the conventional use of the word, you need to provide a viable alternative definition, and you need to explain why it would be more productive to abandon the conventional use of the term. I do not think your definition is viable, because it necessarily involves an arbitrary cost threshold. Even if your definition were viable, I don’t see how you’ve shown that there is a problem with the conventional use of the term. Yes, there are different types of signals that differ in important ways, but I don’t see why this warrants completely changing how we use the term, rather than specifying weak vs. strong signals.
I think it is worth preserving a distinction between the specific kind of signaling Patrick describes and a weaker definition, because “true signaling” explains a specific phenomenon: in equilibrium, there seems to be too much effort expended on something, but everyone is acting in their own best interest. “High-quality” people do something to prove they are high quality, and “low-quality” people imitate this behavior. If education is a signal, people seem to get “too much” education for what their jobs require.
As in an exam problem I recently heard about: Female bullfrogs prefer large male bullfrogs. Large bullfrogs croak louder. In the dark, small bullfrogs croak loudly to appear large. To signal that they are the true large frogs, large ones croak even louder. When everyone is croaking as loudly as they can, croaking quietly makes a frog look incapable of croaking loudly and therefore small. Result: swamps are really noisy at night.
Or, according to this paper, people “expect a high-quality firm to undertake ambitious investments”. Investment is a signal of quality: low-quality firms invest more ambitiously to look high-quality. Then high-quality firms invest more to prove they are the true high-quality firms. Result: firms over-invest.
In this sense, you can also signal that you are serious about a friendship, job, or significant other, but only where your resources are limited. An expensive engagement ring is a good signal of your seriousness—hence, expensive diamond engagement rings instead cubic zirconium. Or, applying to college and sending a video of yourself singing the college’s fight song is a good signal that you will attend if admitted, and writing a gushing essay is a cheap imitation signal of that devotion. Hence, high school seniors look like they spend way too much effort telling colleges how devoted they are.
So you might use signaling to explain why “too many” people get “useless” degrees studying classics, or why swamps are “too loud”, or engagement rings are “too expensive”. I don’t think it’s true that too many people pretend to be Republicans, or too many birthday cards or sent.
What Patrick refers to is called costly signaling in evolutionary psychology, and I believe in general.
The signals you talk about are low cost, but while the returns obviously are positive, they also are miniscule. I’m not sure if “cheap” applies if you take this into account.
ETA: I also think this is a problem in the op.
Aren’t you arguing over definitions here? If he had defined a wholly new term as having that meaning, would your objections still apply?
You did realize that the OP is an argument about definitions, and thus a response that continues that argument is spot-on, right?
I hadn’t actually read the OP, but it seems like proposing a formal definition of a term being used is rather different to attacking an opponents use of a term on the basis that they haven’t provided “adequate evidence or argument” that their definition is the “one true meaning of ‘signal.’”
My objections would indeed not apply if a new term were used. You can define a new term however you like; that’s the point of making a new term. You can’t just declare that a commonly used term has a specific meaning without providing some justification for abandoning its other existing meanings.
If I wanted to argue that the definition of “bachelor” is “an unmarried man,” I could do so rather easily, by citing this for example. If I were arguing over what counts as “theft,” I could offer an argument as to why a particular act should or should not fit under the general definition. An argument like the OP’s could theoretically include evidence (of common usage, of confusion, etc.) or argumentation, but the OP’s post does not really seem to do this. It declares, “The definition should be X” and then rejects certain usages as not fitting the definition. If you’re using an extremely common word like “signaling,” you don’t get to arbitrarily redefine it.
I’m not totally against redefining, or introducing a technical meaning for a common word that is used in some discipline, but doing that and then complaining about how other people are misusing the word is too much.
It’s a word. It means whatever we agree it means. If he wants to introduce a new, ore precise set of criteria for calling something a “signal” then he’s welcome to. However, reading the OP, he seems to think his definition is the only acceptable one, which is clearly nonsense.
EDIT: ninja’d by HalMorris