Useful, but I do want to warn about oversimplifying the topic. Conversations _do_ contain signals, and that may be a plurality or even a majority of the time spent. But they are not simple signals like “unidimensional fitness for cooperation”. There are dozens or hundreds of signaling dimensions, and often a significant amount of actual object information, to actually communicate concepts and align beliefs, rather than just to signal fitness and capability.
How would you convince somebody that you’re an expert in quantum mechanics?
There’s a LOT of unpacking to do here. what does “convince” mean? What does “expert” mean? What mutual knowledge do we have of each other? In fact, relative to many, I _AM_ an expert on quantum mechanics. Relative to time travelers, nobody born in the past is. Most importantly, why do I care whether they’re convinced?
All this goes to the next step in your writeup—signaling generally has multiple levels of complexity, and they all have to land in order to be effective. Good signals are a cluster of costs on different dimensions of proxy for the underlying characteristic, and faking one is ineffective. Which leads to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countersignaling, where an entity does something that would be a bad signal out of context, but combined with other signals is actually an even more impactful costly display.
So, how did I do at the game specified at the end of your post?
Useful, but I do want to warn about oversimplifying the topic. Conversations _do_ contain signals, and that may be a plurality or even a majority of the time spent. But they are not simple signals like “unidimensional fitness for cooperation”. There are dozens or hundreds of signaling dimensions, and often a significant amount of actual object information, to actually communicate concepts and align beliefs, rather than just to signal fitness and capability.
There’s a LOT of unpacking to do here. what does “convince” mean? What does “expert” mean? What mutual knowledge do we have of each other? In fact, relative to many, I _AM_ an expert on quantum mechanics. Relative to time travelers, nobody born in the past is. Most importantly, why do I care whether they’re convinced?
All this goes to the next step in your writeup—signaling generally has multiple levels of complexity, and they all have to land in order to be effective. Good signals are a cluster of costs on different dimensions of proxy for the underlying characteristic, and faking one is ineffective. Which leads to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countersignaling, where an entity does something that would be a bad signal out of context, but combined with other signals is actually an even more impactful costly display.
So, how did I do at the game specified at the end of your post?
I really appreciate the feedback! Agreed with all your points, there’s a lot of areas I need to work on to improve my writing.
Signal-wise you come across as what I think of as the good side LW: well reasoned, thoughtful, and intelligent.
Sidenote: I think people (like you) who comment thoughtfully on other people’s “content” make the internet a much better place.