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The Sig­nal­ing Trilemma

TagLast edit: 3 Jan 2022 0:18 UTC by Pablo

The belief signaling trilemma (or signaling trilemma for simplicity) points out that (a) people assign reputation based on claims; (b) people want to maintain their reputation; therefore, (c) people warp their claims. This presents a trilemma:

  1. We could agree to stop assigning reputation based on beliefs, but this would deprive us of an extremely valuable tool for evaluating others, besides being impossible to enforce.

  2. We could agree to always report honest beliefs, but this could be very costly for cooperators and again impossible to enforce.

  3. We could embrace dishonest reporting of beliefs, but this can severely warp the discourse.

Related tags/​pages: Deception, Honesty, Meta-Honesty, Signaling

The Belief Sig­nal­ing Trilemma

Scott Garrabrant20 Sep 2013 0:50 UTC
21 points
49 comments2 min readLW link

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Maybe Ly­ing Can’t Ex­ist?!

Zack_M_Davis23 Aug 2020 0:36 UTC
58 points
16 comments5 min readLW link

Maybe Ly­ing Doesn’t Exist

Zack_M_Davis14 Oct 2019 7:04 UTC
70 points
57 comments8 min readLW link

Can crimes be dis­cussed liter­ally?

Benquo22 Mar 2020 20:17 UTC
102 points
38 comments2 min readLW link3 reviews
(benjaminrosshoffman.com)

Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Re­quires Com­mon In­ter­ests or Differ­en­tial Sig­nal Costs

Zack_M_Davis26 Mar 2021 6:41 UTC
40 points
13 comments3 min readLW link1 review

How hard is it for al­tru­ists to dis­cuss go­ing against bad equil­ibria?

abramdemski22 Jun 2019 3:42 UTC
46 points
6 comments11 min readLW link
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