Comments on: Excess Signaling Example

By: Dan

Dan — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 21:07:01 +0000

“…an employee of a random unknown type get paid fifteen.”

Producing twice as much as the next guy but getting paid the same? Sounds like communism.

By: Richard Sharpe

Richard Sharpe — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 15:44:43 +0000

It would seem then that those of low ability should have an interest in preventing those of high ability from signaling … and that defectors from those of high ability might do very well by organizing those of low ability …

By: Stuart Armstrong

Stuart Armstrong — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 06:10:03 +0000

I just think that estimating these admirable activities is a lot less like deciding on the existence of free energy machines (can be decided on basic principles) and more like deciding on the existence of global warming (needs lots of careful studies and an awareness of lots of factors that could throw the data).

I’m calling for prudence, not impotence

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 18:22:00 +0000

Stuart, if you let the complexity of the world discourage you from ever drawing any conclusions about whether there is too much or too little of anything, you may never be in a position to make any recommendations. Deciding that there is too much of something of course does not imply that any particular regime of regulation or social pressure would not be worse.

By: Stuart Armstrong

Stuart Armstrong — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 17:30:22 +0000

a single example is not a theorem

I am most aware of that – my point was to extend the example to see if there was extra insight to be gained (the theorem version of what I said would be “If there is no penalty for good people to signal and a high enough penalty for others that a bad person does not improve his income by signaling, even if he is the only bad person to do so, then the signaling is accurate and at least socially neutral.”)

But your example has convinced me that unless there is a substantial gain from the activity, then signaling will mean that effort will be wasted.

However, if the gains are large, then the signaling will not be a problem (if the gain is large across the board, then the signaling is inaccurate, but the social benefit is positive). There’s also the issue of a free-market economy, deriving common good from (to a large extent) individual desire to signal.

The original question was simply: would it be better for the world if globally we reduced these admirable activities? And is there a bias towards them? The presence of signaling in these activities is a sign that some of them could be done more efficiently (the ones that suffer from their signaling). But the activities are too varied, and their benefits and costs are also too varied to generalize about admirable activities.

To analyze the results of a global reduction or increase in art or education would be very difficult. I don’t see that we can short-circuit that analysis simply because they are admirable activities.

By: Cobb

Cobb — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 13:36:08 +0000

That depends upon whether one can say with any certainty that today’s world is good since it obviously lies at the very end of all previous wars.

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 10:31:07 +0000

Paul, if school is in fact an inefficient signal, the first step is to talk about it that way. We pollute and go to war for our local benefits, but at least we usually do not claim that such things are good for the world.

By: Paul Gowder

Paul Gowder — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 07:04:30 +0000

But given that there’s a massive and probably insoluble collective action problem in getting from the inefficient signaling equlibrium to the nobody-goes-to-school equilibrium, why bother? I can’t help but feel like exhorting people to give up inefficient signaling is in itself a form of the same.

(Also, if we’re wired to like an inefficient level of admirable activity, we have to count that pleasure into our general utility function somehow, and I’m not sure how that would work — maybe the individual over-expenditures on admirable activity create enough positive externality to outweigh the waste?)

By: Zhong Lu

Zhong Lu — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 01:36:20 +0000

Ok. I agree. I really don’t understand what you’re talking about.

By: Nic "RedWord" Smith

Nic "RedWord" Smith — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 20:11:18 +0000

I just happened to stumble across a email whitelisting service, and can’t help but think that it might make a less “loaded” example, as even people who want to overcome bias have bias. Suppose there are two classes of people who send email – spammers and opt-in list admins (I’ll use the term “marketer”). Suppose spammers earn $0.10 per email sent, marketers earn $1.00, the cost to maintain the list is $0.50 per email, the cost per email received is $0.11, and the cost per email filtered is $0.05. If all marketers signal that they are marketers and not spammers, they earn $0.50 per email, spammers make nothing, and (assuming an equal proportion of spam and legitimate messages) the owners of the email boxes pay an average of $0.08 per email. The presence of a signal in this situation dramatically reduces the earnings of the marketer while bringing a much smaller benefit to those who receive email (-$0.50 vs +0.03) so the signal is a net bad.

Please note that the numbers presented have been selected completely arbitrarily and are a poor reflectional of the actual email situation. One odd little thing that you might have noticed is that I assume that spammers keep sending spam after they are no longer received by anyone. If they were rational and in control of their actions, they would stop, and the benefit to email receivers would be greater. However, in this scenario, spammers who meet this criteria wouldn’t be spammers in the first place, but marketers; in other words, spaminess and spam frequency are taken as innate.