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I wonder if signaling is really something our brains deliberately hide from ourselves, as the article describes, or if it's visible to beyond just the people in
by didericis 7y ago
I wonder if signaling is really something our brains deliberately hide from ourselves, as the article describes, or if it's visible to beyond just the people in this article's target audience. I'd prefer to think people are aware of what they're doing and just don't like to talk about it. I haven't read the book he's referencing, so I'm not sure what the evidence is in regards to the extent to which people are actually deluding themselves vs just being private about their underlying motivations.
- wilg 7y agoYeah, my intuition is that the person evaluating the behavior is misunderstanding it, and the person doing it could tell you if they were comfortable. The idea of "hiding it" seems way too loaded, because it's usually in a context with an implicit value judgement. I suspect that there are multiple factors of various importance going into every decision, and the observer is reducing, reprioritizing, and judging it against their own opinions. Perhaps that book or some other source offers a more rigorous analysis.
- thanatropism 7y agoAs someone else said, Hanson is an economist. Signaling is taught in Game Theory 101 in undergrad econ. Varian, Pyndick etc probably have plenty of "more rigorous analysis".
- roywiggins 7y agoThe authors of the book are an economist and a software developer... I am not convinced they have any particular insight into how actual human minds work. Furthermore, one of the authors of the book also authored this blog post, which I hesitate to summarize, but yeesh: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/04/two-types-of-envy.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/04/two-types-of-envy.html