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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

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40 points
13 comments3 min readLW link1 review

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122 points
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Maybe Ly­ing Doesn’t Exist

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

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

The Belief Sig­nal­ing Trilemma

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