iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

This has been debunked! He first job was actually deploying the Spanning Tree Protocol in ethernet networks; his geographic proximity to St Pancréas and love of Stone Temple Pilots and sticky toffee puddings are merely whimsical happenstance

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Reposted by Ed Seabright

Cultural Evolution Society @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

CES will give out at least seven travel awards of up to $4000 per person for researchers from low-and-middle income countries to attend the upcoming @ces2026.bsky.social CES 2026 Rabat conference. Applications must be submitted via this form by 20 February 2026, 9:00 AM AoE, to be considered.

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Reposted by Ed Seabright

ces2026 @ces2026.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

Post 1/13 📢🧵 Call for activities proposals ! You are invited to submit proposals for three activities to be held during the upcoming CES2026 conference:

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Zach Garfield @zhgarfield.com · 16/01/2026

We received a TON of submissions for @ces2026.bsky.social ! This is definitely a trend you'll want to conform to. If you didn't submit, still come for the amazing speaker lineup. Registration will open soon. @hbes2026.bsky.social abstract submission closes today!

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Reposted by Ed Seabright

Zach Garfield @zhgarfield.com · 08/01/2026

One week left to submit your abstracts to #HBES2026 16 Jan deadline! @hbes2026.bsky.social @humbehevosoc.bsky.social We’re scouting banquet locations. Hope to see you in Rabat!!

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Reposted by Ed Seabright

Vivek V. Venkataraman @vivek123.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

New article in Hunter Gatherer Research! Foraging societies practice consensus-based politics. We conduct a xc review and argue that it helps to boost collective intelligence. Consensus, cooperation and collective intelligence in foraging societies liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/...

liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk

Consensus, cooperation and collective intelligence in foraging societies | Hunter Gatherer Research

Consensus-based collective decision-making is a common feature of political life in hunter-gatherer (forager) societies. In this paper, we ask why. Synthesising evidence from anthropology and experimental social psychology, we argue that consensus-based ...

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

This will be screened, along with a Q and A with the director and Hrdy herself, at the 2026 HBES meeting at UM6P in Rabat! Deadline for applying: January 15th @hbes2026.bsky.social

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

This is what Jamie Jones commented earlier, to which I responded: yes, that's a super important "insofar"! It means we have a possible explanation for ostentatiously expensive traits.

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

And in between people who pay close to no marginal cost and those who pay too much marginal cost, you have people who pay some marginal cost. Either way, the actual expense of the watch is super relevant. It is the driving force behind the signal. Which is all I have been arguing.

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

Sorry but people extravagantly spend money "for the lifestyle" all the time, sometimes ruinously. It happens!

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

Right. So you believe that people never spend serious (to them) amounts of money as a social signal? That's crazy to me. But ok it's clear now our disagreement is empirical.

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

This is the same argument as saying: in a world where rolexes were gifted to you at a certain wealth, they would still signal wealth - ok, but they're mostly not, and people spend money on them as a signal.

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

Yes, if the utility curves look different, then you can go from realised costs at equilibrium to no costs at equilibrium. What do utility curves look like empirically, in the real world? Are they diminishing returns, without ever becoming flat (which is what you would need for a no-cost signal)?

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

I do not care about "handicaps" as a term. I care about whether we can expect realised costs in the real world, and whether costly signalling can be good explanation for ostentatious behaviour. You have described this as a "red herring" and "god of the gaps". To me, this is a massive overcorrection.

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

I know!!! Does this mean that I can't critique any other parts of his papers?

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

If you're going to make comments implying I don't understand the theory, I wish you would specify what it is you think I'm not understanding. I know that Szamado knows that realised cost signalling systems exist, which makes it all the stranger that he writes as if those costs are irrelevant.

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

I know they're not contradictory! My issue from the beginning has been about framing. Go reread my initial comment in the thread, I was saying that a sentence in the paper (NOT the title) could cause confusion. The preprint includes this in the abstract, seemingly agreeing with me:

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

I think let's agree to give up. I'm not even sure what we are disagreeing about, since you seem to oscillate between "wasteful signals are fine and plausible" and "wasteful signals are red herrings and unfalsifiable" and idk your actual position anymore. Maybe we can hash it out in person sometime.

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

idk why you are responding to points I never made instead of addressing the ones I did. You still haven't said anything about the peacock's tail. As for the preprint, here is what it has to say, which is what I have been saying since the beginning. It's clearly not just my stubborn opinion.

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

- any attempt to demonstrate wasteful signalling must test, not assume - Szamada's papers are good. Generalising models is good. - The framing of many of these papers as direct rebuttals to or debunkings of the HH (as opposed to the HP) are unhelpful and add to the confusion

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

Few additional points: - I believe, although I do not know, that wasteful signals are likely to be somewhat common in nature, simply because diminishing marginal utility is common. - I ofc agree that assuming waste implies signalling, or that signalling entails waste, are both very bad practice

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

If you want to convince me that HH is a red herring, you at least need to show it doesn't apply to its most famous case study, which requires you to show convincing falsifying evidence for any of my 5 criteria in the case of the peacock, and ideally to provide a convincing alternative explanation .

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

and observing differences in reproductive success. Add to this an association between tails and good health, as well as a complete lack of plausible alternative adaptive purposes for such a costly trait, and you have an extremely good candidate for a handicap hypothesis explanation.

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

To return to the canonical example, the peacock's tail: the high energetic cost of the tail was NEVER taken as prima facie evidence of a signal. In fact, it was taken as an evolutionary puzzle to be solved. Its use as a signal was painstakingly demonstrated experimentally, by manipulating tails

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

a) diminishing marginal utility b) clear waste c) waste associated with high-resource/high-capital individuals d) waste taken as signal by other individuals, and e) not plausibly useful for anything other than a signal.

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

Now just because this *can* happen doesn't mean that it does, but this is absolutely not a god of the gaps hypothesis! It is extremely falsifiable. My diagnostic criteria would be:

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

This IS the handicap hypothesis, not the faulty overextension, which I guess is being called the handicap principle. This model was correct when Grafen formalised it and remains correct even though we can show that different utility curves produce different, non wasteful equilibria.

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

Namely, that when some resource has diminishing marginal utility, wasteful behaviour by resource rich individuals can serve as an honest signal of said resource-richness, because the utility cost of said waste is higher for the resource poor.

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

Nothing has been redefined, Duncan. There is no ship of Theseus. There are two claims, one of which was wrong and has been demonstrated to be wrong - that waste is necessary to honest signalling - and one which was correct and is not disputed by anyone, including yourself,

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

"we show that the handicap hypothesis is theoretically valid, though it should be considered as just one of several mechanisms to support honest signalling." - baby

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

It makes the point repeatedly, e.g: "This trend may have led researchers outside of the field of animal communication to believe that the handicap hypothesis is logically invalid. That is untrue."

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

anyway I agree with you on your evidentiary standards for costly signals.

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

If the pendulum swings people will start arguing that costs simply can't act as signals, haven't you read Szamado, he debunked the handicap hypothesis

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

All I have been saying this entire thread is that I personally believe he has not helped his messaging by framing his papers as debunkings of, rather than extensions to, costly signalling.

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

I also agree that costs don't automatically prove signals! Especially when those costs benefit other people, then it's a cooperation problem. But it's still a worthwhile explanation to explore.

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

It seems to me that you are annoyed that people assume that signals entail costs. I get that! it's a bad assumption. What I am saying is that sometimes costs can be explained as signals. I still don't know of a better explanation for the peacock's tail, for example.

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

Not at all, it's an empirical question. The point is, when we are confronted with an apparently costly trait that demands an explanation, the possibility that it is a handicap signal is one that is worth exploring, and the fact that other honest signals are not costly is irrelevant

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

but yes, like I said - it's good to extend the model, it's scientific progress. It remains the case, however, that handicaps *can* be the mechanism underlying honest signals, and some of the language in the Szamado papers seems to deny this.

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

It was setting out to explain costly traits, so of course it didn't look at cases where the trait isn't costly

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

"Grafen hadn't vindicated the HH he'd discovered a special case" yeah, a special case called handicaps. It's a very strange white whale imo. Like I said - good to clarify the primary importance of the cost of deception, very weird to insist that therefore the HH is obsolete and debunked.

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

for no reason other than as a signal. So it's mathematically a special case, and? It's a special case that uniquely solves certain adaptive conundrums. My issue with Szamado is he writes as if he has debunked the HH, which he hasn't. It's still a thing, even if it has been misapplied.

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

isn't that "not all honest signals have to be costly" but rather that food sharing benefits the recipient, which makes it a classic cooperation problem with all the available alternative explanations - reciprocity, indirect fitness, etc. In contrast, true handicaps are traits that are costly ...

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

Economists have also been writing about this for decades prior to Szamado! This insight isn't new. The point is it is an *important* special case, because it can explain apparently costly traits in ways that these other kinds of honest signals can't. The problem with applying it to food sharing ...

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

"Inflammation as a marker of infectious status" is nonsense akin to digit ratios? What? This thread is responding to the claim that the HH is a "God of the gaps" argument, which it isn't because it's easily falsifiable. Whether you are convinced by the evidence is irrelevant to that argument.

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

This difference in marginal costs is the entire point, and it has been well known that this is the driving force behind the HH for decades. Have people misunderstood this? Sure. Has a lot of the research been bad? Yeah. The Grafen paper is still correct, though.

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Ed Seabright @edseabright.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

The Grafen models from 1990 are the papers that properly formalised the principle, and they are extremely clear that what makes the HH work is that "the marginal cost of advertizing (wl) should be greater for worse males" (this is directly form the "Biological signals as handicaps" paper).

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