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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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)?

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.

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

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.

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:

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.

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.

- 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

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

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 .

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.

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

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.