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It always gives me a surge of vindictive glee when someone says something to the effect of, "I hate when outsiders learn to co-opt our language to scam us."* Sucks to suck! Next time learn to receive and transmit factual observations instead of markers of ingroup status!
I'd wager this happens because it's a time-efficient mental heuristic-- you learn that people in your ingroup are unlikely to lie to you because they share the same goals, so when you recieve ingroup-signals you spend less effort discerning truthfulness. Intelligent people need this heuristic less and therefore groups full of high-average-intelligence people have a sort of herd-immunity against this type of scammer. Scammers often try to signal that they're high-intelligence by talking like LLMs trained on smart-people-talk... but that only fools dumb people who've trained themselves to have the separate-but-related heuristic of trusting anything that includes enough technical language. (See: homeopathic remedies, the medbed people, anything "quantum.") To the high-intelligence group, they just look like nuts, cranks, and schizophrenics.
However, implicit understanding of that herd-immunity becomes its own type of heuristic. Which works fine under normal conditions because you need to be smart** to lie to a smart person, and if you're smart you have more alternatives to being a scammer. But there's a particular failure case that I think is especially interesting: when a formerly high-average-intelligence group reduces its selection criteria and lets lower-intelligence people in. High-intelligence people become vectors of information instead of firewalls against it, because their level of laziness when evaluating ingroup claims is no longer adaptive.
I don't have any real conclusion to draw from this... Actually, I suspect I shouldn't draw any conclusions from this, because "the ingroup gets shittier when we let new people in" is exactly the sort of heuristic I suspect I'm already predisposed to have by genetics and culture. It's almost certainly priced in so to speak. So having the mechanistic explanation for the heuristic should actually push me toward being more open to expanding the ingroup-- at least, in cases where I suspect the new members are equal or greater intelligence to the existing ingroup. (Should I be even more in favor of increasing green card caps for technically skilled workers? But then again, I'd guess that I'm predisposed to be biased in favor of that by political affiliation and cultural influences anyways so this might be a wash.)
Though-- if human intelligence actually declined after the invention of agriculture (I'd put a sub-50% probability of this being true, but it would be really interesting if it was) it would imply that we were in a sweet-spot in terms of ingroup formation. If you live in a optimally sized band of primates, there's no need to send ingroup signals because you already have a deep, personal connection to every member of the ingroup. If you live in our current, massively populous, highly-anonymous society, relying on signals of ingroup membership gets you scammed. But for a thousands-of-years-long golden age you could afford to be stupid. Ingroups were both large enough that you could rely on yours to avoid having to think for yourself, and small/impermeable/anti-anonymous enough that scammers weren't a risk.
* See: fake-feminists seducing feminists, trump supporters donating their kids' entire inheritance on accident because of predatory web design practices, LGBT getting suckered into buying rainbow capitalist merchantise, megachurch pastors fleecing their denominations into giving them private jets, etc. (I'm providing politics-related examples of this because they're the most visible, but I'd wager the most common version of this is, "this fast-taking fellow convinced me we'd both be rich but he got away with the money and I was left with the bag.")
** well, you need high fluid intelligence specifically
There is a great cost to scammers utilizing ingroup signals though, it introduces friction akin to a transaction tax imposed by the government, except now it is imposed by lack of ability to trust. Sometimes transactions are so consequential it always makes sense to have vetting with insurance. Something like title insurance on a real estate property. But what about the special Best Buy warranties? What if it made sense to buy that crap for a $400 television because you dont know if you are getting a SONY or a SƠNY? This pretty quickly destroys your economy.
I don't understand why you framed this as a rebuttal to what I'm saying. Was my thesis unclear? In case I need to restate it-- "resist attempts by your ingroup to use language as a status-signalling tool because it will make you all vulnerable to scammers and I will laugh when they take your shit."
You shouldn't laugh, you should be sad.
I won't claim that this vindictive glee is in line with my deepest ethical principles, but... c'mon. Bad things happening to good people is tragedy. Bad things happening to bad people is justice. Bad things happening to idiots is hilarious.
Building social cohesion is not stupid. When it works your community has virtually no transaction costs.
Well if your only means to do that is by using language to communicate status rather than factual information, it clearly doesn't work.
That's why I enmesh myself in communities where status is a factor of conveying useful, factual information. It's much more efficient than handicapping strategies like sticking to a counterproductive party line as a high-cost signal of commitment to ingroup values.
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