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Notes -
I recently read The Elephant in the Brain and a review of it (https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/12/31/book-review-the-elephant-in-the-brain/)
One of the main ideas is that humans have competitive tendencies that helps them gain access to limited resources and mates. Humans need to signal that they are a good ally and mate in order to get some of the things that they desire. Instead of directly signaling (such as trying to impress people with our bank statement) people send indirect signals (such as wearing expensive clothes). Signaling indirectly gives us plausible deniability and even allows us to deceive ourselves (example: I wasn’t wearing expense clothes to show off my wealth, I just wore them because I like the way they look).
The book goes through Body Language, Laughter, Conversation, Consumption, Art, Charity, Education, Medicine, Religion and Politics to explain hidden motives. Examples:
Conversation isn’t just about exchanging information it is also about signaling intelligence and social skills.
Politics isn’t just about policy, it is also about alliances.
What are some hidden motives that you’ve noticed?
Some I’ve noticed is dancing is about signaling social confidence to potential mates. Brightly colored hair usually signals loyalty to left-leaning politics, the signal is costly because non-leftists may detect the signal and be biased against the signaler.
It’s interesting to think that the Muslim world might be onto something by banning the female appearance competition spiral. If the thesis of the book is correct, then it’s never enough for a religion to say “don’t entertain vanity” — instead the religion must actively punish vanity and reinforce less vain competition. The fundamentalist Muslim world just says “every woman wears this plain garb, period”, and in one fell swoop they have immediately restore six hours a week of labor to every woman, billions of dollars kept in middle class pockets, improved grades, etc. Because now the marriage-driven and reputation-driven competition over appearances is eliminated, and women now are forced to look for other ways to compete against each other. An entire % of brain activity is redirected to something that is, at least in theory, better for everyone’s happiness.
Another question: is virtue signaling bad, or is it only bad when the signal lacks substance? If moral action is induced by a person displaying his own morality, then why not support that? Our concern then should just be ensuring that the “moral competition” has the correct exemplars and rules, so that the substance lines up with the competition. So a person who is being “Christ-like” by practicing humility would be, counterintuitively, obtaining reinforcement by his community which all believe in such a moral exemplar — and this would be good, and not bad, because it’s making the most of human nature.
So a lot of moral implications hinge on the question of this book: is human behavior, pessimistically and ultimately, always decided by what gives the most ”primal” rewards?
Yeah, without endorsing or condemning, I would bet that the arrangement of "every woman keeps her appearance hidden from view at all times in public" is one of the few stable and self-sustaining norms one can implement if one's goals are to maintain a patriarchal social order.
I think the point is that a reliable signal is supposed to be costly to the sender in some way. Else they can simply manipulate the signal in whatever way they wish to get the recipient to do the thing they want.
So signalling one's morality should, in this view, be associated with some penalty/cost for falsifying the signal or breaching the morals they're signalling.
Take, for example, a vehemently pro-life politician who nonetheless makes his mistress get an abortion when he accidentally knocks her up. If their moral signalling goes out the window they second it would cost them something to uphold it, then the entire false edifice of their beliefs and behaviors is laid bare for all to see, which tends to... dilute the strength of their signalling.
I know it’s a hypothetical, but if this was a scenario that happened then you would expect it to be a major scandal that’s prominent in the news, even if said politician is like a West Virginia state legislator or something equally irrelevant. As strong on family values politicians get in trouble for having mistresses regularly enough for nobody to be surprised, and occasionally have children with those mistresses, but there’s not a lot of news stories about their mistresses getting abortions, we can surmise that their commitment to pro-life values extends at least that far.
https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2017-10-04/pro-life-rep-tim-murphy-pressured-mistress-to-get-abortion
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2012/10/scott-desjarlais-recorded-abortion-call-with-mistress.html
Just reading the link gets you all the info you need in this case.
That's just the best examples from a quick Google. There's a few cattycorner examples mixed in there as well (campaign operatives, or having a girlfriend get an abortion as a teen) but these two are recent and on all fours with the hypothetical.
Now you can quibble with what this means: out of how many pro life politicians so maybe this isn't that many, or should we only count out of pro lifers who have affairs, or should we assume that this kind of thing happens 12 times in secret for every time it happens in public so this is only the tip of the iceberg, or whatever you want. But it's certainly not an absurdity.
Indeed, I included that as an example not to make a point about pro-life politicians or anything, but just because it is a handy example that has readily available real-world examples.
That's what virtue signalling is. You scream loudly about a moral position you claim to hold, but when the time comes to apply that position you back down instantly. So you get to feel good about 'supporting' the right thing but have no intention of behaving in accordance with it.
Your signal is unreliable, and you intend for others to believe it but you don't care to be bound by it nor incur the costs of enforcing it.
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