I think there is one pattern that being good at something (socially accepted) is good signalling... but trying to improve at something (and thus showing that you think you are not good enough yet) is bad signalling.
I have noticed this pattern years ago, when I was trying to write sci-fi stories, and was meeting with other people who tried the same. I found somewhere on internet that many famous writers attended some kind of writer workshops. So I suggested to my friends that we should find out whether such workshop exists near us, and if not, try to create our own workshop. Most of them were horrified by that idea. When I asked why, they told me that a person either has a talent for writing, or not. The former cannot learn anything at workshops, because the true art cannot be taught; only the latter could learn to become a more skilled art-less graphomaniac. I thought such reasoning was stupid, and asked some literary critics about it: but they confirmed that they would percieve a person known to have attended such workshops as an art-less wannabe, because the true talent must be born. I refused to accept their reasoning too (because I have read a few autobiographies of famous writers, and many of them had some kind of writing education), but I have learned that admitting to a systematic self-improvement can be a huge status loss. (So a smart thing to do is to attend the workshops secretly, and to pretend you were just born with such ability; at least until your status becomes unshakeable.)
Shortly: to fix a problem, first you have to admit it. Admitting the problem = status loss.
Recently I was thinking about how exactly is this possible: how can improving your skills seem like a status loss? Like, is there any way to have good skills other than improving them? How else can the good-skilled people become good-skilled, if not by gradual learning? But then I realized that perhaps it's the life-long learning aspect that goes against our instincts. In an ancient environment, life was short and rather simple -- people learned their skills as children (naturally low-status), and as adults they have just used them; improving them further by using, but not starting from near-zero. Today, the life is so complex that we cannot learn everything as children, but our brains still see the first steps in mastering any skill as childish. We still feel learning is natural for children (skills learned in childhood we perceive as inborn), but retarded (literally: too late) for adults.
That doesn't seem to be the case where I am: I often hear "Have you been practicing? You've gotten much better than last time" in (what sounds to me like) a complimentary tone, whereas replying to "Where did you learn that?" with "I didn't, I'm just improvising" is often met with (what looks to me like) disappointment/disenchantment. (EDIT: But I'm 25. What age did you have in mind as "adult?"
As I've recently been understanding signalling/status behaviors common among humans and how they can cloud reality, I've had a tendency to automatically think of these behaviors as necessarily bad. But it seems to me that signalling behaviors are pretty much a lot of what we do during our waking life. If you or I have abstract goals: become better at physics, learn to play the guitar, become fit and so forth, these goals may fundamentally be derived from evolutionary drives and therefore their implementation in real life would probably make heavy use of signalling/status urges as primary motivators. But that does not necessarily reduce the usefulness of these behaviors in achieving these abstract goals1,2.
I suppose what we need to be cautious about are inefficiencies. Signalling/status behaviors may not be the optimal way to achieve these goals. We would have to weigh the costs of actively ignoring your previous motivators and cultivating new motivators against the benefit we would gain by having motivations more aligned to our abstract goals.
Any common examples of behaviors that assist and/or thwart goal-achievement? I've got one: health. Abstract goal: We want to be healthy and fit. Status/Signalling urge: desire to look good. The urge sometimes assists, as people try to exercise to look good, which makes you healthier. Sometimes it thwarts, like in the extreme example of anorexia. Has anybody made personal trade-offs?
Note:
1) I realize that this theme is underlying in many LW posts.
2) I'm not trying to talk about whether abstract goals are more important than signalling/status goals.