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TimS comments on That Thing That Happened - Less Wrong
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I thought that cheap signalling was bad.
If signalling of a virtue is cheap, people will signal even if they lack the virtue - creating substantial waste and disguising those who actually have the desired virtue.
If signalling a virtue is cheap then the waste may not be all that substantial after all and the problem is primarily the difficulty in detecting actual virtue. For creating substantial waste look to signals that are costly but nevertheless important enough to be signaled heavily. Like higher education degrees and male peacock's feathers.
Fair enough. I don't take much from Hanson, but I agree that insincere signalling is not something we should reward - I personally think that insincere signally is mildly immoral - at about the level of basic Dark Arts rhetoric.
Regardless of the moral valence, if one does something only for signalling value and not because one intrinsically desires the result (e.g. how some folks treat attending classical music concerts), then I suspect one would be personally happier if one would stop the signalling behavior - not that this is always practical.
whoosh