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.
I am emotionally excited and/or deeply hurt by what st_rev wrote recently. You better take me seriously because you've spent a lot of time reading my posts already and feel invested in our common tribe. Anecdote about how people are tribal thinkers.
I don't even know where to begin. This is what blueist ideology has been workign towards for decades if not millennia, but to see it written here is hard to stomach even for one as used to the depravity caused by such delusions as I am. The lack of socially admired virtues among its adherents is frightening. Here I introduce an elaborate explanation of how blueist domination is not just completely obvious and a constant thorn in the side of all who wish more goodness but is achieved by the most questionable means often citing a particular blogger or public intellectual who I read in order to show how smart I am and because people I admire read him too. Followed by an appeal to the plot of a movie. Anecdote from my personal life. If you are familiar with the obscure work of an academic taken out of context and this does not convince you then you are clearly an intolerant sexual deviant engaging in motivated cognition.
While sympathetic to this criticism I must signal my world-weariness and sophistication by writing several long paragraphs about how this is much too optimistic and we are in grave danger of a imminent and eternal takeover by our opponents. The only solution is to begin work on an organization dedicated to preventing this which happens to give me access to material resources and attractive females.
Ciphergoth proves to be the lone voice of reason by encouraging us to recall what we all learned on 9/11: