[Link] How Signaling Ossifies Behavior

Jayson_Virissimo

Here is a new post at EconLog in which Bryan Caplan discusses how signalling contributes to the status quo bias.

The lesson: In the real world, signaling naturally tends to ossify behavior - to lock in whatever the status quo happens to be. If you're an optimist, you can protest, "It's only a tendency." But even an optimist should admit that this tendency leads to atypically slow and unreliable progress.

Here is a new post at EconLog in which Bryan Caplan discusses how signalling contributes to the status quo bias.

The lesson: In the real world, signaling naturally tends to ossify behavior - to lock in whatever the status quo happens to be. If you're an optimist, you can protest, "It's only a tendency." But even an optimist should admit that this tendency leads to atypically slow and unreliable progress.

I don't get the impression that being seen as weird or different has particularly bad consequences, at least not among educated western adults.

In your model, the typical educated western adult would not negatively judge someone who is:

promiscuous
polygamous
voluntarily celibate (why is the expert worried about "curing" this non-problem)
mentally ill
gender non-conforming (eg cross-dressing)
a poor speaker of the native language of the community
voluntarily unemployed
male and primary child care provider

I would have great difficulty if I wanted to avoid hearing negative judgments of those or similar traits from college educated adults. I'm not sure we are communicating with the same concepts. I understand intolerance as any act that occurs primarily to make that state of being less frequent / less visible. When I take my son to the park without my wife, and others comment on how unusual I'm being, that's a kind of intolerance of my behavior.

Not that intolerance is necessarily bad. I'm quite intolerant of murderers, child-rapists, and thieves. But saying a particular intolerance isn't problematic is different from saying that type of intolerance never occurs.

How did you choose those examples?

Yes, people who talk about tolerance are not very tolerant of those things, but they are more tolerant of them (except probably mental illness) than people who do not talk about tolerance (including people 50 years ago).

It appears to me that this is pretty much the list of things where Richard Kennaway and scientism concede tolerance, but say are too minor to talk about.

1Emile13y

Those are good examples, BUT, I wasn't saying that educated westerners don't accept all forms of weirdness, but rather that weirdness alone isn't damning, so dislike for some of your examples could be attributed to something else than conformism (mentally ill people are more likely to be stupid or dangerous, poor speakers are worse at communication, voluntarily unemployed people are more likely to be lazy, promiscuous people may be less likely to be faithful spouses). That being said, you do make a good argument that weirdness per se will probably get you dark looks, and yeah, parenting and sex are probably areas where weirdness is judged particularly negatively. Note that Caplan's argument was that intolerance for weirdness reduced innovation, and I'm not sure that our intolerance of weirdness is strong and broad enough to justify that conclusion. I'm not really convinced either way; maybe a clearer example of beneficial-but-weird would be eating insects. It's also possible that I'm in an unusually-tolerant-of-weirness environment; I work in the game industry (with a very loose dress code, and people with pretty diverse backgrounds and attitudes, and nobody minds if we play board games at lunch break), a lot of my uncles and aunts and cousins went off to marry (or live with) foreigners, and I don't get any comments when I take my son to the park without my wife. Someone whose family is mostly local and religious, and who works in a bank may get a different impression of how tolerant society is of difference.