Huh. I had a weird reaction to this post. My instincts keep violently disagreeing with the main idea, but then when I zoom in on any particular step in the chain of logic it looks sound.

Even if I don’t agree with someone else’s principles, I trust them more when I see they are committed to living by the principles they believe in, and I trust them even more if they pay an ongoing tithe in time or effort or money that forces them to be very clear about their values.

Diving deep on this particular quote... my brain generates the example of a Buddhist monk. Do I trust them more because I see they are committed to living by the principles they believe in? Yup, definitely. Is the monk's ongoing tithe of time/effort a load-bearing element of that trust? Ehhhh, kinda, but not super central. When I think about why I trust a Buddhist monk, it's mainly that... <introspect> ... I expect that they understand their own values unusually well?

That seems right. When I think of other people who understand their own values unusually well (including people who are not good people but have understood and accepted that)... that seems like a surprisingly perfect match for the sort of people who feel instinctively trustworthy to me. Like, the Buddhist monk, or the ex-criminal who found God, or the main character of Breaking Bad toward the end of the series... these are the sorts of people who code as "trustworthy" to me. They are people who are very self-aware, very reflectively stable; people who are not going to have their values overwritten by peer pressure the moment I stop looking.

... and that makes it more clear why my intuition kept disagreeing with the main idea of the post. The thing my trustworthiness-meter is looking for is not signals of virtue, but signals of self-awareness combined with conformity-resistance. Signals that someone's values will not be overwritten by the values of whoever's around them. Most of the standard examples of "virtue signals" signal the exact opposite of that, precisely because they're standard examples. They're signalling exactly the kinds of "virtue" which are broadly recognized as "virtuous", and therefore they weakly signal someone who is more likely to allow their values to be overwritten by whoever's around them.

I don’t care to defend empty “cheap talk” signals, but the best virtue signals offer some proof of their claim by being difficult to fake.

I think this is the crux: the common usage of the phrase "virtue signalling" and the economics notion of "signalling" have diverged; people use the phrase primarily, maybe even exclusively, to refer to cheap talk, and to emphasize this cheapness. Eg Cambridge Dictionary defines virtual signaling as: "an attempt to show other people that you are a good person, for example by expressing opinions that will be acceptable to them, especially on social media".

This doesn't take away from the value of genuine signals of good character, but it does mean we need a different term for them.

Hmm, I'm not sure that you're saying anything that the other side (people annoyed by current "virtue signaling") would disagree with, good virtue signals are useful if they're done well, and bad virtue signals are bad, they'd certainly agree that Mcdonald's should virtue signal about its beef quality, though they might not realize the that this is in fact virtue signaling because of how the phrase's usage has evolved. A vegan friend mentioning he's a vegan off-handedly while apologizing for the hassle before coming to your house for a BBQ is completely fine, but veering off the conversation at every opportunity towards the immense and cosmically important suffering of chickens is starting to become either bragging, or a weird power move that people reject instinctively. Being moral yields prestige in the tribe, and a too-obvious virtue signal can be read as attempting to elevate your power. In fact, I think everything you've written also applies to bragging about your skills: sometimes very necessary, others really should be informed of how competent you are, but there's still a whole host of social norms about the way to do that appropriately, and everyone who hates bragging really only hates "bad bragging".

One of the big problem with virtue signaling is that it suggests a one-dimensional scale when we care about multiple different aspects of the character of other people.

We care about people willing to sacrifice for the good of others. We care about people being honest to themselves. We care about people being honest to others. We care about people willing to change their mind when presented with compelling evidence.

If we discuss the example of the Buddhist monk, one of the core Buddhists beliefs is that life is suffering and that it's valuable to end that suffering. In the longtermist context that means that a Buddhist who sincerely follows those ideals might decide to let AGI end all life on earth. In this context the veganism of the Buddhist monk is a signal that they are willing to act according to their beliefs which makes the person more dangerous not less dangerous. 

Historically, Hitler fits also into the pattern of a vegetarian who's very committed to living out ideological commitments. Hitler was the kind of person willing to make huge sacrifices for his ideological commitments. 

It's valuable to remove animal suffering. You can argue on the basis that it's valuable that veganism is virtuous, but that doesn't allow you to make the important predictions about the future actions of those people.

If you decide to hire someone for your organization, you have to make a decision whether or not you want to trust them. To make that decision well you have to think about the characteristics that are actually important for your hiring decision. If they are generally skilled, I would advocate in the EA context that the most important characteristics are those that prevent maziness instead of general willingness to personal sacrifice for the greater good along lines like animal welfare, the enviroment or personal donations. 

Imagine if Nabisco took the stance that it didn’t have anything to prove about the safety and quality of its food, and that food safety testing is just a virtue signal that wastes a bunch of product. They could be sincere, and somehow keep product quality and safety acceptably high, but they are taking away your way of knowing that.

Food safety testing is an interesting topic. In Germany where I live, the EU decides on limits for the amount of pesticides that can be in the food that can be sold. The German government than sets higher limits then the EU rules. The supermarket chains then set even higher limits for the food that they sell. That's true even for the discouter chains.

This process results in pesticide limits don't have a good medical basis. 

On the other hand there's microplastic in our food. There are no limits for the microplastic in the food, nobody measures and does anything about it. From a health perspective having stronger limits on microplastics and weaker on pesticides would make our food safer. 

German culture values companies virtue signal that they adhere to standards in a way that makes our food likely safer then US food, but it's still imperfect. 

A discourse that would focus more on the empiric issues involved in food safety would be better then one that focuses around avoiding pesticides as a virtue signal. 

I'm afraid this doesn't engage with the real concerns/objections to what is commonly referred to as virtue signaling, because you're using a pretty narrow, overly generous (to the point that it feels motte-and-bailey, but I'd prefer to believe that your experiences differ enough from mine that we just have a terminology disagreement).

The virtue signaling that I object to is the cheap, non-rationally-justiable, and often hypocritical expressions of support or hatred for in-group or out-group rallying topics.  The pendulum CANNOT swing too far against this, IMO.  

I think a mixed strategy with at least some people pushing the no-animals-as-food norm and others reducing animal consumption in various ways is best for the animals.

As far as norms go, this heavily violates the norm of honesty. What you are suggesting implies that even if all those people believe exactly the same thing, some should tell you not to eat animals and some should tell you to cut down. But implicit in what they're telling you is "my moral values state that this course of action is the most moral", and it's not possible for both of those courses of action to be moral. You can justify one, and you can justify the other, but you can't justify them both at the same time--either the person saying "no eating animals" or the person saying "it's okay to just cut down" must be a liar.

(Separately, even if they didn't all believe the exact same thing, I would still be very skeptical. If you really think eating animals is mass murder, telling me to eat fewer animals without going completely vegan is equivalent to telling me "If you do what I say, I will no longer think you are murdering 50 people, I will only think you're murdering 25 people". But the moral condemnation curve is pretty flat; being a murderer of 25 people is not condemned substantially less than being a murderer of 50 people.)

I agree with you in terms of virtual signaling being a proper and good thing with a real function. However, I think many people's objection against it is related to the higher order effects of goodharting and Moloch-worship (escalating virtual signalling in a game that always ends in a race to the bottom towards things like public self flagellation and self immolation). I was looking for it in the article but I didn't find it, so I figured I'd mention it here.

I wrote a messy post back in January spelling out why I disagree with this.

In short:

• Attention to (virtue) signaling can help you make sense of systems you're not part of.
• Attention to them in systems you are part of creates anti-helpful incentives.
• It works way, way better, for both individuals and groups, to…
  • …completely ignore signaling…
  • …work to embody the traits you'd want to be perceived as having, and…
  • …strive to symmetrically create transparency and clarity about whatever is true, even if it's damning.

This automatically produces hard-to-fake virtue signals without adding Goodhart drift. It also mostly eliminates signaling (vs. signal verification) arms races.

Let's look at your vegan example.

If someone is vegan in order to send a social signal, then I have to sort out why they're intent on sending that signal. Do they want to feel righteous? Do they want acclaim for their self-sacrifice for a greater cause? Opportunity to gloat about their moral superiority? Or is it purely as it seems, a sincere effort to do good in the world based on their best understanding? Because they're doing it explicitly to manipulate how they come across to others, it's not a natural extension of how they want to be in the world. Maybe it would be if they weren't using all this signaling thinking to get in their way! But I sure can't tell that. And frankly neither can they.

By way of contrast, if someone does the inner work to give zero fucks about what "signals" they're sending people, and they practice honesty & transparency, and from that place decide (probably quietly) to become vegan, then the clarity of that decision is way way way more impactful. If someone challenges them with "Oh come on, what are you doing to help animals?" they can just matter-of-fact point out "Well, think what you want. I'm not worried about your opinion of me. But in case it actually helps elucidate what I'm saying, I have in fact been following a vegan lifestyle these last three years."

It's more impactful because it's true. There's no attempt to manipulate others' perception. There's just simple clarity. It's unassailable precisely because it's wedded to truth.

An anthropologist outside of EA could describe all this in terms of virtue signaling within EA. But someone within EA who attempts to use this "virtue signaling" thinking to decide what diet they should follow absolutely cannot embody this power. It's a lie before it's even uttered.

But is it really better when we stop offering others proof of positive qualities that are otherwise hard to directly assess? Is it better to give others no reason to trust us?

False dichotomy.

It's not "Virtue signals or no info about trust."

Another option is to just in fact strive to be trustworthy while also striving to let the truth of your trustworthiness be clearly visible, whatever that truth might be.

If I'm selling you a car, there's all kinds of BS virtue signals I could give to help put you at ease. Precisely because they're BS, you'd have to dig under them to detect possible maliciousness or dangerous neglectfulness on my part.

But if I instead just in fact mean you well, and mean the deal honestly, then it's no trouble at all for me to say something like "Hey, I know you're unsure how much to trust me or this car here. I mean you well here, and I know you don't have an easy way of telling that. Just let me know what you need to make a decision here. I'll help however I can."

Clean. Simple.

No need for intentional virtue signaling… because the actual presence of virtues causes reality to reflect the costly signals for free.

So I guess this comes down to an adamant disagreement with your call to action here:

I urge you to do the prosocial thing and develop and adopt more legible and meaningful virtue signals— for others and especially for yourself.

I dearly wish the opposite.

The prosocial thing is to dig inside oneself for one's dire need for others to see one in a particular way, and uproot that.

And also, to in fact truly cultivate virtues that you sincerely believe in.

And finally, to encourage clarity and transparency about what you are in fact like and capable of, with absolutely zero attachment to the outcome of what gets communicated in that clarity & transparency.

This is vastly more prosocial than is cultivating skill with making people think you're virtuous.

It's also a hell of a lot easier in the long run.