= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
RichardKennaway comments on Organic food, conventional food - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (55)
I usually treat 'signaling' as the null hypothesis for human behavior: if the behavior doesn't make sense on its own, I assume it is signaling.
If a person is attempting to maximize their health, there are behaviors that have a better cost:effectiveness ratio than buying organic. Most of the people I encounter who buy organic do few to none of these things.
If a person is attempting to signal some sort of association with a the "health-food/green-living/upper-class" tribe (one or all of them) then buying organic makes far more sense.
Having encountered more of the signaling behavior than the healthy behavior anecdotally, the signaling behavior is more likely. I haven't invested any real effort into proving this (People could just be systematically acting in a sub-optimal fashion, for instance) but given how much of what people do is signaling behavior, it is my baseline explanation.
That seems unwarranted. That you don't know why someone is doing something means only that you do not know the reason. I see no reason to think that when people say that organic produce is better than non-organic, that they are not merely saying what they actually think. If there was no-one who actually believed that, how could saying it be a signal?
There can only be such a thing as fake gold because there is such a thing as real gold.