[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.

Most people should conform, and most nonconformity should be punished. To me, the most likely outcome of reducing the overall human tendency to conform and to punish nonconformists is that more people join cults, refuse to pay their taxes, become terrorists... I think nerd culture has a tendency to fetishize nonconformity that isn't criticized often enough. Edit: Although it is criticized in Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate, which is good.

Most people should conform, and most nonconformity should be punished.

For most people, conformity is an instrumental value, given consideration only because it helps implement some terminal value. Thus, your assertion contains an implicit "in order to advance terminal value X."

If I don't think conformity advances value X, or if I don't agree with value X, then I don't see why I should value conformity.

3John_Maxwell13y

Hm. I see conformity as a factor that causes cults, not the other way around. [...] If lots of people stopped paying their taxes, we'd develop effective enforcement mechanisms. [...] I could see this. Related. It's a good point overall, in some cases conformity could be good. Probably for high-IQ "nerds", conformity is more frequently bad, because we're often smarter than the people we're considering whether to conform with, and therefore better equipped to make decisions.

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[Link] How Signaling Ossifies Behavior

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[Link] How Signaling Ossifies Behavior

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