[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.

Conformity keeps people in cults, but I don't think it causes people to join them.

That's not obvious to me at all... my rough (highly uninformed) model of how cult initiations work is that you get sucked in to a situation (e.g. Scientology "stress testing" or similar) where you're forced to either not conform or join the cult. (Also fits my (very limited) observation of fraternity initiations.)

Well, or so we tell ourselves. (It seems healthy to be generally suspicious of stories that make my tribe look good.)

Just because a story is flattering to your group doesn't mean it's false. The research I've seen on the usefulness of high IQ for achieving desirable life outcomes has been pretty positive.

Personally, I think nerds are self-deprecating way beyond what's justified by rationally looking at the data. I suspect this is due to school socialization effects (higher-IQ folks have a hard time finding cognitive peers, and therefore making friends, and therefore end up being lower status; I recommend this essay for more on this idea). Is it really so implausible that intelligent people would be better at stuff that requires thinking and decision-making? This conclusion almost seems like it would follow directly from the definition of general intelligence.

That's not obvious to me at all... my rough (highly uninformed) model of how cult initiations work is that you get sucked in to a situation (e.g. Scientology "stress testing" or similar) where you're forced to either not conform or join the cult. (Also fits my (very limited) observation of fraternity initiations.)

Also keep in mind that people who join cults are not a random sample of the population. It is generally believed that people who join cults are usually in some way social outcasts to begin with. Cults offer them the possibility of bei... (read more)

0Qiaochu_Yuan13y

Entirely possible. I'm not sure the fraternity analogy holds water; at many colleges I would expect the decision to seek out a fraternity (as opposed to the decision to join one) to be at least partially motivated by obtaining higher status, whereas joining a cult generally only gets you higher status among existing cult members. I'm working primarily off of Cultish Countercultishness, in particular this part: [...] Your second point is also fair. What I think is implausible is that everyone who self-identifies as an intelligent nerd is actually intelligent. Maybe they only like thinking about nerdy topics but aren't good at it and tell themselves a story about how they're intelligent to fit in and maintain their self-image (being a dumb nerd sounds awful).

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[Link] How Signaling Ossifies Behavior

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[Link] How Signaling Ossifies Behavior

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