When signalling (or whatever the actual human decision-making algorithm is ) promotes activities that are correlated enough with good actual objectives, you'll wind up getting that stuff done anyways. If making cool products promotes your status and makes you millions of dollars as a startup, you'll wind up with high geek status and millions of dollars.
My point is that signalling isn't orthogonal to accomplishing things. They're actually pretty well correlated. Making millions of dollars is high-status. Fixing societal problems is high-status. Getting a project done is high-status. High-status things generally aren't that useless.
If we could identify things that were high status and useless, how easy would it be to lower their status and thereby optimize society's status budget?
It seems to me that when people discover signalling, they see it everywhere and write essays about how no human activity is aimed at its stated purpose.
However, stated purposes and other sorts of useful work get done anyway, and I'm sure there are constraints which mostly keep signalling under enough control that it's mostly not deadly. When I try to think about the subject, I don't get anywhere, possibly because the constraints on signalling are mostly tacit.
Any thoughts or resources on the subject?