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Ishaan comments on Open Thread, May 18 - May 24, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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If people are actually interested in signaling to their social circle, they will ignore geeky Givewell and do a charity walk for a local (for-profit) hospital instead.
I would consider anyone who would do this (based on the dollar amount of donation) to be terribly pretentious and, frankly, silly.
I do have a parallel thought process which finds it pretentious, but I ignore it because it also said that the ice bucket was pretentious. And the ice bucket challenge was extremely effective. I think the dislike is just contrarian signalling, and is why our kind can't cooperate. That or some kind of egalitarian instinct against boasting.
Isn't "pretentious" just a negative way to say "signalling"? Of course that idea might not be effective signalling but abstractly, the idea is that EA is well suited for signalling so why isn't it?
I'd consider value in doing a local hospital. Local community strengthening and good feelings is its own thing with its own benefits, and there's a special value in the aid coming from local people who know what's what - as a natural extension of the idea that aid is better coming from parents to children than from distant government to children. I'm talking about the global poverty crowd here.
That I find something pretentious is my moral/aesthetic judgement. Evaluating the effectiveness of dark arts techniques is an entirely different question.
Speaking of signaling, pretentiousness means you tried to signal and failed.
Why is it dark? Doesn't it have to be a drawback in order to be dark? (agreed about pretentiousness=signal failure)
All actions have a drawback, in at least the form of opportunity costs.
It's dark because it's manipulation. You are pushing buttons in other people's minds to achieve a certain outcome.
All interactions involving people involve pushing buttons for outcomes.
Negative-connotation-Manipulation is when you do it in ways that they would not approve of it if they realized exactly what you were doing. The ice bucket challenge for example does exactly what it says on the tin - raise awareness, raise money, have social activity.
I disagree.
It's signaling more status than the people around you want to give you.
"Pretentious" might be signalling of high status [1]that's irritating to receive, which leads to a large new topic. When is signalling fun vs. not fun? Is it just a matter of what's a positive signal in the recipient's group?
[1] Signalling about sports teams isn't pretentious, even when it's annoying. I don't think there's a word for the annoyingness of middle-to-low status signaling. "Vulgar" covers some cases, but not most of them.