The question is how correlated signalling is with actually valuable activities. Healthy societies have institutions that try to correlate social rewards with pro-social behavior; capitalism and academia are both examples of institutions that try to tie value-creation with changes in social status. However, no linkage is perfect and all signalling behaviors can be hacked to some degree. So you end up with an academia where grant-finagling and publication, in at least some fields, are largely divorced from producing meritorious work. Likewise PUA is an attempt to hack both social-skills modules and cultural rules that award status based on behavioral traits. Much of the inefficiencies around healthcare can be seen as an attempt to hack the current regulations and payment systems rather than address the preventing and curing of disease that the systems were intended to incentivize.
Yet despite this, some institutions succeed fairly well at making the linkage stick. Capitalism seems to have done it pretty well, although it certainly does fray at the edges. Informal reputation-tracking works pretty well in maintaining small-group prosociality, at least compared to anonymity. In fact examine pretty much anywhere where useful work gets done, and you'll see mechanisms to tie status-seeking to virtue and productivity (however defined).
Where possible, when people notice the divergence between signalling and the "true purpose" of institutions, they tend to optimize for signalling. The health of a culture or institution, and the value of a signalling norm, is how well they can tie selfish signalling interests with the goals (prosocial or otherwise) of the institution.
Note: it's helpful to actually have a shared notion of what-should-be-valued and an intuition that some institutions and customs are preferable than others; else it's not even possible to have that conversation.
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.
The question is not whether signalling is real, or whether signalling can be pro-social. (It is, and it can be).
Instead, I read the OP as raising the more meta-question of how we can tell useful signalling talk from hand-waving just-so-story signalling talk. I think everyone agrees that the later is not useful analysis. But there does not appear to be widespread agreement about how to tell the difference (or even if very much anti-insightful signalling talk even exists).
Well, one way to start is whenever someone proposes a signaling model ask the following question:
1) What is being signaled?
2) Why is the allegedly signaling behavior a credible signal, either now or in the EEA?
That's a great test of whether a model is actually a signalling model, but not so useful for determining whether any particular signalling model is insightful or true.
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?
So...you, the person who is low status because of not doing the useless status-enhancing thing, are going to try to expropriate status from the high-status useless people? Let me know how that goes!
Bullshit as a problem in public ethics.
Briefly, government and NGO reports assessing problems and solutions have a lot of nonsense that is really just mutual back-patting and other social politicking - and it distorts the recommendations of those types of reports.
Yet people training future public policy experts spend very little time talking about the ethics of those phenomena, or effective ways of dealing with the pressures that cause these effects. In short, no one talks about when and why to push back against insincere mutual admiration, and when to just go with the flow.
Some signaling is so ancient that our human value system includes it as a value in its own right. Music, sports, art, religious practice may emerge from this.
“Our human value system includes” “religious practice”? Are non-religious people (which in places such as Europe make up a large fraction of the population) are mutants or something?
Yes, these people certainly are memetic mutants (to the extent you can make the analogy to genetics), inasmuch as religion has served as a terminal value (or as close as you get in humans minds) for pretty much all of humanity since the species arose, and the irreligiosity meme as we know it only arose since the Enlightenment.
But don't feel bad, all our genes arose by mutation if you trace them back far enough, and we can say that about most memes as well.
religion has served as a terminal value
Has it? I'd think of it as serving as an instrumental value for the terminal value of going to Heaven/not going to Hell, and earlier as an attempt to control stuff like the weather (earlier? there are plenty of people who still believe that prayers are also granted in this world, not just in the afterlife), or (for some people) as an instrumental value for binding communities/enforcing social norms. I'd guess that people worshipping deities just for the sake of it without expecting anything in return have been a minority.
But don't feel bad, all our genes arose by mutation if you trace them back far enough, and we can say that about most memes as well.
Right. OTOH, saying “human eyes are brown” on the ground that blue eyes arose relatively recently (not as recently as irreligiosity, but still) would sound kind-of weird to me.
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?