Call for discussion: Signalling and/vs. accomplishment

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.

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.