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Comment by didericis | Hacker News Reader

Am I alone in finding a lot of signaling transparent and kind of repellant? I realize I'm signaling to a certain crowd by saying that and am not denying that I participate, but it's never seemed hidden to me.

I want to live in a world in which more time is spent increasing merit and competency rather than advertising some sort of proxy. I understand that both merit and competency are impractical to judge without any sort of easily identifiable signal, but the inaccuracy of a lot of those signals and the amount of time, money, and effort wasted on them is kind of mind numbing.

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On the other hand I find a lot of people seem to see signalling where there is none, or use "they're just virtue signalling" as a way to dismiss peoples legitimate concerns. Make sure you think about whether you're actually seeing signalling, or if it's just someone with a different worldview and different priorities than you.

There's also going to be a lot of bias in what is visible to you here - you're only going to see the people who loudly boast on Instagram about say donating to charity or using eco friendly cups or whatever - because of course the people that just do it quietly because they care and don't boast aren't going to be noticeable.

Maybe there's 10 people who aren't signalling for every one you see, but you have no way of knowing because they're not signalling.

> Maybe there's 10 people who aren't signalling for every one you see, but you have no way of knowing because they're not signalling.

The non-signalling 10 others are then cast as "following" the trends set by a signalling one.

It’s a meta signal. You can observe the “shallow” signaling of others (for lack of a better word) and it becomes a signal in and of itself.

The only winning move is not to play.

But even by quoting that, I'm still playing (albeit by attempting to jump out into the meta game).

So the only ones who are actually not playing are the ones who are clicking away from this vapid comment page and moving on with their lives.

You're right. Every form of communication indicates signalling, you're literally sending signals from one entity to another. The only way to stop signalling is to stop communication between entities.

Deleting facebook is a signal. Abandoning social life altogether is a signal too.

I believe the only way to stop is to generate white noise - by sending signals so mixed that those who observe stop trusting them

I'm sorta reminded of the Onion article from years ago, "Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Own a Television":

https://www.theonion.com/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-d...

Area man doesn't signal.

> Am I alone in finding a lot of signaling transparent and kind of repellant?

^ And this one isn't?

Fair enough; I tried to acknowledge that in my original comment. Specifically I find signaling that's prioritized over increasing competency or without true interest in whatever is being used as a signal repellant. The opinion I expressed was genuine, and not put out there solely in search of validation or increasing my social standing, but I don't deny the fact that I was engaging in a form of signaling.

I was asking in part because I was skeptical about the claim that most are deluded and unaware of their own signaling. I think more people are aware of it than this article would suggest, and that they just don't talk about it. But I don't have any evidence either way.

Definitely not, this article is targeted specifically at people with your worldview.

I wonder if signaling is really something our brains deliberately hide from ourselves, as the article describes, or if it's visible to beyond just the people in this article's target audience. I'd prefer to think people are aware of what they're doing and just don't like to talk about it. I haven't read the book he's referencing, so I'm not sure what the evidence is in regards to the extent to which people are actually deluding themselves vs just being private about their underlying motivations.

Yeah, my intuition is that the person evaluating the behavior is misunderstanding it, and the person doing it could tell you if they were comfortable.

The idea of "hiding it" seems way too loaded, because it's usually in a context with an implicit value judgement.

I suspect that there are multiple factors of various importance going into every decision, and the observer is reducing, reprioritizing, and judging it against their own opinions.

Perhaps that book or some other source offers a more rigorous analysis.

As someone else said, Hanson is an economist.

Signaling is taught in Game Theory 101 in undergrad econ. Varian, Pyndick etc probably have plenty of "more rigorous analysis".

The authors of the book are an economist and a software developer... I am not convinced they have any particular insight into how actual human minds work.

Furthermore, one of the authors of the book also authored this blog post, which I hesitate to summarize, but yeesh: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/04/two-types-of-envy.html

I feel like signaling only works in groups that signal. We've got plenty of signaling here on HN - open source projects, GitHub/CodePen account links, algorithm skill, fancy words, and people who choose to criticize whatever news is trending at the time (not directed at this comment). I've seen people screenshot their HN accounts together with karma score.

Someone on the outside looks at these signals and shakes their head, but it's just a bug in human nature.

What’s wrong with it being transparent?

Sounds to me like you object to false signalling, rather than signalling in general. Just think of all the positive forms of signalling like giving someone a gift to indicate that you’re thinking about them. Is that repellant?

You are correct. I was a bit too general. I said “most signaling”, not all, but that probably goes too far. I clarified in another comment that I specifically dislike disingenuous signaling, as well as excessive effort spent on signaling alone rather than whatever substantive thing it is you’re trying to advertise.

I regret my original wording. I think I should have jumped directly to my main question about whether or not people are as unaware of signaling as the article suggests.

> I want to live in a world in which more time is spent increasing merit and competency rather than advertising some sort of proxy.

does such a world exist?

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