We don’t like to admit signaling motivations

Sunday, January 12th, 2025

We want people to think we’re smart, healthy, and rich, Robin Hanson notes, but we tend to signal indirectly:

For example, we signal wealth via visible consumption, instead of via directly showing our asset portfolios or bank accounts. We signal intelligence and knowledge via large vocabularies, mansplaining, and school degrees. We signal health via sport achievement, surviving harsh environments, and drinking heavily without falling down.

All of these activities take up big fractions of our time and energies. So why don’t we instead signal in more direct cheaper ways?

A simple explanation that I’ve often heard, and which makes sense to me, is that we don’t like to admit signaling motivations.

[…]

But if we were each willing to admit that most other people do a lot of signaling, even if we personally do not, we should be open to coordinating to promote more direct signals. For example, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Iceland have all at times given the public access to (parts of) individual tax records. And the easier we made it to look up someone’s income or wealth, the less people would need to signal those things via consumption.

We could similarly require health tests, and annual IQ and/or knowledge tests, and post their results for all to see.

Comments

  1. Jim says:

    This is more embarrassing than bukkake.

  2. McChuck says:

    The person proposing this has never met actual people, has he?

  3. Michael van der Riet says:

    Way back when we used to call this “status symbols.” In the drawing office for example only the senior had a high chair and the other draughtsmen had to stand. Like many other animals, humans have always competed for position in the social hierarchy. Publishing your tax return sounds like a rather bloodless way of getting one up on the rest. And there’s a practical objection. A guy can’t walk up to a strange girl at a bar and say,”Here’s my tax return.”

  4. Phileas Frogg says:

    So let me get this straight, if I have an expansive vocabulary THAT is the nominal representation of my intelligence, but the piece of paper with my intelligence abstracted into numerical form is somehow the REAL form of my intelligence? And athletically…dunking on you in a game of 1 v 1 in a complete blowout is merely representational, but if I have great health markers from my doctors office, then I’m the superior athlete?

    This nerd thinks showing is telling, and telling is showing, lol.

  5. Gaikokumaniakku says:

    Here is a crazy idea. Give every member of society a simple rank. Military ranks go from E0 to E9 or whatever, then O1 to O15 or whatever. They could invent a similar system of ranks for civilians, and then society could operate with customs and courtesies appropriate to rank.

  6. T. Beholder says:

    Phileas Frogg says:

    So let me get this straight, if I have an expansive vocabulary THAT is the nominal representation of my intelligence, but the piece of paper with my intelligence abstracted into numerical form is somehow the REAL form of my intelligence?

    Well, the people who can perform well on tests and make up similar tests say so.

    See also Offshore Comic #360 and #324.

    http://offshorecomic.com/images/S324.jpg

  7. Jim says:

    Gaikokumaniakku: “Here is a crazy idea. Give every member of society a simple rank. Military ranks go from E0 to E9 or whatever, then O1 to O15 or whatever. They could invent a similar system of ranks for civilians, and then society could operate with customs and courtesies appropriate to rank.”

    Chinese.

  8. T. Beholder says:

    Gaikokumaniakku says:

    Here is a crazy idea. Give every member of society a simple rank. Military ranks go from E0 to E9 or whatever, then O1 to O15 or whatever. They could invent a similar system of ranks for civilians

    Unified ranks for non-military officials were done in Russian Empire when it was rolling downhill. Presumably it satisfied some vanities, but not clear whether this had much real effect at all, one way or another.

  9. My Name is Eli says:

    Can we hold hold off on the social ranking and public display of worth for just a little bit more?

    I’ve got this faking-it-till-I-make-it plan going, and I just need a bit more time.

Leave a Reply