SubJeff on 12/4/2017 at 06:16

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She's not a feminist?

hopper on 12/4/2017 at 07:16

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That's just begging the question, though.

OTOH, even if the phenomenon is true, I find it a bit odd to get worked up about people who express sympathy for something without getting deeper involved. What's wrong with loving delicious food without bothering to learn to cook?

demagogue on 12/4/2017 at 20:58

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If you abstract it from the context, group membership signalling and feelings of validation by being recognized as a member in good standing is a thing in anthropology. It can be seen as a problem when people start doing or supporting perverse things not because they help a situation, but because they'll feel a greater feeling of validation by the recognition of it by group leaders of its contribution to member-in-good-standing status. It's part of social recognition bias in social psychology or self-determination theory.

Once you start looking at actions from that lens, you see it all over the place. Hell, in computer mediated communication theory, it's part of the motivation for why we're posting in this very thread to signal good-member standing among our peers. Wearing a Che shirt can do that too.

It can appear perverse if you're thinking like a policymaker. For policymakers, they're looking at costs and benefits, pros and cons, of various policies, and try to be as independant as possible as to whether this or that group will validate that action as scoring points for their side. The right action should be right whether the hoi paloi recognize it as such or not, and it shouldn't be thought right just because it's validated. The only thing that should matter is the objective analysis of net social good.

The case studies you'd want to explore to see if this hypothesis plays out are cases where a given action incites a large reaction of validation by the respective party leaders but actually causes a drop in social welfare. Just look at the motivations people have for batshit proposals on the left and right both. Like things Antioch college likes to do, ban all sneakers on campus because of their contribution to labor exploitation even though such a ban isn't doing the exploited workers any good, just making their conditions marginally worse and not putting any pressure on the company because you've only alienated people who wear sneakers (edit: contrast it to the successful Nike boycott campaign that got them positively on board and actually did improve factory conditions), or requiring guys have girls sign a consent form for sexual intimacy as if that's what will stop rape and not only just kill the mood for the innocent by perverse bureacracy. Things like that look like signalling policies. They make life positively more difficult for no measurable gain and a chance of perverse loss for the very group they want to help, but they send a strong signal of support for the value that will get validated by the passionate group members.

That said, the Right does this kind of thing so rampantly, finding examples is like shooting fish in a barrel. Cf. Trump and Brexit. Total member-in-good-standing signalling to peers to validate their membership. We've signalled that the UK is protecting its sovereignty from being denuded, or at least the perception thereof, nevermind it doesn't actually affect sovereignty the way they thought it did, and there are real costs to it they also didn't think about in advance.

Point being it happens on the Left and Right. Rather than making it a pissing match I'd rather just say I don't like people developing policies according to the idea of whether it sends a good signal about their loyalty to values of a group. Ideally they should do actual careful analysis about what's actually good for meeting that value in practice, even if the masses don't like the signal it sends. I don't really worry about t-shirts or hashtags though.

Thirith on 13/4/2017 at 11:54

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Definitely agree with this, especially the first part. Case in point: all the people complaining about pushy, self-righteous vegetarians and vegans. I know almost exclusively the former and very few (actually, none) of the latter. Obviously this is just anecdotal evidence, but the same is probably true for the people who complain about virtue signalers.

I don't think it's just "people being shrill about subjects I disagree on annoy me". Some of the people I know who complain most in this respect are actually moderately progressive (or whatever shorthand we want to use to describe them), but they take (perceived) shrillness more personally if, on the whole, they are on the same overall side. Then again, I very much live in a more or less progressive bubble, so that probably skews what I see myself.

SubJeff on 14/4/2017 at 14:50

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I'll give you an example of what I consider to be bad virtue signalling - all the meat eaters who were in "solidarity" with the few vegans who complained about tallow being in the £5 note.

Now I don't have an issue with people not wanting tallow in the notes, per se.

My problem with the virtue signalling here was a. the lack genuineness in the mob, b. ignorance of other similar issues that are arguably more important and b. the distraction from those issues.

Here's a little bit on it from Vice. (https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/a-very-precise-calculation-of-exactly-how-many-cows-are-being-murdered-for-the-new-fivers)

The potential for this type of thing to cause a massive problem is there. If the BoE chooses to use something else there is a huge cost implication and I make no apologies for thinking that a tiny bit of tallow, that would have come from less than 2 cows, in a note that you don't HAVE to use if you don't want (I don't), is really not worth it. Especially as the BoE has responded by seeking an (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/03/30/bank-england-backs-palm-oil-replace-animal-fat-plastic-20-note/) alternative and potentially environmentally harmful source.