This sentence is a HUGE RED FLAG:
“it shattered my illusion that I mostly avoid thinking about class signals, and instead convinced me that pretty much everything I do from waking up in the morning to going to bed at night is a class signal.”
If signaling can explain everything, then it is in the same category as Freudian psychoanalysis—unfalsifiable and therefore useless.
The idea that signaling explains everything leads to the idea that “people who say that they don’t bother with signaling and don’t use the symbols available to them are REALLY just signaling that they are the kind of person who can afford to not care about signaling.”
This is not the conclusion of a respectable theory; this is mental gymnastics. Having a theory that can explain anything is identical to having no clue.
I’ll admit that this post is the extent of my knowledge of signaling, so others might have fleshed-out the theory to the point that it can make predictions, but this essay was too much representativeness heuristic and not enough evidence.
This sentence is a HUGE RED FLAG: “it shattered my illusion that I mostly avoid thinking about class signals, and instead convinced me that pretty much everything I do from waking up in the morning to going to bed at night is a class signal.”
If signaling can explain everything, then it is in the same category as Freudian psychoanalysis—unfalsifiable and therefore useless.
The idea that signaling explains everything leads to the idea that “people who say that they don’t bother with signaling and don’t use the symbols available to them are REALLY just signaling that they are the kind of person who can afford to not care about signaling.”
This is not the conclusion of a respectable theory; this is mental gymnastics. Having a theory that can explain anything is identical to having no clue.
I’ll admit that this post is the extent of my knowledge of signaling, so others might have fleshed-out the theory to the point that it can make predictions, but this essay was too much representativeness heuristic and not enough evidence.