This post, by its contents and tone, seems to really emphasize the downside of signaling. So let me play the other side.
Enabling signaling can add or subtract a huge amount of value from what would happen without signaling. You can tweak your initial example to get a “rat race” outcome where everyone, including the stupid people, sends a costly signal that ends up being completely uninformative (since everyone sends it). But you can also make it prohibitively mentally painful for stupid people to go to college, versus neutral or even enjoyable for smart people (instead of there being an actual economic cost of engaging in signaling), with a huge gain to employers for being able to tell them apart.
one can look at Nikolai Roussanov’s study on how the dynamics of signaling games in US minority communities encourage conspicuous consumption and prevent members of those communities from investing in education and other important goods.
As a counterpoint to this, in other cases the signaling value of education may induce people to get more education than is individually optimal, which is actually a good thing socially if you think education has large positive externalities. And if you work hard and discover a cure for cancer, you will be paid largely through other people’s opinions of you, now that you’ve signaled to them that you are such an intelligent and hard-working and socially-conscious person. (You were just as intelligent before you cured it, but now they know). Since you cannot possibly hope to recoup even a modest fraction of the social value you will have created, that’s unambiguously good for incentives.
On any other site, I would probably get away with saying: Since invention is basically the reason for our high modern standards of living, if signaling seriously encourages it, then in the long run the positive value of signaling would seem to dwarf any losses discussed above (even the “poverty” of some minority communities is nothing compared to the poverty in all of our shared historical past). But here...well, here we are pretty worried about where our invention spree might be leading us.
This relates to something I’ve wondered about—why did ancient Greece leave a tremendous legacy while the slave-holding southern states and the Confederacy didn’t?
If you mean a scientific legacy, it is not clear to me that this is true—Thomas Jefferson was Virginian, and though he was a ‘lesser’ scientist than Franklin just over the Mason/Dixon line, he was quite significant.
But supposing it is so, there are so many reasons it seems to me difficult to find out which were most critical.
The Greeks were largely surrounded by less erudite regions (at least, immediately so surrounded). Not so with the southern states, which were competing with the north and Europe at least.
When the Greeks were taken over by the Romans, the Romans spread their Greek Wisdom(tm) far and wide. The North… didn’t.
The Greeks had far more time to produce work of note.
The southern states had resource extraction economies.
This post, by its contents and tone, seems to really emphasize the downside of signaling. So let me play the other side.
Enabling signaling can add or subtract a huge amount of value from what would happen without signaling. You can tweak your initial example to get a “rat race” outcome where everyone, including the stupid people, sends a costly signal that ends up being completely uninformative (since everyone sends it). But you can also make it prohibitively mentally painful for stupid people to go to college, versus neutral or even enjoyable for smart people (instead of there being an actual economic cost of engaging in signaling), with a huge gain to employers for being able to tell them apart.
As a counterpoint to this, in other cases the signaling value of education may induce people to get more education than is individually optimal, which is actually a good thing socially if you think education has large positive externalities. And if you work hard and discover a cure for cancer, you will be paid largely through other people’s opinions of you, now that you’ve signaled to them that you are such an intelligent and hard-working and socially-conscious person. (You were just as intelligent before you cured it, but now they know). Since you cannot possibly hope to recoup even a modest fraction of the social value you will have created, that’s unambiguously good for incentives.
On any other site, I would probably get away with saying: Since invention is basically the reason for our high modern standards of living, if signaling seriously encourages it, then in the long run the positive value of signaling would seem to dwarf any losses discussed above (even the “poverty” of some minority communities is nothing compared to the poverty in all of our shared historical past). But here...well, here we are pretty worried about where our invention spree might be leading us.
This relates to something I’ve wondered about—why did ancient Greece leave a tremendous legacy while the slave-holding southern states and the Confederacy didn’t?
If you mean a scientific legacy, it is not clear to me that this is true—Thomas Jefferson was Virginian, and though he was a ‘lesser’ scientist than Franklin just over the Mason/Dixon line, he was quite significant.
But supposing it is so, there are so many reasons it seems to me difficult to find out which were most critical.
The Greeks were largely surrounded by less erudite regions (at least, immediately so surrounded). Not so with the southern states, which were competing with the north and Europe at least.
When the Greeks were taken over by the Romans, the Romans spread their Greek Wisdom(tm) far and wide. The North… didn’t.
The Greeks had far more time to produce work of note.
The southern states had resource extraction economies.