I think you should consider the legibility of the signals you send, but that should flow from a desire to monitor yourself so you can improve and be consistent with your higher goals. I feel like you’re assuming virtue signal means manipulative signal, and I suppose that’s my fault for taking a word whose meaning seems to have been too tainted and not being explicit about trying to reclaim it more straightforwardly as “emissions of a state of real virtue”.
Maybe in your framework it would be more accurate to say to LWers: “Don’t fall into the bad virtue signal of not doing anything legibly virtuous or with the intent of being virtuous. Doing so can make it easy to deceive yourself and unnecessarily hard to cooperate with others.”
It seems like the unacknowledged virtue signals among rationalists are 1) painful honesty, including erring on the side of the personally painful course of action when it’s not clear which is most honest and dogpiling on any anyone who seems to use PR, and 2) unhesitant updating (goodharting “shut up and multiply”) that doesn’t indulge qualms of the intuition. If they could just stop doing these then I think they might be more inclined to use the legible virtue signals I’m advocating as a tool, or at the very least they would focus on developing other aspects of character.
I also think if thinking about signaling is too much of a mindfuck (and it has obviously been a serious mindfuck for the community) that not thinking about it and focusing on being good, as you’re suggesting, can be a great solution.
I think you should consider the legibility of the signals you send, but that should flow from a desire to monitor yourself so you can improve and be consistent with your higher goals. I feel like you’re assuming virtue signal means manipulative signal, and I suppose that’s my fault for taking a word whose meaning seems to have been too tainted and not being explicit about trying to reclaim it more straightforwardly as “emissions of a state of real virtue”.
Maybe in your framework it would be more accurate to say to LWers: “Don’t fall into the bad virtue signal of not doing anything legibly virtuous or with the intent of being virtuous. Doing so can make it easy to deceive yourself and unnecessarily hard to cooperate with others.”
It seems like the unacknowledged virtue signals among rationalists are 1) painful honesty, including erring on the side of the personally painful course of action when it’s not clear which is most honest and dogpiling on any anyone who seems to use PR, and 2) unhesitant updating (goodharting “shut up and multiply”) that doesn’t indulge qualms of the intuition. If they could just stop doing these then I think they might be more inclined to use the legible virtue signals I’m advocating as a tool, or at the very least they would focus on developing other aspects of character.
I also think if thinking about signaling is too much of a mindfuck (and it has obviously been a serious mindfuck for the community) that not thinking about it and focusing on being good, as you’re suggesting, can be a great solution.