Another idea is that intelligence is valued more when a society feels threatened by an outside force, for which they need competent people to protect themselves from.
Building up on this, virtue is valued more when a society is threatened from the inside. If people are worried about being betrayed or undermined by those who appear to be part of their tribe they will look for virtue signals. We see this a lot in the high correlation of virtue signaling with signals of ingroup loyalty, while intelligence signaling often takes the shape of disagreeing with the group.
In general, an outside threat or goal allows people to measure themselves against it. Status is set by the number of enemy scalps one collects, for example. But without an external measuring stick people will jockey for relative status by showing loyalty and virtue
Building up on this, virtue is valued more when a society is threatened from the inside.
Right, and unfortunately the relevant thing here isn’t how much society is objectively threatened from the inside, but people’s perceptions of the threat, which can differ wildly from reality, because of propaganda, revenue-driven news media, preexisting ideology, or any number of other things. To quote a particularly extreme and tragic instance of this from Gwern’s review of The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962-1976:
The disappointment generates dissonance: many people genuinely believed that the solutions had been found and that the promises could be kept and the goals were realistic, but somehow it came out all wrong. (“We wanted the best, but it turned out like always.”) Why? It can’t be that the ideology is wrong, that is unthinkable; the ideology has been proven correct. Nor is it the great leader’s fault, of course. Nor are there any enemies close at hand: they were all killed or exiled. The cargo cult keeps implementing the revolution and waving the flags, but the cargo of First World countries stubbornly refuses to land.
The paranoid yet logical answer is that there must be invisible enemies: saboteurs, counter-revolutionaries, and society remaining ‘structurally’ anti-ideological. No matter that victory was total, the failure of their policies proves that the enemies are still everywhere.
This is a great example. During the Cultural Revolution and similar periods (e.g., Stalinist Russia) you not only wanted to signal virtue above intelligence, you actively wanted to signal *lack* of intelligence as vigorously as you could. The inteligentzia are always suspect.
Building up on this, virtue is valued more when a society is threatened from the inside. If people are worried about being betrayed or undermined by those who appear to be part of their tribe they will look for virtue signals. We see this a lot in the high correlation of virtue signaling with signals of ingroup loyalty, while intelligence signaling often takes the shape of disagreeing with the group.
In general, an outside threat or goal allows people to measure themselves against it. Status is set by the number of enemy scalps one collects, for example. But without an external measuring stick people will jockey for relative status by showing loyalty and virtue
Right, and unfortunately the relevant thing here isn’t how much society is objectively threatened from the inside, but people’s perceptions of the threat, which can differ wildly from reality, because of propaganda, revenue-driven news media, preexisting ideology, or any number of other things. To quote a particularly extreme and tragic instance of this from Gwern’s review of The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962-1976:
This is a great example. During the Cultural Revolution and similar periods (e.g., Stalinist Russia) you not only wanted to signal virtue above intelligence, you actively wanted to signal *lack* of intelligence as vigorously as you could. The inteligentzia are always suspect.