Access to mass (one-to-many) media used to be restricted to elites, but are now open to ordinary people, who compared to the elites perhaps tend to favor virtue signaling over intelligence signaling, and this somehow feeds back into elite culture (e.g., journalism and academia). (This can be seen as another way of stating the “social media” hypothesis mentioned in the post. I feel like I still don’t have a clear model of what happened / is happening though.)
A couple more ideas:
The decline of religion paradoxically caused virtue signaling to increase. (I wrote that earlier and forgot to mention it in the post.)
Access to mass (one-to-many) media used to be restricted to elites, but are now open to ordinary people, who compared to the elites perhaps tend to favor virtue signaling over intelligence signaling, and this somehow feeds back into elite culture (e.g., journalism and academia). (This can be seen as another way of stating the “social media” hypothesis mentioned in the post. I feel like I still don’t have a clear model of what happened / is happening though.)
Organized religion may not have reduced virtue signaling, but it may have contained it within the church.