If you want to see what runaway intelligence signaling looks like, go to grad school in analytic philosophy. You will find amazingly creative counterexamples, papers full symbolic logic, speakers who get attacked with refutations from the audience in mid-talk, and then, sometimes, deftly parry the killing blow with a clever metaphor, taking the questioner down a peg...
It’s not too much of a stretch to see philosophers as IQ signaling athletes. Tennis has its ATP ladder, and everybody gets a rank. In philosophy it’s slightly less blatant, partly because even the task of scorekeeping in the IQ signaling game requires you to be very smart. Nonetheless, there is always a broad consensus about who the top players players are and which departments employ them.
Unlike tennis players, though, philosophers play their game without a real audience, apart from themselves. The winners get comfortable jobs and some worldly esteem, but their main achievement is just winning. Some have huge impact inside the game, but because nobody else is watching, that impact is almost never transmitted to the world outside the game. They’re not using their intelligence to improve the world. They’re using their intelligence to demonstrate their intelligence.
If you want to see what runaway intelligence signaling looks like, go to grad school in analytic philosophy. You will find amazingly creative counterexamples, papers full symbolic logic, speakers who get attacked with refutations from the audience in mid-talk, and then, sometimes, deftly parry the killing blow with a clever metaphor, taking the questioner down a peg...
It’s not too much of a stretch to see philosophers as IQ signaling athletes. Tennis has its ATP ladder, and everybody gets a rank. In philosophy it’s slightly less blatant, partly because even the task of scorekeeping in the IQ signaling game requires you to be very smart. Nonetheless, there is always a broad consensus about who the top players players are and which departments employ them.
Unlike tennis players, though, philosophers play their game without a real audience, apart from themselves. The winners get comfortable jobs and some worldly esteem, but their main achievement is just winning. Some have huge impact inside the game, but because nobody else is watching, that impact is almost never transmitted to the world outside the game. They’re not using their intelligence to improve the world. They’re using their intelligence to demonstrate their intelligence.