27 Comments

thank u for sharing information with us

Expand full comment

"most losers do in fact suspect most winners of insufficient norm support." Well, there is norm support, and there is cheating - fraud & violence. Dress code is a norm, business contracts are "legally binding" -- or maybe not, when enforcement costs are greater than the loss from the other side cheating.

Or, in the case of Alpha males (like Pres Clinton or Trump), who are married but cheat. There are differences between norm support and law-breaking.

And there is norm migration in the culture -- no suit Fridays became suit optional everyday for many office workers.

Expand full comment

What happens when the norms deviate from reality and are based on propaganda rather than facts? We get Donald Trump as a response to increasing hypocrisy.

I'm watching a Japanese film. A teacher complains about a student reading manga and humiliates him, only to have the too-honest student mention he saw the teacher reading something worse on the train the other week. The teacher loses credibility and the students revolt. When private and public norms diverge too much, society crumbles as everyone tries to signal piety in increasingly bombastic ways.

Expand full comment

the important stuff is all happening in the background where firms meet a variety of norms and nobody notices.

Firms must take norms into account, but how is that "sacrifice"? It isn't a matter of wanting to obey norms even in the face of profit loss. There's no real question of defection from the norms being advantageous to firms' bottom lines.

Expand full comment

Fixed; thanks.

Expand full comment

OK, call me neurotic, but the misspelling is bugging me. Line 2: Boehm, not Bohm (who, of course, was a theoretical physicist).

Expand full comment

I'd love to see more evidence of this.

I'd love to see a single example of the "personal costs" people pay to support norms. I'm not even sure I know what Robin's talking about.

Expand full comment

Humans aren't eusocial insects, and aren't particularly good at being ethical, so need an external support system of which virtue signalling and callouts are part. We are not going to get better results by putting a stop to them.

Expand full comment

"most losers still pay large personal costs to support most norms most of the time"

I'd love to see more evidence of this.

The argument here seems to sound like "civilization exists, so most people must be doing something right most of the time."

But that makes wild assumptions about the *distribution* of "doing something right."

What about Ayn Rand's version: civilization exists because of the top 1%, and everyone else is break-even to negative?

Expand full comment

I think you're misreading me. I'm not arguing against it being virtue signaling all the way down (although I'm not certain it is, either). I'm just saying that my preference is for more norm enforcement. Overly frequent accusations of virtue signaling -- even if accurate -- can undermine this.

Expand full comment

"I'm not virtue signalling, I'm just genuinely disturbed!"

Expand full comment

I'm sorry but it's virtue signalling all the way down. The problem is when that there isn't even much virtue in the first place.

Expand full comment

It's not a very widespread term.

Expand full comment

It's probably constructive for you, in particular.

Expand full comment

Here I agree with your conclusion, but I put the blame on the practice of "calling out" rather than on the concept of virtue signaling (just a refinement of the ordinary concept of 'posturing').

People who "call out" others for virtue signaling often do so when those others have "called out" someone for racism.

This "calling out" mania represents a way of enforcing norms that have nothing to do with us. Which is in essence why I think we need less rather than more norm enforcement. I'm for people minding their own business more.

Expand full comment

It looks a lot like the signaling and counter-signaling stories to me. Sure, I may resent needing to stretch my budget to shell out thousands for an acceptable suit while Trump's billionaire friends -- who could at least afford this fashion norm -- parade the White House in loafers. But I wisely adhere to the norm; I realize that, by adopting their sort of counter-signaling strategy, I would convey only the least desirable traits about myself. So, their example may "tempt" me one some level, but it is far less than might first be imagined, the temptation being more apparent than real. In the end, their deviations have no bearing on me, as if related to an entirely different domain.

Expand full comment