[1053r]

While the central observation of the article is vaguely interesting, what is more interesting perhaps is the slow and gradual pivots from Victorian moral signaling to modern moral signaling, and whether modern moral signaling is more or less adaptive towards actually making one's life better than Victorian moral signaling was.

For example, life satisfaction is strongly correlated with exercise. This was true even before the general population used exercise to signal virtue. (See the Harvard longitudinal study as an example of this.)

Additionally, the modern practice of allowing (some) women to have highly successful careers seems to lead to better outcomes than the Victorian practice of locking women out of everything except teaching and nursing, and encouraging them to get out of those as soon as they could lock down a man.

Perhaps virtue signaling slowly converges on actual virtue? (This isn't to imply that all modern virtue signaling practices are virtuous. For example, I'd argue that modern virtue signaling around sleep, or lack thereof, and work, namely filling one's life entirely full of it with no breaks, at least in the USA, are terrible for health and life satisfaction.)

Edit: added clarification that modern values around female careers are better than Victorian ones, but are not yet a fully solved problem.