[BaseballPhysics]

> My understanding is that "virtue signaling" implies that the primary goal is performative with minimal personal risk and minimal commitment to productive action.

And it's based on the flawed assumption that stating public support for something without doing anything else is useless.

But people moderate their behaviour based on perceived social norms.

When people publicly state their support for a given issue, they are communicating what they understand social norms to be.

When a lot of people do that, that becomes the norm.

So "virtue signalling" could just as easily be labelled "showing support", which is the way that we share and align on those norms.

But, of course, folks who don't like people voicing their support for those values, for fear that they will become normalized, needed to find a label to apply to insult those people and, hopefully, stop people from voicing their support for these social movements.

And thus the term "virtue signalling" was born. Suddenly saying out loud what you believe becomes itself a social moray.

Now flying a pride flag, or calling for increased diversity in the workplace, has become "virtue signalling" and something to be embarrassed about.

It's quite clever as a means of controlling the narrative. And it appears a shocking number of people have bought into the BS.

[jacobr1]

There are a few more dimensions to this.

1) Does "showing support," actually do anything? Are we really aligning on norms or just scoring points with people who already agree the same position? I suspect the detail matter and that there is continuum, where for uncommon positions maybe it does something, but for widely held views, it really is just "virtue signalling."

2) When does "showing support," become a substitute for more substantive action. Maybe I post a pride flag on my social media avatar, but don't bother to vote in a local election with discriminatory ballot initiative. Or consider any number of incidents of corporate "greenwashing."

But sure, plenty of virtue signalling, isn't _just_ signalling. And we shouldn't dismiss it on those terms, but rather ask about impact.

[kortex]

How much is a heap of sand? It's a Sorites problem. There exists a continuum between "changing your profile picture to be tinted like flag X" and "everyone is saying and doing the same thing and it's an entrenched social norm".

It's certainly less impactful than doing something substantive but it also costs nothing to signal boost. Same like boycotts, it only works en masse.

[Gollapalli]

I think one of the important things about virtue signalling is that you're making a big deal about the prescribed norms that everyone is, in our unofficially official ideology, supposed to follow.

It'd be like flying a great big flag that says "I support the government and corporations." Whenever I see a pride flag, that is essentially what I see. It's like, (and it's useful to read the people who are against you as a mirror), when Patriarch Kirill of Russia says: ". Today there is such a test for the loyalty of this government, a kind of pass to that “happy” world, the world of excess consumption, the world of visible “freedom”. Do you know what this test is? The test is very simple and at the same time terrible - this is a gay parade. The demands on many to hold a gay parade are a test of loyalty to that very powerful world; and we know that if people or countries reject these demands, then they do not enter into that world, they become strangers to it."[1]

That's not far off from the truth. Virtue signalling, as opposed to protest, is oriented towards moving closer to power, rather than further away from it. In Foucauldian terms, protest would be a transgression, a breaking of the taboo, and virtue signalling would be the opposite of that, an adherence to and reinforcement of the taboo, in which one mimetically serves the strengthening of the taboo, until the mimetic crisis breaks into blodshed.

Virtue signalling is wearing the swastika in 1938, and bears no relation to wearing one in 1929, except to say that those who wore it in 1929 won.

[1]: https://www-patriarchia-ru.translate.goog/db/text/5906442.ht...