[vikramkr]

Calling something virtue signaling is not a dismissal of people caring about things other than profit. It's a statement of belief that they don't actually care about things other than profit and are just pretending that they do. There's a pretty clear financial incentive to virtue signal since getting the benefit of the doubt from society lets them make more profit with less scrutiny. There's also no benefit for society to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they're being genuine.

[space_fountain]

Yes I agree that's the intent, but I think it can often be used by people who think the thing being "virtue" signaled about isn't important. People who think that corporations aren't going far enough in support of their social issue sometimes accuse them of virtue signally, but people opposed to people viewing the issue as important do all the time.

The prevailing wisdom on Hacker News now is that actually people who say they care about AI safety are mostly lying and any road blocks they try to put up are motivated by greed. It feels very much like someone accusing a company talking about responsible forestry and advocating for higher standards in the forest cutting business of virtue signaling

[vikramkr]

The danger there is that the phenomenon of throwing up roadblocks that are purely motivated by greed but are claimed to be for good reasons is common enough that we've got a phrase for it - regulatory capture. If the belief is that these companies are actually simply not motivated by anything other than pure greed, which I don't think is unreasonable, then it's also not unreasonable to be skeptical of any roadblocks they propose. Responsible forestry is a pretty great example actually - not that there's regulatory capture there, but in terms of it being an industry that pretends that it's planting forests and restoring ecosystems while actually taking rich, dynamic ecosystems and turning them into biodiversity-free monoculture tree farms. But the branding of 'forest' means people think it's something other than miles of high density monoculture agrigulture of neat, soulless rows of trees. And if those companies began talking about 'higher standards' in forest cutting, I'd pretty much immediately want to dig into who they're trying to lock out of the market, if it was some sort of protectionist thing, etc.