Transcription
Hi, I'm Diana Fleischmann, and I'm here with Jeffrey Miller. Today, we're going to be talking about virtue signaling and effective altruism. Hi, how are you?
Hey Diana, thanks for doing this. So, let's refresh everyone's memory about what is virtue signaling. Virtue signaling is something that I think all humans do, often unconsciously, and it's showing off your moral virtues to others. So, it's a kind of social signaling system. And the moral virtue could be anything that you consider to be sort of markers of goodness, traits that are like conscientiousness or agreeableness, or sexual moral traits like fidelity, or just being a good parent, a good partner, a good citizen, anything like that that you consider virtuous. If you're kind of unconsciously signaling it socially to friends or mates or lovers or neighbors or other fellow citizens or people on social media, all of that is virtue signaling. It's being agreeable virtue for some people, but for others, of course, being assertive and standing up for yourself is a virtue. So, some of the disagreements about what the virtues are are actually correlated with people's political attitudes or religious beliefs.
And what is effective altruism? Well, effective altruism is a social and moral movement that you've been involved with for a little longer than me. You actually got me into it about four or five years ago. Effective altruism, or EA as the insiders call it, is actually only about ten years old and it was originated in Oxford with a couple of moral philosophers, and it's grown into a global movement. It's mostly young people, and what they're trying to do is combine reason and altruism. They're trying to do the most good that they can, but by using reason and evidence and testing hypotheses and thinking experimentally and trying to prioritize cause areas, things that are worth focusing on. And often those cause areas are things that other folks neglect and don't really consider to be that worthy of attention.
So, I got you involved in effective altruism. I got involved in effective altruism through some people I knew in Oxford, including Rob Woodland, well, McCaskill, Amanda Askull, I think that's her name now. And so I got involved with that group, and then I started getting involved in effective altruism. So, I mostly actually am involved with animal, effective animal advocacy, for example, and less to do with things like future or reducing global poverty as well. So, you're on the board of the Sentience Institute, for example, and you're a vegan. Yeah, and you're mostly concerned about reducing factory farming. Yes.
Roz, I'm I'm a little more focused on issues like existential risk now. You reduce the likelihood of catastrophes that could exterminate humanity, like nuclear war or bioweapons or artificial intelligence that goes badly. So, effective altruism is a broad church, and it includes all of this. Yeah.
Right, but the common denominator is people trying to think really hard about how do I allocate scarce resources to really do the most good I can, given the world as it is. Yeah. And I think both of us are really interested in making sure that we get the word out about effective altruism to smart people who might be aligned with the values of effective altruism. I think that's really important, and just that kind of being public intellectuals and talking about it is really, really important as well. And I think it's also important to know, effective altruism doesn't have any particular political or religious slant. Like a lot of EAs are atheists, but you can also have Christian effective altruism. A lot of EAs are centrists or a little bit lefty or progressive, but you can also have conservative EAs who might focus on somewhat different cause areas. But it's also a very broad church in terms of accepting people with different ideologies, as long as they kind of sign up for the basic idea of being rational and skeptical about how you, how you do good.
So, thinking about this effective altruism slant, why are we interested in virtue signaling? What's important about virtue signaling in terms of doing good and reducing suffering, for example? I think virtue signaling is this sort of social superpower that people have that can be used for good or for ill. Right? So, I think a bad kind of virtue signaling that you often do is people will get very exercised about some cause area that they've heard about through media that actually isn't that important in the grand scheme of things, and then they'll devote enormous resources or time, energy, and money to that little cause area, and they'll neglect things that could actually do a thousand times as much good in a kind of objective sense. But they'll make a lot of noise about it, right? So they'll have a bumper sticker saying, like, "I give a lot of money to my local no-kill animal shelter." Yeah, and most animal shelters are not very efficient ways of converting money into protecting animals. You could do a lot better by fighting factory farming or becoming a vegan or investing in companies to do lab-grown meat. Yes, but they don't work as well as virtue signals because people haven't heard of them, and so they're considered kind of weird. And nobody thinks, "Oh, you're investing in lab-grown meat? That's even better than protecting those poor puppies who will get killed." Yeah, but actually it is better.
And I definitely saw some very difficult to place kind of virtue signaling. It was difficult to place what effect it was going to actually have in the vegan movement. You know, the focus among some vegans, for example, on purity, the focus among some vegans on avoiding very trace chemicals like something like L-cysteine, which is derived from duck feathers, which avoiding it is so much more trouble than it could ever prevent in terms of suffering. So, there, yeah, the virtue that they're sort of signaling is a kind of moral purity that says, "I will never let any animal product, however minuscule," yeah, "you know, pass through my lips." It's a kind of religious commitment they've made. But if you ask, is it really the highest and best use of your time and energy worrying about that? The answer is almost always no. Yes, exactly.
Yeah, so one question is about, you know, effective altruism founders, and they really have struck upon a fundamentally different way of thinking about doing good that other people have considered, but effective altruism was the first to really form a whole movement about it. And what is this fundamental difference? Well, before effective altruism, the focus in the charity sector, right, was trying to get people to give money to good causes where "good" means it's socially recognized as a good cause, and where you get social status for giving money to it, even if people aren't quite sure what it means. So, like, you get employees at a university to give 5% of their income to some mega-charity, right? And you ask them, "Where is the money actually going?" If it's a United Way or something like that, yeah, and they don't know. They don't even know what they're supporting. And so one of the origin stories for effective altruism was skepticism about mainstream charity culture and seeing it as just kind of stupid virtue signaling and thinking, "We could do better if you actually allocated money to causes that were really good and gave money to charities that were actually effective in testing what really works." Let's do split testing, let's run the experiment here and there, and then see what happens.
How did effective altruism founders differ from kind of previous approaches to doing good? Before effective altruism, doing good was almost synonymous with doing donating to charity, and usually that meant donating as much money as possible to charities where you don't even really know where the money is going or what it's donating to, a mega-charity like United Way through your employer. And if you ask most employees, "What is that money doing? And how do you know it's doing any good?" The answer would be, "I don't know. I just trust them to do good." So, one of the origins of effective altruism is in charity evaluation, trying to figure out which charities are really doing good, maximizing lives saved per dollar, for example. And that's the origin of groups like GiveWell, that did systematic charity evaluation, not just in terms of what percent of the money that you give to a charity goes to programs rather than to fundraising, yeah, rather do they have any evidence that they're actually doing anything and what good? Well, found was most charities have zero evidence that they're doing any good, and they're actually quite offended when you ask.
Well, yes, one approach that GiveWell took that was really different than previous approaches is that they were saying, you know, why does it matter that much how much money is going to overhead versus how much money is actually going to the program? So, if you were buying a car and you were trying to buy the best possible car, for example, you wouldn't necessarily say, "I want to buy a car where they paid the person who designed the car as little as possible. All the money I'm spending on the car is going into the raw materials for the car." Instead, you do want to pay people a good amount of money who were involved in charity if you want them to design the best and most effective interventions to help save lives or reduce suffering or whatever it is that you're interested in. So, this focus on as little overhead as possible and as much money going to the recipients as possible was, in some sense, misguided.
So, I think the bad old charity world is people doing virtue signaling simply through the amount of money that they're giving, without really caring that much about, does it do any good? Yeah. In one way, you could see effective altruism is trying to get away from virtue signaling and towards pure altruism. But in another way, you can think of it as they were just trying to harness the virtue signaling instinct in a better way. So, an early EA, one sort of bragging point that people often had was, "I've signed the Giving What We Can pledge. I promise to give 10% of my income to charity." And then they would also kind of mention, and it's like, "The Against Malaria Foundation, which we know from experimental evidence is an effective charity that's saving lives per dollar." So, that was the kind of virtue signaling game that EA was trying to play. Was, yeah, we know people have these instincts for showing off that they're good, but let's take those in a direction where they actually are doing good. Yeah.
I have seen effective altruism kind of harness virtue signaling, as you're talking about, for better purposes. But it seems like to me, and I would be happy to criticize if they weren't doing this, that effective altruism has actually been done to harness for virtue signaling for purposes kind of adaptively. So, initially, when I got involved in the movement, how much money you gave away was considered, you know, huge, basically. Like, people admired you, your status in the community was based on how much money you're giving away. Now, it seems like people are considering more, how much good are you doing? Are you trying to look into a tractable, neglected problem? How much good do you think this problem actually is going to solve? And especially people who are taking risks in terms of going into unknown territory, people studying Chinese so they can better understand what kind of artificial intelligence research is going on in China. Those people are actually getting greater status in the effective altruism community. So, it's a really different mindset, right? Because the traditional virtue signal is, "I'm a good person because I go to church and I donate in this plate, and I trust the church will know where to give the money to do the most good." Effective altruists like to look under the hood and ask, "Where is the money really going?" But also, yeah, there is a shift where early EAs is mostly about, like, "What percent of your income do you give away? And are you giving it away to an approved effective charity?" Yeah, but now, yeah, you get status from things like, "I've identified a new existential risk no one's thinking about." And it fulfills the three main EA criteria: number one, scope, how many sentient beings does it affect now and in the long-term future, right? And that could be humans or animals. Tractability, can we actually solve the problem? Are there any levers for influencing it, or is it hopeless, or is it already going to be solved anyway by just economic growth or something? And third, neglectedness, are people already focusing a huge amount of effort and resources on it, in which case additional resources might not matter very much, or is it a neglected topic where nobody's thinking about it, and you can actually have maybe a huge impact?
Now, there's a trade-off between neglectedness and virtue signaling. So, we talked quite a bit about in my undergraduate seminar, effective altruism, the problem with neglected causes is you don't, it's really hard to get social status for focusing on them, right? If you go around saying, "I donate to no-kill animal shelters," everybody is going to be like, "Yeah, I understand you're saving cute kittens and puppies, right? That's a good thing." Huh? But if you say, "I'm really worried about the geopolitical governance issues and genetically engineered bioweapons and how we reduce the ability of terrorist cells to engineer Ebola into it," like, people like, "What is that? I'm an, I don't know whether to give you social status if you're doing that or not." And certainly, if you try to explain on a first date to a potential mate that I'm a better person than that other guy you went on a date with last week because he only saved kittens and puppies, whereas I'm saving people from the Bible and pen, thank you. Right? I love all these first examples that you give. First date is kind of my good example. Absolutely. I've liked what you're trying to signal. Absolutely.
So, how does effective altruism manage to combat someone bad form of virtue signaling? So, you know, if you look at charity or even, you know, religious kinds of virtue signaling in the past, they were about how much you sacrifice yourself in the service of the greater good or in the service of some acts that was supposed to be for the greater good, yeah. And so it seems like effective altruism is either consciously or unconsciously harnessing virtue signaling in a smarter way. How do you think that's happening? Well, a couple of key differences between EA virtue signaling and traditional virtue signaling is, for example, the concept of earning to give. EA pretty early on figured out it's not really the percentage of your income to give away that matters, it's the absolute amount. It's actually better, for example, to become an investment banker and end up making a million dollars a year and give away even just five or 10% of it, than to go into the nonprofit sector and to say, "Look at me, I'm giving away 50% of my income." If your income is only $40,000 a year, yeah, you're not actually giving as much net to charity. So, the concept of earning to give means you can actually have an awesome life and get rich and, you know, do cool work, but also doing a vast amount to charity, and that's okay. That's a win. Yeah.
Well, yeah, effective altruism, right now, so that was one of their first messages, and that is something that people associate with effective altruism a lot. And there's a bit of frustration about this because, while it is a very provocative idea, right now effective altruism is really pushing more for people to get education in certain areas where they can discover new problems. So, it actually seems like effective altruism right now, it's more talent-limited than money-limited. So, it's actually really important young smart people start to think about these things strategically. And even when it comes to things like, you know, that people might find boring, like operations. You know, is that an effective altruism conference? And there's a guy who teaches nonprofit people who are interested in running nonprofits how to run operations. That is like, get people work permits, get people housing, make sure that everybody's taxes, you know, just stuff that really just needs to get done. And none of those people are actually along with effective altruism. And those are people that effective altruists really need, are the people who grease the wheels, yeah, as well.
So, in animal welfare and veganism specifically, how does virtue signaling and effective altruism play out? I think we talked about this a bit in our virtue signaling video, and I just talked about a little bit of like the purity domain. Well, I think one one crucial situation, for example, is a typical vegan will say, "All animal products are tainted, morally tainted, and bad, and eating any animal products is just objectionable." Yeah, right? An effective altruist will typically say, "Well, look, different kinds of animal products impose different amounts of suffering per calorie or per pound of product." For example, beef compared to chicken. It takes a lot of chickens to create a thousand pounds of chicken. It only takes one cow to create a thousand pounds of beef. And chickens actually have worse lives, arguably, you know, in factory farms than beef cattle do on their pastures. So, if you cut out chicken and switch to beef, you can still eat beef and actually massively reduce the animal suffering footprint. Do you have to? A traditional vegan, that sounds weird and psychopathic and terrible. But to an effective altruist, it's like, "That's what that's a win-win because, you know, you can still eat beef if you like beef, but you don't need chicken." Or you've made the argument for what you call bivalve veganism, which is the idea that if you eat bivalves like oysters, clams, mussels, they apparently don't have much of a nervous system. Yeah, so they're unlikely to suffer. They're not designed to be mobile, so they don't have the kind of senses and motor control systems animals have, and they probably don't feel pain. So, eating, you know, a dozen oysters probably has virtually no suffering impact, whereas eating eggs does because it's hard for chickens to lay eggs, it's painful, it has health problems, etc. So, that's that's an example of where the EA virtue signaling, reduce animal suffering, would deviate quite a bit from traditional vegan virtue signaling and just avoid all animal products. Yes, absolutely.
And yeah, I definitely stay tuned on our channels. I'm going to be doing a video about how we came to an agreement, me being vegan or mostly vegan, and Geoffrey being a meat-eater, how we came to a happy agreement and live together in harmony. And also something about bivalve veganism and thinking about reducing your suffering footprint, which is all really, really important.
What are some effective altruist causes that are hard to address through in purchasing? I think it's hard to address a lot of the existential risks through virtue signaling. For example, a lot of the smartest people I know, inside and outside effective altruism, are really worried about artificial general intelligence. That's something that could be very, very dangerous and very harmful, and they think of it as one of the biggest existential risks in the 21st century, particularly given that there's now an AI arms race between America and China. And China is going all-in on AI, investing billions and millions of dollars and diverting their best, most talented students into becoming machine learning experts. So, if you get concerned about AI as an X-risk, artificial intelligence as an existential risk, and you talk to people about that at a party or on the first date or in your neighborhood barbecue, people look at you like, "Well, I'll watch the Terminator. I understand your concerns, but it's not reset to science fiction. That's not really gonna happen." But so offensive. Southern accent alert. So, you talk about AI, and now when people immediately go into, "Well, that's just Age of Ultron and the Avengers and it's Ex Machina." And they meet you immediately think science fiction movies. And it's hard to get much cred or status for taking that seriously because people aren't programmed by the media to think that that is actually a major X-risk.
What do people think is the big X-risk? Climate change. Yeah. So, now, particularly in American culture, you're supposed to worry about global warming and climate change as the big challenge of our era. And if you don't, right, if you question the kind of dogma that climate change is the big X-risk, people think you're a terrible person. Yeah. Now, of course, I think global warming is happening. It's a burgeoning. It is what you could call a global catastrophic risk. It could have bad effects on hundreds of millions of people, right? That's bad. They'd have a catastrophic risk. Yeah, yeah. And it's like, it's worth paying attention to for sure. And it could lead to positive feedback climate things we can't fully predict that could be even worse, right? So, there's a little bit of a risk it could be even worse than we think. But is it as bad as global thermonuclear war? No. No, I don't think it is. Yeah. It's just that we've kind of gotten used to living under the shadow of global thermonuclear war since the 50s. When I was in college in the early 80s, everybody's smart I knew assumed we were going to die in fireballs within 10 years. Wow. And now the college students are like, "Oh no, the world might get two and a half degrees warmer. I shouldn't have kids because it'll be so catastrophic." Now, to me, I think that's surprising. I think, yeah, it's a big deal, but it's not gonna kill all 7.3 billion people on the planet. It's probably not gonna. Yes.
I mean, these are, you know, there's many different people who've made arguments about whether or not it's a catastrophic risk. And you can also check out the show notes. There are effective altruists who have done some calculations here about whether or not it is, it is a risk and is it a greater risk. So, I think that one thing that effective altruists kind of get right is that they care a lot about the, of course, everybody cares about social approval. Everybody wants to signal to their to their group. And I think that that's something that they get right. I don't think that if I talk about trying to, you know, if I was working on lab-grown meat or in vitro meat, right, if I was working on cellular agriculture, I don't think that like the vast majority of people would necessarily understand where I was coming from. But the people I really cared about, who I had cultivated as a friendship group, those people would care. And so I think that that's something that you have to consider about virtue signaling is, who are you signaling to? Right?
So, this is a cool thing about the effective altruism movement is, I think pretty early on, they realized, "We are going to come across as very weird people, overly rational, and we were not concerned about the kind of stuff that ordinary folks virtue signal about." How do we overcome the social psychology of virtue signaling? Well, we basically form our own subculture. We get together, we have meetup groups, we have, you know, online groups, we create social networks where we can get all of those social and status benefits from virtue signaling in the ways that we value. Just like, you know, if you go to a church that has certain religious values and you want to show off, "These things matter to me," you kind of surround yourself by people who will appreciate those virtue signals and reinforce them and validate them. So, I think there's a social engineering aspect to the effective altruism movement that's very interesting. And of course, it's analogous to the social engineering that any activist group does about any issue. People who care about the issue try to create groups where they're surrounded by other folks who care about that same issue, wherever it is. Yeah.
And yeah, I've had close friends, has happened recently with people that I know who pivot their thinking, something else is important. The people that are near and dear to them are not reacting well, you know, unfortunately. If you decide that you want to do something fundamentally different with your life, you want to pursue something else, you might have to virtue signal to a new group of people. That's something very difficult about just being social beings.
So, how can we harness virtue signaling to better promote real good? Well, all of these things that the EA movement has done, I think, are sort of fascinating social and moral hacks for how to actually promote the most good. I think a crucial thing you kind of alluded to with EA is the status that you get from updating. And they use this concept of updating from Bayesian statistics, like you had a bunch of priors, your prior beliefs, then you get new evidence, and then you update your kind of expected distributions about, you know, about beliefs.
Just to dwell on this for a second, obviously, everybody's had an experience, or everybody should have, that experience where they've changed their mind. Changing your mind is one thing, right? But updating is kind of another thing. So, let's say that I think that global warming is a huge catastrophic risk. I think it's the most important catastrophic risk that exists right now. Then I read a bunch of literature, I listened to a bunch of people, and I think that there's a 10% less chance that it's a catastrophic risk. That'd be before. I didn't quote-unquote change my mind, but I did update, right? My statistical ideas, whatever my prior is, however you would call it in Bayesian statistics. But if it's like changing your mind, but it's basically where your attitudes about the probability of things change, as opposed to completely having a different position on an issue. Yes. So, the the updating can be gentle, or it can be dramatic. And I've had some dramatic updates and also some gentle ones. And you're super open-minded. Yeah, I try to be open-minded. Yeah. And I think that's something that EA as a culture values a lot. If you're an EA and you're heavily invested in a particular issue, and then you, and then you learn more about some other issue, publicly make a pivot where you say, "I'm going all in on this new thing." You actually get support for that, and people say, "That's cool." And if they give good reasons, if they think so. Absolutely. Yeah. And your issues on it's compelling. But in traditional virtue signaling, people don't really get credit for that because, you know, your moral identity kind of gets stuck in the value system that you adopted, usually in college, right? And if you update your whole value system and your causes that you care about, in a way, it's admitting I've wasted a lot of time and effort on causes that weren't as important. And that's a bitter pill to swallow. Yeah.
I mean, imagine if I, you know, if I was really heavily active in the kind of mainstream vegan movement and I decided I was gonna get a degree in cellular engineering and that I was gonna work on that instead. I definitely wouldn't be able to bring my whole social group with me. I definitely wouldn't have everybody support me. Or let's say that I was interested in, you know, Antifa or conservative movements, and then I decided that I was going to pivot to something that actually supported one of those core values, but in a different way. It's difficult to take a social group with you along with a new way of supporting a given value. Yeah. So, doing a dramatic moral update and focusing on new cause areas, it, you know, is a massive revision of your virtue signaling strategy as a social being and a moral being. And that's a great way to lose friends and alienate people. Yeah.
So, it kind of requires some social nimbleness where you, you're willing to say, "My moral beliefs were fallible, and now they're better, now they're better informed. I'm going to change my life. I'm going to prioritize different things." And I'm willing to, you know, hopefully bring along some of my old pals, but I might not bring them all along. Yeah.
I mean, a great example is I live with that. I was vegan. I became vegan when I was dating a Buddhist who ate meat. And he wanted us to go, the one thing the Buddhists do in order to collect, you know, merit in order is, you know, a good karmic thing, is you go to a bait shop and you buy small fish that you would normally use as bait, and then you release them. Like, he was interested in doing that, but then he wasn't interested in giving up meat. And I thought that that was really profoundly misguided. He thought my veganism was profoundly misguided. So, we ended up, you know, at loggerheads, as they say, about that kind of thing.
So, Geoffrey, you thought a little bit about how we might virtue signal in the future and how virtue signaling might become more honest. You're sort of obsessed with these ideas about augmented reality, reality, and also how we could have a better sort of moral vision into what other people are doing. Talk about that some more. Yeah.
So, we'll link below my video about moral vision, where I kind of lay out this argument. But that was more in the context of ethical investment. Here, I'll kind of relate it more to effective altruism. So, virtual reality, right, is where you wear goggles and you're looking into a computer-generated reality, and you can like look around and explore it and control things. Augmented reality is you're wearing glasses that give a heads-up display where you can see reality as it is, but it's also got digital information overlaid. Now, the most likely application will be, you can have your augmented reality glasses that also have cameras on front that scan the environment looking for, let's say, human faces. And maybe it's got automated face recognition, which is very likely within 10 years. So, what that means is you can potentially have your computer glasses writing everybody, every stranger in your environment as you're walking around. Yeah, it could connect their face information to all available public information about them. Hmm, right? Which could include their social media accounts, their name, their education level, etc., whatever they choose to share, whatever they choose to share, or even whatever they don't choose to share, anything that's public domain. But it could also include information like, how much per year did they give to charities? And which charities? And which moral cause areas are they most concerned about? Which existential risks are freaking out? You could literally see all of that perhaps overlaid on the image of somebody. So, for example, if you're a vegan, and you're walking around, you might actually be able to identify everybody else in your social environment who's vegan. Yeah. And conversely, everyone who isn't. Oh, yeah. Who shares the same kind of values. So, this is kind of a beautiful extension of freedom of association because it's not just freedom of association, it's freedom of association with almost perfect information about the marketplace of association that's available to you. Yeah. And so, of course, there could be cheap talk systems where somebody could just click a button on a social media profile to claim to be a vegan. Right? But then, one level deeper, there could be like validated vegan, where there's an app that actually tracks all of their purchases. Yeah, and validates they haven't bought any animal products in the last year from anywhere. Right? So, in in one way, it's kind of an Orwellian nightmare. But in another way, it makes people completely morally accountable to everybody else in their environment, and everybody really consistent with what they say and their values, manageable and consistent. Yeah. And I think this is an interesting thought experiment in terms of what would happen to a society if virtue signaling happens through augmented reality, face recognition, publicly available data, purchase histories, charitable donation histories, all of that. I think it'll be fascinating to see how it plays out because I don't think that's just science fiction. I think we really will have these systems within 10, 15, 20 years. Some people opt out and go, "I don't want anybody to know anything about me," and don't wear masks to prevent face recognition in public, etc. But other people figure out, "Hey, you know what? I'm proud of my work purchase. I'm proud of my charitable giving. I'm proud of what I do in alignment with my values." And I think they'll want to share this information. My cynical view is that most people are hypocrites. Everybody's hypocrites, basically. And my personal view is that right now, there's just so much kind of cheap talk signaling, and there are ways to corroborate whether or not people are doing what they say they are doing, that people don't check up on, even if they could. No, I don't think that this vision that you have is going to come out. I don't think that very, I think very few people are actually going to care about associating with other people who have actualized the values that they themselves have. But it could be, and you do see this, you know, in Christian and other kinds of religious communities. So, it definitely could be something that could happen. I just myself, I'm pretty skeptical that it will. I think whenever you got the intersection of morality and technology, there's going to be early adopters who get very excited about being able to use new signaling systems, right? Whether it's tattoos or wearing a cross or dressing a certain way or publicly sharing information about, you know, their charitable contributions, whatever. Some people will adopt it. Some people will be very resistant to it and not want to give up the privacy. And in this case, it's kind of, as you say, the privacy, the the right to be a hypocrite, right? The right to say in a cheap talk way, "Unvirtuous," yeah, but not actually to back it up. The problem with that is from signaling theory, we know there's a kind of intrinsic tendency in any signaling system for people to get caught up in it because if you're not signaling that I'm above average in some trait for some value, people will assume you're average or below average. Okay? And there's a ratchet effect. Everybody loves loopholes. People love loopholes. But I think with global publicly accessible databases that can validate ethical behavior, the people who start to use that to leverage it to say, "I really am virtuous," right? 100% reliable virtue signaling, it's going to be very hard to exist that as a sort of a tractor state that pulls people in. That's my prediction. I think it'll, it might mean the end of hypocrisy. It might mean virtue signaling globally gets a lot more reliable and valid. Or it might mean people just have a public discussion and say, you know what, look, we're just social primates. Let's all get a little more comfortable with our hypocrisy. Yeah. And let's not go down that road of actually doing the most good we can. Yeah.
I do enjoy when you speculate about the future. Okay. I know you fancifully, a little bit of like, so much slightly ridiculous, but I appreciate these. You see, do you have any final thoughts about effective altruism and virtue signaling? Anything that we haven't gotten to that you want to have a final note about? I just think that for anybody who's kind of interested in contemporary debates about free speech and viewpoint diversity and partisanship and certain values being promoted by, you know, public education and universities or the media, anybody concerned about sort of far-right versus the far left, all about all that stuff that's, you know, grist for the Twitter mill. I think effective altruism is a really interesting thing to think about as a sort of counter example, yes, to that, right? As a kind of work as the best of virtue signaling, one has virtue signaling done as well as we can, harnessing it, yeah, harnessing it the right way, and doing it as rational and evidence-based and and open-updating as we can. We can't escape it, so we should really use it for good. Like, I think all of our sort of primate and evolutionary instincts. Thank you very much. You have a book about virtue signaling, don't you? I do have a book about virtue signaling, which will be linked below and which is on sale now. Awesome.