
The Silence Is Deafening - pagade
https://devonzuegel.com/post/the-silence-is-deafening
======
ChrisMarshallNY
I suspect that a lot of the nice behavior on HN is because, for the most part,
people value the community, and consider this a "professional" environment,
and it's not a bad idea to play nice in places where employers/ees can see us
show our butts.

LinkedIn was like that (in fact, sickeningly saccharine), but it's starting to
fray.

Slashdot was good for a while, then CNN and YouTube kicked off their trolls,
and they all went to /. It's now the place to go, if you want swastika ASCII
art.

StackOverflow manages to be a painful place to participate, even though they
are sincerely trying to be decent. I think it's way too "gamified," and
competitive.

For myself, I'm an old troll. I admit that I was a right bastard, back in the
UseNet days.

I am trying to atone.

One of the ways that I do that, is make all my info connected with every place
I participate. If I am a jerk, you know where to find me. Alternatively, if I
make a good impression, you know where to find me.

I also pay attention to downvotes. If a post I make gets a couple of rapid
downvotes, I nuke it. Sometimes, I understand why; sometimes, not. It's just
not worth it to me.

I am also making an effort not to engage too much. I may have a one-or-two-
post back and forth, just to see if we can come to an accommodation, then it's
"Have a great day!". Totally OK to let someone else have the last word. I have
better uses for my time.

~~~
stevedewald
I'd encourage you to consider NOT nuking a post/comment just because it gets
downvotes. We already have too many people afraid to speak for fear of
judgement by the mob. You're clearly a thoughtful person, and I believe the
silent majority out there would appreciate more diversity of opinions.

~~~
Barrin92
I honestly feel it would be a good idea to remove them. Just let people
upvote. There's something disproportionately mean about downvotes. They're not
just a lack of upvotes, they're like beating someone up with a stick.

They're almost never used for their actual purpose anyway, which is to rank
down uninformative or just dumb posts, they always end up being utilized in
heated discussions as a way to stick it to whoever someone is arguing with.

~~~
Reelin
It seems like having only (up / down) conflates at least two distinct messages
that a reader might want to quickly express. The "official" one is
dispassionately judging post quality for moderation purposes. The "wrong" one
is expressing personal opinion of the content.

Many users clearly want to quickly express their personal opinion in a low
effort manner and are more than willing to "misuse" the voting mechanism for
that. There was a post on the front page of HN earlier today about railroad
crossings and blaming end users for (arguably) systemic failures. It seems
like the current incarnation of social media runs afoul of this quite badly in
all cases I'm aware of.

(I'm reminded of an SO comment by Tim Post about comments being their version
of a public trash can and the reputation requirement for them roughly equating
to a municipality welding them shut. The result is pretty much what you would
expect.)

~~~
amelius
Perhaps downvoting should require more effort, like solving a captcha.

------
hnick
I watched the famous movie 12 Angry Men for the first time recently (I think
it holds up well today, BTW).

There is a scene where a man goes on a racist tirade. Instead of engaging in
argument or ignoring him, they stand up and turn their backs.

Here it is:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXlHKTPfLVA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXlHKTPfLVA)

This is much like the disapproving glare mentioned, but what's the online
equivalent?

I play a few online games but not much multiplayer. Public voice chat made it
a much less enjoyable experience. You can mute people of course. But as far as
I know, they don't get told. What if each time it happened it popped up a
message "4 people have muted you today", "3 out of 8 teammates have muted
you"? It could be a useful feedback mechanism.

~~~
anonymousab
Negative feedback and dislike features can reduce engagement or drive people
away, so social media platforms are incentivized to avoid such mechanisms.

~~~
hnick
And I think they're just chasing local maxima. Over the long term, they
devolve and people leave.

~~~
sbarre
This is a very important observation.. It parallels the real-world chase of
short-term profits in business, and short-term "points" in politics.

If the major platforms took a longer view of their communities, and asked
themselves how do you build the _best_ community, not the _biggest_ community,
we might all be better off..

But then their stockholders wouldn't be better off, so it hasn't happened.

That said, now with businesses and advertisers (the actual customers of social
networks - because the users sure aren't) starting to pull ad dollars, we may
see some of this change? One can hope..

------
11thEarlOfMar
A big part of in person conversations are about building equity in the
relationship. Even from the first encounter, you express what you think about
and how you think about it and look for places that your thoughts intersect
with others. Those that have a beneficial intersection you're likely to
explore further, invest more and build more equity.

Online, there is little chance that you'll establish a new relationship and
build equity with other users. You've got hundreds or thousands of followers,
so do they and in many cases, the person you respond to may never see your
reply, let alone remember your username for more than a few minutes.

These exchanges can be so fleeting because you're both typically anonymous.
Anonymity is antithetical to trust and trust is required for equity. There is
little that an anonymous person can do for you, and little you could do for
them.

Contrast Twitter and LinkedIn. Both have feeds and allow messaging and
conversations. But since you know the people you're interacting with on
LinkedIn, many times personally, you are civil, helpful and courteous because
one day they may actually be able to do something to benefit you. You invest
in them and building equity in your relationship in expectation that if there
is something you can do for them, or they can do for you in the future, it's
there to leverage.

Twitter just feels like, I dunno, looking for love in all the wrong places?

People have a multitude of purposes for engaging online anonymously. Learning
or trolling, ego support or battling boredom, maybe a better solution would be
to target those purposes as independent platforms and structure the dialog to
support the purpose.

~~~
mirimir
Yeah, friends have occasionally encouraged me to use Twitter, over the years
since the mid 00s. But it's never appealed to me, and so I have ~no experience
with it, except from following posted links.

But anyway, you say:

> Anonymity is antithetical to trust and trust is required for equity. There
> is little that an anonymous person can do for you, and little you could do
> for them.

While that's generally so, I have developed many more-or-less long-term
anonymous relationships, over the past couple decades. And some of them have
led to interesting collaborations, and even paying work.

------
burlesona
This article made me realize, part of the quality of the conversation on HN
comes from the ability to downvote.

I’ve never thought about this before, but one of the effects of Twitter and
Facebook only having positive reinforcement is that you don’t get the
“disapproving stare.” It’s possible for a person to “like” with some degree of
anonymity and no effort, but not possible to do the reverse. Worse, since the
Algorithms heavily bias content based on “likes,” there’s no recognition of
content that is actually broadly liked versus content that is polar.

Also, for individual posters in places with downvoting, the little dopamine
hit you get from upvotes is heavily countered by the bad feeling of downvotes.

I know that in my own participation on HN I will occasionally think of a
snarky thing to say, but usually don’t post it because I know it’ll get
downvoted, which I don’t like, and that moment of hesitation is usually enough
for me to think “yeah that is actually unhelpful and not worth posting.”

This all probably very obvious to most of this crowd, but I honestly haven’t
considered it before. How different would the world be if Facebook and Twitter
merely had dislike buttons to go along with likes?

~~~
quotemstr
Reddit has downvotes as well and its conversations are uniformly bad. Slate
Star Codex has a creaky old antique of a comment system without voting at all,
but its conversations were of the highest quality. So are LWN's. I don't think
voting mechanics affect discussion quality as much as you think. What matters
a lot more is a sense of mutual respect, shared purpose, and, honestly, a
certain level of average intellectual horsepower.

~~~
mundo
I'm a huge fan of Scott's writing, but the forum discussions at SSC did not
seem particularly good (for any value of good - niceness, erudition, signal-
to-noise, etc) to me. Certainly they were much worse than HN on average.

~~~
wanderer2323
Not sure what you mean by the 'forum discussions'. The open thread discussions
were almost uniformly of higher quality and depth than most HN threads.

~~~
jessaustin
Could you link to some examples? My impressions so far have agreed with
GP's...

------
FailMore
There are two services (one built by me) out there which have this in mind,
providing an online space for deep public discussions around a topic.

Taaalk ([https://taaalk.co/](https://taaalk.co/)) is mine. It is currently
less focused around debate, and more around exploring topics:

E.g. OCD: [https://taaalk.co/t/exploring-obsessive-compulsive-
disorder](https://taaalk.co/t/exploring-obsessive-compulsive-disorder) Eating
disorders: [https://taaalk.co/t/discussing-eating-
disorders](https://taaalk.co/t/discussing-eating-disorders) Bitcoin:
[https://taaalk.co/t/bitcoin-maxima-other-crypto-
things](https://taaalk.co/t/bitcoin-maxima-other-crypto-things) Flag design:
[https://taaalk.co/t/the-power-and-significance-of-
flags](https://taaalk.co/t/the-power-and-significance-of-flags) Chess:
[https://taaalk.co/t/how-to-think-about-chess](https://taaalk.co/t/how-to-
think-about-chess) Psychedelics & Mental Health: [https://taaalk.co/t/falling-
inward-discussing-the-role-of-ps...](https://taaalk.co/t/falling-inward-
discussing-the-role-of-psychedelics-in-modern-medicine-and-mental-health)

Etc...

Another alternative that is built by a fellow HNer is Debubble
([https://debubble.me/](https://debubble.me/)). It is more focused around
debate than Taaalk. There are a fixed number of messages / discussion.

~~~
uhhyeahdude
Oh, wow... I clicked on one of the topics on your site, a topic of great
personal relevance, and I really like what I see so far.

I’m on a quick break, but later on I would like to join the discussion,
because it seems like a healthy environment that is oriented around
understanding, inclusivity, and mutual aid.

I’m sorry to be so vague with my feedback, but I figure it is still at least a
little bit useful, and hopefully even a little encouraging as a small
validation of the concept. Thank you!

~~~
FailMore
No problem, thank you for it.

If you want to email me about anything, my email is in my bio.

------
Thorentis
Good observation. I have noticed that people very vocal online do not do so
well in person. They forget what it's like to have people looking at you
disapprovingly or to be forced to express your views coherently the first or
second attempt, without the chance to craft the perfect 140 char response.

Unfortunately, as more and more young people grow up with digital spaces as
their primary domain, they are losing the ability to communicate in person. I
have a few friends that are high school teachers, and they all notice this
trend. Every class discussion involves short sentence answers, low effort,
very little passion. But if you let them use a digital space to post opinions
(like a class discussion forum) things can become polarised, or at least more
passionate than they were in class.

~~~
casefields
Toastmasters! Public speaking is an incredible valuable skill that you need in
all walks of life. People should check out their local chapter:
[https://www.toastmasters.org/](https://www.toastmasters.org/)

~~~
sinker
I've come across people mentioning Toastmasters online at least 3 dozen times
in separate contexts over the years. Yet no one IRL knows what the hell it is
or where to find one. How can something be so commonplace here and completely
alien outside of online spaces. I've never been to one or had the word
_toastmasters_ ever mentioned in person before. Is this like an alcoholics
anonymous, but for public speaking?

------
dvt
I have a few friends that are trying to "solve this problem" \-- ranging from
ideas on better, more inclusive social networks, to vetting (news) sources and
ideas, to self-governance, to curation-heavy communities.

I personally don't really think it's a "problem" \-- people simply, on
average, just _don 't care_ about other opinions ( _especially_ opposing
ones). This happens on both sides of any debate. Why learn about, study, and
discuss the moral implications of abortion and wade through its ethical morass
when you can just share some provocative meme? Why actually _read_ the W.E.B
DuBois and Booker T. Washington debates when you can just share some
celebrity's shallow BLM Tweet? Hacker News is a rare gem[1]. Most people
aren't educated, curious, and willing to accept when/if they're wrong. This is
exacerbated by the re-emergence of yellow journalism in mainstream media
(where accountability for misleading or even false headlines is nonexistent)
because these days it's all about the clicks.

So we're left with Twitter and Facebook. And people, on average, _like_ their
echo chambers. They _don 't_ want to be challenged or poked or prodded. In
2020, Socrates would be banned from Twitter.

[1] Although, perhaps as a sign of the times, even this post is getting
downvoted without any discussion.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
I fear you are being over cynical. I think most people don't have the time or
energy to care about so many different things. The person we imagine in the
conversation will care deeply about family, friends. Possibly about their work
and maybe one or two "big" issues - but grief there are a lot of issues being
top-of-lungs- screamed right now and ten more to come.

Take our persona abi e and put them on a citizens jury and give them two weeks
paid time to get involved in an issue (like Irish did on abortion laws) and we
will see nuanced balanced decision making (which we may or may not agree
with).

And for the very big issues that become part of the "public conversation" this
does happen - I am pretty sure that most people in the UK considered the
issues around Brexit as deeply as they wanted to - there was time motivation
and information available to all.

So for most issues yes they fly past us all, covered in fake news and
attention grabbing antics, and sometimes we get angry but most of the time
it's just wallpaper.

I don't like the wallpaper and don't think it's conducive to pleasant
conversation but I doubt few people are actually fooled.

~~~
pjc50
Brexit was dominated by misinformation and bad prospectouses far more than any
recent election. People voted against things that were not going to happen any
time soon, and in favor of things that were never going to be delivered, like
the extra NHS money.

------
proc0
You don’t have to turn this into something. It doesn’t have to upset you.

It’s silly to try to escape other people’s faults. They are inescapable. Just
try to escape your own.

The more we value things outside our control, the less control we have.

-Marcus Aurelius

~~~
marcusverus
I'm a big fan of Meditations. Having read both the Gregory Hays translation
and the George Long, I have a hard time mapping these very different
translations as referring onto the same text. My first impression was,
"clearly the George Long translation is a _real_ translation of the text,
whereas the Gregory Hays is a contemporary attempt to restate the thesis of
each lassage without strict adherence to the original." But without the
ability to _read_ the original, this is pure speculation/ignorance on my part.
Does anyone have any insight into which translation is the most faithful to
the original?

~~~
proc0
Yeah, it would be nice to learn Latin and read the originals.

~~~
wenc
Interesting tidbit: Marcus Aurelius, despite being a Roman emperor, wrote
Meditations in Koine Greek.

I once had a conversation with a Koine Greek scholar (also a Lyft driver, he
was driving me to the airport -- turns out the job market for Ph.D.s in Koine
Greek was/is not great), and he claims that most native English speakers
should be able to achieve reading proficiency in Koine Greek in a matter of 6
months. It's apparently a very regular language.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations)

~~~
proc0
Interesting indeed, thanks for sharing.

------
rattray
Wow, this changes how I think about online discourse more than anything I can
remember.

It actually makes me feel a lot better - rather than feeling like the whole
world and all my friends are angry and unreasonable, it reminds me that, no,
most of them are just being invisible. And that even the ones who seem
unreasonable are just a product of their environment.

The funny thing is it could really be solved with a "that" feature on Twitter,
to quietly keep track of when others disapprove, and even to anonymously and
privately let the tweeter know.

~~~
acidburnNSA
A that feature? Is that a typo?

~~~
rattray
Sorry, yes, that was autocorrect - I meant "tut", which had been suggested by
someone else on the thread

------
lifeisstillgood
The digital "tut" is perhaps a inter-social-media protocol we could create.

Like a downvote, it indicates disapproval and starts trying to, as this
article persuasively says, move social nuance online.

Twitter, Facebook et al could all have this alongside a like button, on a
RESTful interface so it's agnostic about the client.

Many, many years ago I stumbled across a web page hosted on a white
supremacist site but was third in google's ranking for Martin Luther King
search term. It struck me then that what would be useful was not for me to
link to that site (hence adding to its pagerank) but to link to that site with
an href attribute that indicated something was wrong about the facts
presented.

I think overall this is the same problem of short selling - and it's not clear
how to fix it.

~~~
chillacy
Humans seem to have evolved to live in small-ish societies where being given
the "cold shoulder" or being ostracized was a great danger. I'm always mixed
though whether abandoning that is good or bad.

On the one hand in liberal societies we're more free to express ourselves than
ever, love whomever, etc. On the other hand, it does seem like anyone can find
a subculture for whatever they believe in, even if it's destructive.

------
fzeroracer
I think the problem I have with this argument is that it assumes 'Angry Alice'
is there to argue in good faith. Unfortunately I've learned that there are
many, many 'Angry Alices' out there that exist solely to rile up people and
they get validation out of misleading people or tricking reasonable people.

At the dinner party it's much harder to pull off this sort of trick because
you're dealing with very real people face to face. Once you've caused large
amounts of friction with people in reality, they're less likely to engage with
you and will outright avoid you.

But when you're on the internet, you have an endless supply of people that you
can troll. And often it's become harder and harder to separate the trolls from
what people actually believe.

~~~
totemandtoken
The author does mention that though, except they call a bad-faith arguer a
"grifter" instead of a "troll."

~~~
ponker
The distinction I keep is that trolls do it for fun and grifters do it for
money. There is a lot of money in the outrage industry and lots of prospectors
looking for gold.

------
bartelby
I’ve been trying to have more 1-1 conversations with friends these days about
some of the more controversial topics in the news when it comes up, basically
an IRL version of a DM, and it’s been interesting to see how people’s opinions
align against the Twitter opinion spectrum. About half have been much more
moderate than anything I’ve seen online, but the other half actually do align
with the more radical and loud voices shouting about whatever it is that’s
trending on Twitter at that moment. I always thought that Twitter wasn’t
really representative of what most people thought/believed but now I’m not so
sure. Of course this is just based on personal anecdotes. And to be fair, all
of the 1-1 conversations I’ve had have been productive and each time I’ve been
able to walk away with some ideas that I haven’t had before.

------
totemandtoken
Love this. One of the most frustrating aspects of social media is the lack of
feedback, or maybe more accurately the one-sidedness of the feedback. I
personally assume that means no one cares about what I write, but maybe they
just don't have the energy to tell me off. Either way, this hits the nail
right on the head in my opinion

------
ferros
On top of all this there is an arbiter (social network) that filters and
decides what is important enough be shared maximally. Before anybody even
hears your conversation it has been filtered to a degree, there is no organic
interpretation of the situation by the group like there would be in real life.

------
christiansakai
It seems like too much work, and not sure if it is a good use of someone's
time to keep answering and writing long facts to people, or random strangers.

It isn't realistic to expect everyone, or the majority of people, do this on
the internet.

------
082349872349872
A single bit of disapproval may be too little information. In the southern US
last century, "So, when are you inviting me over?" not only conveyed
reasonably non-confrontational disapproval, but also the specific message that
one shouldn't speak too much of one's own acquisitions in a wide public. "Your
ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter" is a
similar stock phrase to gently suggest online that someone is not preaching to
their choir.

Someone asked a few days ago on HN what to do about clearly racist rhetoric in
the twenty-first century. Maybe we ought to discover a similar stock phrase,
such as "All that matters is can the fine horse see" or "Nobody's saying they
don't appreciate what Jenny did" (or perhaps something from Blazing Saddles?
"So, when are we stampeding cattle through the Vatican?").

(but, even assuming such a phrase were discovered and originally used in a
targeted fashion, how should we avoid the nearly-inevitable Godwin-treadmill
flak thereafter?)

------
tambourine_man
Here you go, server is currently giving me 503

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://devonzuegel.com/post/the-
silence-is-deafening)

On a side note, why does Google make it so hard for mobile users to use its
cache feature?

~~~
dredmorbius
IA WBM is a more reliable archive tool:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20200703225029/https://devonzueg...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200703225029/https://devonzuegel.com/post/the-
silence-is-deafening)

~~~
tambourine_man
Yes, but it's a bit slower too.

------
kordlessagain
Good luck trying to do this with every single participating entity. The
"problem", if there is one to be defined, is not the "silence" of the user,
but the default behavior to not surface the access of the data in question to
others who are accessing or discussing the data. Basically servers need to
divulge all meta data about an endpoint, including access and times.

Its a "security flaw" of the Internet and web services, as they are currently
defined. If someone would get around to integrating Lightning with the 402
HTTP error code, it might make it a bit better. Then again, someone has to
convince all the users to use new browsers and technology, which will take
forever.

In the meantime, a service which shows who and where the content is being
accessed, and a revenue model that fits with that viewing would be
interesting.

Vote me down, but no discussion is just more of the same meta problem. Users
vs. hidden/unknown corporate control.

------
bobthechef
Downvoting is one way disapproval is expressed, so the premise is the article
is flawed. However, we must also remember that the point of speech is to
convey truth, not crowd pleasing, not stirring up conflict for the kicks, not
bland milquetoast niceness. What the appropriate tone or style is, or whether
engagement makes sense at all, will depend on the situation and here we need
prudence (in the classical sense). Feedback can be of help in shaping
prudence, but it is not the final arbiter of the correct course is action. It
must be examined for validity.

So please, do not couch your language. Be clear and direct. Let your yeses be
yeses and your noes be noes. Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless,
hesitating, non-committal language. Listen to to your interlocutors, but
speaks plainly and honestly. Let the chips fall where they may.

------
chiefalchemist
> It gets worse—Angry Alice only sees feedback from extremists, so she doesn't
> receive more nuanced signals that might actually cause her to reflect on her
> behavior

But this works both way. Actually, it works all ways. That is, the person who
marginalizes Alice is also marginalized by someone else. And so on and so on.
Eventually, everything is binary. There's little if any grey area.

No doubt a small minority actually deserve to be marginalized. Those existed
long before the internet. The internet is different. You don't need to work to
understand or even engage. Instead, many seek to minimize friction and
maximize positive feedback. The validity of the source is irrelevant. Digital
love is good regardless of the source.

------
nabla9
Best kind of disapproval makes people reflect and change behaviour. That kind
of disapproval works best if it comes from people in your in-group or from
people you respect.

Anonymous downvoting like in big forum is just for moderation that excludes
people.

------
guerrilla
I've long thought that the problem with Twitter and Facebook is that there's
no downvote button. This article is about something different though. What if
we had a platform like these but posts had a metric of likes or shares per
view displayed on them rather than absolute numbers. I really want to see how
that goes actually. Simply displaying views might give a totally different
interaction as well.

------
pabo
I think he hits the nail in the head. He's main observation is this:

"...digital spaces generally have no equivalent of a disapproving glare.
You're stuck choosing between staying silent and entering the fray, with few
options in between. If you have little reason to believe that other reasonable
people will back you up, you're going to stick with the default: silence."

In this permanent work from home situation, I can relate...

~~~
apsec112
FWIW, Devon is a woman:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20200524035931/https://devonzueg...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200524035931/https://devonzuegel.com/page/about-
me)

~~~
pabo
Ohh, thanks for pointing that out.

------
mjw1007
I think this direct message technique has always been going on.

The reason people on Usenet would say "The lurkers support me in email" (until
they learned that saying that was taboo) is that the lurkers were supporting
them in email.

------
ilaksh
Well good ideas, but maybe Twitter should have a disapproving glare button and
a way to incentivize it's use by reasonable people.

------
curation
Polemics require belief that subjectivity is born out of battle. What has
changed is that belief.

------
buboard
A deeper issue is the cultural shift to an overly judgemental culture which
has been built thoughout the decades. The media always, always has thrived on
creating moral panics, but the public wasn't always so gullible to them.

There's a noticeable shift towards conservativism and a constant preoccupation
with their public image among younger generations. It's even noticeable in
statistics , e.g. disapproval of nudism.

------
jger15
Curious if this is related to the Balaji Srinivasan/Taylor Lorenz spat on
Twitter.

------
sergiotapia
Arguing online is a complete and total waste of time. Designed to make you
spin your wheels. You aren't doing _anything_ productive.

------
basicplus2
DM = Direct Message

------
Ghjklov
>speak out

>get attacked

>stay silent

>get attacked

It used to be that the only way to win a losing game is to not play, but even
now that's not an option anymore.

~~~
danlugo92
How do you exactly get attacked by staying silent?

~~~
commander_k33n
A common slogan these days is "Silence is violence.".

------
mD5pPxMcS6fVWKE
But what if Alice is right and silent majority is wrong? I would say silent
majority is mostly wrong in recent times.

------
VLM
The linked article suggestions would work on a holiness-neutral topic like
emacs vs vi, but I don't think the suggested tactics would work against holy
virtue signalling.

~~~
mcguire
Can we ditch the "virtue signalling" meme? It comes across as a simple
dismissal, which doesn't improve any situation.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
The term can be overused. But we need a way to describe the very real
underlying phenomenon, of expectations that everyone ought to endorse and
actively promote promote a particular moral stance. Trying to talk about
modern activism without the term "virtue signaling" would be like trying to
talk about churches without the term "religion".

~~~
Intermernet
The term "virtue signalling" is a derogatory term for something that every
person does in pretty much every form of communication. You can perceive it in
everything from scientific papers, to song lyrics, to professional
conferences, to children's conversations.

The use of the term is purely to denigrate the person by vaguely deriding the
values that they've presented as the basis for their argument.

If you use the term you've chosen to argue against the character of the
person, and not against the content of their statements.

~~~
cousin_it
> _The term "virtue signalling" is a derogatory term for something that every
> person does in pretty much every form of communication._

There are different virtues though. A lot of online debate is between those
who want to signal intelligence and those who want to signal morality. I'm on
the former side, as intelligence signaling gave us civilization, while
morality signaling is mostly about painting targets on people.

~~~
jessaustin
Just as "virtue signalling" is not the same as virtue, "intelligence
signalling" is not the same as intelligence. Some would say it's the latter
that "gave us civilization".

~~~
cousin_it
Sure, though signaling high intelligence could actually be the main use of
intelligence, if it's a Fisherian runaway. And it's plausible that such use
led to civilization: figuring out a beautiful theory feels purposeful in the
same way as building a beautiful nest.

