Saved by Danielle Vermeer
Signaling: The Language Peacocks, Gazelles, and Humans All Speak
To understand dominance, we need to focus on the high-status behaviors. To understand prestige, however, we need to focus on the low-status behaviors.
Kevin Simler • Social Status: Down the Rabbit Hole | Melting Asphalt
That people show off these illegible globs in public only makes sense from a signaling perspective: They are saying, “look at how many nodes I have in my brain, amazing nodes, I have so many nodes that a peon such as yourself can’t even guess what’s going on here!”
Personal Knowledge Management is Bullshit
Social Signals are tangible indicators of some intangible quality that increases a person’s social status or group affiliation. People don’t wear sports jerseys because they’re stylish—they’re ugly by any aesthetic measure. People wear them because they want to clearly affiliate themselves with their favorite team—it’s a statement of identity.
Josh Kaufman • The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume
The other issue with overvaluing material success is the danger of prioritizing it over other values, such as honesty, nonviolence, and compassion. When people measure themselves not by their behavior, but by the status symbols they’re able to collect, then not only are they shallow, but they’re probably assholes as well.
Mark Manson • The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life (Mark Manson Collection Book 1)
What risk-taking seems to be signalling is gene quality. In effect, they are saying: watch me – I can afford to take risks because my genes are so good I’ll get away with it.
Robin Dunbar • Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships
It turns out that we all have specific and subtle signals and hints that massively influence the way we view others and how they view us. Most of them are miniscule, subconscious, and mired in the minutiae—but these are the details that actually make the difference.