Comment by asdasdsddd
6 days ago
Signaling is bad because anyone can signal anything they want. Everyone should be judging either other based on actions not superfluous signals. And yes, maybe you should think twice if you see a swastika tatoo on someone, people change and are multi dimensional.
Is your comment here an "action" or "superfluous signal"?
Do you have a coherent principle that separates one from the other?
Obviously its a gradient, but we can agree that "dedicate time and money" is on the action side and "typing online" being superfluous signaling. And yes, if you knew me in real life, you probably shouldn't weight my hacker news comments over what I spend time and money on.
For what it's worth, I don't think it's so much a gradient. It's that everything is always both an action and a signal. Since signals can affect the behavior of others, all signals are actions. If an action is visible, it may convey something, so all (visible) actions are signals.
> And yes, maybe you should think twice if you see a swastika tatoo on someone, people change and are multi dimensional.
Tattoos can change, too. If I had a tattoo like that, but had come to see the error of my ways, I would have it removed, or if that was too costly and time-consuming (it takes a year or so of painful, expensive, periodic laser treatments to remove a tattoo), I'd have a tattoo artist cover it up with something else.
There's no excuse for keeping a neo-Nazi tattoo if you stop being a neo-Nazi and realize that neo-Nazis are disgusting people.
Everyone "should" be vegan too but I ain't holding my breath