Status signaling

Of the subtle things in life, status signaling is one of the subtlest. It is mostly a delicate art refined in the forging fires of one-upmanship (and perhaps envy), but it can become quite unpleasant in the hands of brutes. So what is status signaling? Well if I am earning a lot more than you,

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On virtue signaling

Let me detail some of the many ways in which I am basically a hypocrite. I am a “liberal”. Does that mean that I fight for women’s rights? Do I work tirelessly for the downtrodden? Well I got into an argument with a family member once in which I said that men and women deserved

Mimetic desire

One of my favorite things in life is to discover counterintuitive truths. Hence, I was happy to recently learn about mimetic desire, as discovered by the French polymath René Gerard. Let me reproduce some real zingers from the article:  We borrow our desires from others. Far from being autonomous, our desire for a certain object