Twits, Midwits, and Intellectual Hipsters
Signaling is everywhere in the animal kingdom. The instinct that drives a peacock to show off his feathers is the same compulsion that brings the 50-something to the corvette dealership. Signaling is the act of distinguishing oneself from the rest of the group. While most animals engage in signaling, I want to focus on something that only humans do: countersignaling.
First, let’s start with the Wikipedia definition for countersignaling:
Countersignaling is the behavior where agents with the highest level of a given property invest less into proving it than individuals with a medium level of the same property.
Why would someone want to invest less into proving their fitness? Because people in the top cohort don’t worry about differentiating themselves from those in the bottom, they care about differentiating themselves from those in the middle. This then leads to the intriguing fact that the people at the top start resembling people at the bottom.
Let’s go through some examples. Regular people wear casual clothes, rich people wear expensive clothes, super-rich people wear casual clothes:
Non-powerful people give weak handshakes, powerful people give firm handshakes, ultra-powerful people give weak handshakes. That CEO who drives a Honda is signaling her wealth more than if she drove a Ferrari.
But what if, instead of status, people countersignaled intelligence? Scott Alexander has an article on exactly this, where he discusses the tendency of people to be “meta-contrarian” and take counter-contrarian positions for the sake of signaling their own intelligence. These people are called intellectual hipsters.
But before someone can countersignal, there needs to be someone signaling in the first place. Signaling intelligence usually comes in the form of contrarianism, here is Scott on when you commonly see this:
So my hypothesis is that if a certain side of an issue has very obvious points in support of it, and the other side of an issue relies on much more subtle points that the average person might not be expected to grasp, then adopting the second side of the issue will become a signal for intelligence, even if that side of the argument is wrong.
The example used in the article is about the benefit of first world societies — the non-signaling position is that living in a modern industrialized nation is pretty great. However, a contrarian may bring up points about how “authentic” or “community oriented” life is for people in poorer countries. The contrarian in this example may be trying to signal their intelligence.
But here is where countersignaling comes in: a super-smart person comes along and feels the need to separate themselves from the contrarian, and starts saying things like “but actually, first world countries are pretty great and have benefits that massively outweigh the costs.” This is obviously not a hot take, but remember that when countersignaling, those at the top resemble those at the bottom. We have found our meta-contrarian, intellectual hipster.
However, the problem is that the signaled or countersignaled position may be wrong, because the incentive to hold the position is to signal rather than be correct. This makes signaling very relevant insofar that it can have real world impact through directly shaping people’s beliefs. No one gets hurt when signaling status or wealth but signaling intelligence can lead to incorrect views being held for the wrong reasons. While it does not mean that the person taking the contrarian or meta-contrarian position is always signaling, but we should be aware that they might be.
Below are a few examples from the article, each more controversial than the next. Please note that this is not saying any of these positions are true or correct, but instead shows examples of the default | contrarian | meta-contrarian dynamic.
-Don’t care about Africa | we should give Aid to Africa | giving aid harms Africa
-Climate change isn’t real | climate change is real | any climate model is unusable
-KKK style racist | politically correct liberal | “but there are scientifically proven differences”
-Misogyny | women’s rights movement | men’s rights movement
-God is real | religion is for idiots | Girardian Christian
Does someone believe that giving aid harms Africa? Or do they just hold that belief to signal intelligence over people who believe we should give aid to Africa?
Putting my self-reflection hat on for a moment, I personally feel the tug of being an intellectual hipster with the last example around religion. While my actual beliefs put me firmly in the middle camp, I can’t help but feel the urge to go on a tirade about how “religion is the most important thing humans ever invented.” You will feel really smart saying that in a room full of atheists, and if you “feel smart” when you say something, that’s usually a red flag.
The point is that there could be hidden incentives for even extremely smart people to hold a belief other than because of its accuracy. It is important for everyone to understand this human tendency and to ask themselves when they hold an opinion: “do I actually believe this, or am I just trying to signal my intelligence”?
But I didn’t just write this post to summarize Scott’s article, I also wrote to talk about memes. Memes are really good at encapsulating esoteric concepts in succinct images, and we happen to have one that addresses this phenomenon:
The problem with the Midwit meme, though, is that it always frames 1 & 3 as the favorable opinions. Obviously, everyone wants to be the jedi (aka intellectual hipster) rather than the crying nerd, but as we learned above, the intellectual hipster may not necessarily be correct! Let’s look at a few examples.
These are two good examples because most people would agree 1 & 3 are correct for one, but 2 is correct in the other. The midwit meme effectively just becomes self-confirming for whichever position creates it. Below are two versions, one in favor of vaccines and one against.
So the next time you’re at a dinner party and have the urge to drop a spicy take, or to have a cold take in response to a spicy take, or see the midwit meme cross your Twitter feed, just remember that sometimes the jedi can be wrong and the crying nerd can be right.
