4 ms·

This almost feels like a virtue signaling PR piece.

geofft 9y ago
I have yet to see a use of "virtue signaling" that usefully distinguishes it from "believing that certain things are good and certain things are bad, and publicly saying as much, and advocating for a society that supports the good things and not the bad things," something that every generation in humanity has considered essential (and something that has traditionally been a thing conservatives have accused liberals of not doing, incidentally).
- i_am_nomad 9y ago
  I suspect “virtue signaling” implies shallowness or insincerity, and that one is stating a position for affiliation instead of advocacy.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    In other words, it’s a dog whistle for accusations of insincerity when there is an absence of evidence to support that point?
  - musage 9y ago
    Couldn't that be rewritten as "advocating a position for affiliation instead of advocacy"? And if I point out a potential bug in your or our program, is the claim "you only do this to impress people who hate this type of bug" (which can rarely be proven or refuted) a good enough reason to not even look into it?
    - geofft 9y ago
      Right - even if the "virtue signaling" activity is being done to promote goodness out of a desire for social status than an inherent belief in that goodness, what's wrong with it, as long as it's done effectively? (If it's done ineffectively or fraudulently, that's a problem, but the problem there seems to be the fraud.)
- zpvxdlk 9y ago
  Virtue signaling is used when someone (in this case Apple) is just trying to _look_ like they care. As the primary drivers of iPhone addiction, it is easy to assume that they are only doing this study as PR
  - ceejayoz 9y ago
    > As the primary drivers of iPhone addiction That's an odd way of breaking the problem down. Apple's one of the major drivers of smartphone addiction, but if you compare them to Google, they're a lot more likely to genuinely move towards limiting these sorts of issues. After all, their profits come more from the hardware sale, whereas Google gets their profits from ongoing usage of the device.
- derefr 9y ago
  "Virtue signalling" mostly means: thinking that the public generally thinks that certain things are good and certain things are bad, and so—whether or not you think those things personally—you know that it's good PR to support consensus-good things and be outraged by consensus-bad things. Virtue signalling is at its most stark when the "good" thing is known to not actually be good, and yet companies do it anyway because they know that the public mistakenly believes it to be good. For example: agro businesses virtue-signal by using "pesticide-free" processes—which aren't actually "pesticide free" in the spirit-of-the-law sense, but rather just make use of alternative chemicals as pesticides that aren't classed as pesticides by the FDA. These alternative pesticides are worse for the crops, and for your health, than the finely-tuned ones that get sprayed on regular crops. The businesses are signalling virtuousness by doing something knowingly anti-virtuous. Another example (this time more in the editorial vein of the OP): governments and nonprofits love pushing for increased residential recycling. It's commerce and industry that generate the vast majority of waste; residential waste accounts for less than 10% of all waste, and recycling already has decent-enough take-up among residences that the additional ROI on residential recycling advocacy is actually negative. (I.e., we've passed the point where the marginal person affected by recycling advocacy actually helps the system by recycling; the people being reached by advocacy now are people with high-enough-paying jobs that it has more benefit to let them spend the time they would spend recycling working, and then tax their additional income and use it to pay for sorting facility workers.) But it's consensus-virtuous to preach the individual responsibility to recycle, so companies love taking part in spreading this advocacy. (Often in hypocritical ways: they'll give their office buildings separated waste containers so that the employees can feel better about having recycled—and then dump all the containers into landfill, because that's more cost-efficient.)
  - geofft 9y ago
    Thanks. But it seems like there are old terms that more accurately describe these cases - hypocrisy, or deception. And neither hypocrisy nor deception applies (I think) to the case described in this article. Maybe a more accurate way of phrasing my complaint "virtue signaling" is a grab bag that means one of two things: saying that a good thing is good and genuinely believing it (though perhaps being louder about saying than doing), and saying that a good thing is good when it's not actually good, or as a way of giving yourself cover when doing a bad thing. The cases you describe seem like the latter, but this article seems like the former.
ShabbosGoy 9y ago
I wouldn’t say it’s virtue signaling. It’s more like Phillip Morris conducting a study on smoking, or Exxon-Mobil conducting a study on climate change.

I have yet to see a use of "virtue signaling" that usefully distinguishes it from "believing that certain things are good and certain things are bad, and publicly saying as much, and advocating for a society that supports the good things and not the bad things," something that every generation in humanity has considered essential (and something that has traditionally been a thing conservatives have accused liberals of not doing, incidentally).

i_am_nomad 9y ago
I suspect “virtue signaling” implies shallowness or insincerity, and that one is stating a position for affiliation instead of advocacy.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  In other words, it’s a dog whistle for accusations of insincerity when there is an absence of evidence to support that point?
- musage 9y ago
  Couldn't that be rewritten as "advocating a position for affiliation instead of advocacy"? And if I point out a potential bug in your or our program, is the claim "you only do this to impress people who hate this type of bug" (which can rarely be proven or refuted) a good enough reason to not even look into it?
  - geofft 9y ago
    Right - even if the "virtue signaling" activity is being done to promote goodness out of a desire for social status than an inherent belief in that goodness, what's wrong with it, as long as it's done effectively? (If it's done ineffectively or fraudulently, that's a problem, but the problem there seems to be the fraud.)
zpvxdlk 9y ago
Virtue signaling is used when someone (in this case Apple) is just trying to _look_ like they care. As the primary drivers of iPhone addiction, it is easy to assume that they are only doing this study as PR
- ceejayoz 9y ago
  > As the primary drivers of iPhone addiction That's an odd way of breaking the problem down. Apple's one of the major drivers of smartphone addiction, but if you compare them to Google, they're a lot more likely to genuinely move towards limiting these sorts of issues. After all, their profits come more from the hardware sale, whereas Google gets their profits from ongoing usage of the device.
derefr 9y ago
"Virtue signalling" mostly means: thinking that the public generally thinks that certain things are good and certain things are bad, and so—whether or not you think those things personally—you know that it's good PR to support consensus-good things and be outraged by consensus-bad things. Virtue signalling is at its most stark when the "good" thing is known to not actually be good, and yet companies do it anyway because they know that the public mistakenly believes it to be good. For example: agro businesses virtue-signal by using "pesticide-free" processes—which aren't actually "pesticide free" in the spirit-of-the-law sense, but rather just make use of alternative chemicals as pesticides that aren't classed as pesticides by the FDA. These alternative pesticides are worse for the crops, and for your health, than the finely-tuned ones that get sprayed on regular crops. The businesses are signalling virtuousness by doing something knowingly anti-virtuous. Another example (this time more in the editorial vein of the OP): governments and nonprofits love pushing for increased residential recycling. It's commerce and industry that generate the vast majority of waste; residential waste accounts for less than 10% of all waste, and recycling already has decent-enough take-up among residences that the additional ROI on residential recycling advocacy is actually negative. (I.e., we've passed the point where the marginal person affected by recycling advocacy actually helps the system by recycling; the people being reached by advocacy now are people with high-enough-paying jobs that it has more benefit to let them spend the time they would spend recycling working, and then tax their additional income and use it to pay for sorting facility workers.) But it's consensus-virtuous to preach the individual responsibility to recycle, so companies love taking part in spreading this advocacy. (Often in hypocritical ways: they'll give their office buildings separated waste containers so that the employees can feel better about having recycled—and then dump all the containers into landfill, because that's more cost-efficient.)
- geofft 9y ago
  Thanks. But it seems like there are old terms that more accurately describe these cases - hypocrisy, or deception. And neither hypocrisy nor deception applies (I think) to the case described in this article. Maybe a more accurate way of phrasing my complaint "virtue signaling" is a grab bag that means one of two things: saying that a good thing is good and genuinely believing it (though perhaps being louder about saying than doing), and saying that a good thing is good when it's not actually good, or as a way of giving yourself cover when doing a bad thing. The cases you describe seem like the latter, but this article seems like the former.

ShabbosGoy 9y ago

I wouldn’t say it’s virtue signaling. It’s more like Phillip Morris conducting a study on smoking, or Exxon-Mobil conducting a study on climate change.