Rhetoric of encomium

How do institutions form around notions of merit?

Me: what about blurbs as evidence of implied social networks? Who blurbs whom? How are these invitations sent/received and by whom?

diachronic: how blurbs evolve over time

Signals, can blurbs predict: - the field of the work - gender - other

Emergence or decrease of signals with respect to time

Imitation of styles and choices. - how does this happen? contagion - I'm reminded of George Mathew Dutcher admonition:

Imitation to be avoided. Avoid the mannerisms and personal peculiarities of method or style of well-known writers, such as Carlyle or Macaulay. (see: https://hypothes.is/a/ROR3VCDEEe2sZNOy4rwRgQ )

Systematic studies of related words within corpora. (this idea should have a clever name) word2vec, word correlations, information theory

How does praise work?

metaphors within blurbs (eg: light, scintillating, brilliant, new lens, etc.)

M. Kawakatsu, P. S. Chodrow, N. Eikmeier, D. B. Larremore, Emergence of hierarchy in networked endorsement dynamics. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 118, e2015188118 (2021)

This may be of interest to Jerry Michalski et al.

https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2022/10/18/more-mit-challenge/

But hey China! If you care, it's just a few hours of work you could do yourself!

This sort of virtue signalling is abominable unless they told the Secret Service and had the offending data removed from Venmo prior to publishing.

Here's a link to the penultimate draft (not for citation): https://www.academia.edu/46814693/The_Signaling_Function_of_Sharing_Fake_Stories

This broad thesis sounds to me like something I've read before, perhaps in George Lakoff about people signaling group membership or perhaps people with respect to their voting tendencies. The question isn't who should I vote for specifically, but who would someone like me (ie. who would my group, my tribe) vote for?

This sort of phenomena is likely easier to see/show in sports fans who will tell blatant untruths or delude themselves about the teams of which they are fans.The team winning at all costs will cause them to put on blinders.

A particular recent example of something like this with relation to what might otherwise be a logical business decision is seen in incoming Amazon CEO Andy Jassy nixing the idea of building in Philadelphia due to his own NFL fandom https://www.phillyvoice.com/amazon-hq2-philly-eagles-giants-rivalry-andy-jassy-jeff-bezos-amazon-unbound/

Why would someone make a potential multi-million dollar decision over their sports preference?

Kumar, A., Chowdhary, S., Capraro, V., & Perc, M. (2021). Evolution of honesty in higher-order social networks. Physical Review E, 104(5), 054308. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.104.054308

Social Signaling and Childhood Immunization: A Field Experiment in Sierra Leone. (2018, December 10). Innovations for Poverty Action. https://www.poverty-action.org/publication/social-signaling-and-childhood-immunization-field-experiment-sierra-leone

This is an important mechanism that cells can respond to their environment and extracellular cues. Cells sense their environment and modify genes, mRNA splicing, protein expression and protein modifying to respond to these cues.

When I hear stories like these, I definitely think about the broader social injustices we're ignoring in lieu of the virtue signaling. Surely language is a place to start and it certainly matters, but aren't there far worse systematic injustices that we could more directly focus on? In the Pareto principled view, the virtue signaling is part of the 80% we should ignore while we focus on the more important 20% issues.

Johnson, Samuel Gregory Blane. ‘Dimensions of Altruism: Do Evaluations of Prosocial Behavior Track Social Good or Personal Sacrifice?’ Preprint. PsyArXiv, 22 August 2020. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/r85jv.

Signaling definition + examples