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[Link] Virtue signaling annotated bibliography (Geoffrey Miller)
1 min readAug 14, 2019
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'Virtue signaling' is one of the big obstacles to Effective Altruism. Here's my new annotated bibliography of suggested readings about the topic:
https://www.primalpoly.com/virtue-signaling-further-reading [archive]
It lists about 100 books, with annotations about why they're good and relevant, including works from evolutionary psychology, biology, anthropology, economics, game theory, political theory, moral philosophy, moral psychology, education, history, current affairs, and Effective Altruism.
Authors include Paul Bloom, David Buss, Bryan Caplan, Tyler Cowen, Frans de Waal, Robert Frank, David Geary, Joshua Greene, Jon Haidt, Sam Harris, William MacAskill, Deirdre McClosky, Randy Nesse, Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, Michael Shermer, Peter Singer, and David Sloan Wilson, and Richard Wrangham.
Moderator note: Leaving this in the "Personal Blog" category, as it is just a list of books without much additional detail.
When I first read the excerpt, I thought Miller's point was that effective altruism was bogged down in virtual signaling. But in context, it seems that he meant something like "the desire to signal virtue drives people away from some of the most effective forms of altruism".