This brought to mind the case of Peter Bergmann (an alias). He went to the Northwest of Ireland and took his life by walking into the sea. Before he did so, he made strenuous efforts to ensure his real identity would never be discovered. [cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Bergmann_Case]. I also recommend a short Irish documentary called The Last Days of Peter Bergmann [https://vimeo.com/166977498]
Stories like these always remind me about Satoshi Nakamoto, who too, in this digital age has managed to remain unknown and at the same time very prominently be part of the technical community in the early days of bitcoin.
It is as long as the state/ IPs do not have identity on every connection. It can even then be subverted, if somebody lets another user piggyback on that connection.
> It’s hard to imagine that he would have been trusted to the degree he was, or extended the same aid, if he had been a woman or an immigrant or a person of color.
They just had to throw this irrelevant bit of virtue signaling in, didn't they? Ironically, support for homeless/transient women is vastly superior to that available for men.
Ya, what was that about? Every single person knows that society is more willing to trust a woman who claims to be in distress over a man who claims to be. [1][2][3]
There's a reason the the archetype is " a damsel in distress" and not "a transient in distress." (Snowwhite, Andromeda, Beauty and the BEAST, King Kong, Princess Sofia and the OGRE)
In what way was I virtue signaling? I'm complaining about something the author said, not extolling myself or dropping irrelevant moralisms. If anything, I expected a more negative reaction from the average HN commenter.
Tell me, how would you go about pointing out that someone is engaging in irrelevant virtue signaling without doing it yourself, by whatever definition you're using?
First of all, you weren't complaining about what they said (or wrote, but whatever). You were complaining about the motives you imputed to their choice to say that thing. I mean, fair enough. I don't agree with you that it was principally virtue-signalling, but it might well have had an aspect of such. In general, I tend to assume that nearly all journalism, at least that where the journalist selects the topic and the tone, is largely virtue-signalling.
With respect to the factuality of the author's claim, I do entirely agree with you that women are more trusted than men, whether indigent or not, in the sense of "trust" that means "we'll let her stay at our house", and also likelier to be lent aid. They are not, I think, as likely to be believed, which is a sense of "trust", but probably not what the author meant. Mind you, I think the author is correct that a white person is more trusted (in both senses) than an immigrant or a non-white person, especially in America, especially in the American South. Then again, what do I know.
You say that you expected the comment to go over badly with "the average HN commenter". Of course, there is no "average HN commenter", but anyway, so what? Virtue-signalling that appeals to the mean (uniformly-weighted) opinion of society is low-value and ineffective, both game-theoretically and in practice. (Because it is cheap to do, most people do it at a general background level, thus it is a weak signal, and thus only children try very hard at it. But some consider it rude to allocate zero effort to it. Shrug.) Effective virtue-signalling, such as perhaps yours, is that which demonstrates one's bona fides to an in-group by visibly sacrificing something else. A typical sacrifice includes some reputational standing with another group. Game-theoretically, and practically, that's a much more convincing virtue signal.
But you say you didn't intend to signal your virtue. What, then, was the purpose of your top-level comment? I mean, just as you question the author's motives, it seems natural to wonder about yours. When you did it, it seemed like a hijack of the topic, to complain about a minutia of the article. Not very useful, you know? I know this mostly speaks to my lack of imagination, but I just can't see a reason to say what you said, other than to position yourself as being in opposition to the author's foolishness. And worse than foolishness, the author's not just wrong, they're "virtue-signalling", which is to say they're conducting themselves in a way that appears to be about something other than reputation, in order to gain repuation! Attention, do not let this work on you! Actually, that seems like a high-probability explanation of your behaviour, but only a medium-probability explanation of the author's behaviour. (Alternate high-probability explanation of the author's behaviour: the author is just a trite writer, fond of copying others' ideas.)
Anyway, the point of this whole comment is to ask "WHY are you complaining?" So, to answer your question about "how would you go about pointing out X without virtue-signalling"... often the answer is "you don't point it out".
And yes, let me save you a little trouble: like your commenting behaviour, surely virtue-signalling is a factor in my commenting behaviour. At some point after you are introduced to the idea of virtue-signalling, you get around to noticing that most (public) behaviour has some aspect of it. So it's mostly not worth bringing up, as in this case. All in all, personally I think your comment would have been much better if you'd left off the first sentence and the word "ironically". Especially if your goal was not virtue-signalling.
That reminds me: Could you help me to understand what sense of "ironic" you were using when you said that it's "ironic" that "support for homeless/transient women is vastly superior to that available for men"?
Thank you, that is a more in-depth and useful definition of virtue signaling than I was working with before.
> You were complaining about the motives you imputed to their choice to say that thing.
I was complaining about the content, as you can tell from the fact that I immediately said "this is wrong" after making fun of their (presumed) motivation for making the false claim.
> WHY are you complaining?
A sense of civic obligation to object to misinformation.
> Could you help me to understand what sense of "ironic" you were using
The irony is that the truth is precisely opposite to the author's claim.
It's also a delightful irony that once people learn that people only use the term "virtue signal" to do it, they only ever use that fact to do it, too.
Yeah, there are some, check Wikipedia for all it's worth, ya might find some interesting stuff.
Last "unpure" shtick was in 2007 I think.
They have a long history with lies simply because they have a long history period, like many others.
