It's true - I may have a tendency to neglect the role of signalling and be too eager to take people's actions at face value. As always, a lot of what people do is probably signalling, but I think there's still truth in the underlying idea of optimising for complexity.
I'm not sure if some of the people in your examples really optimise for complexity, as opposed to signalling the ability to handle complexity?
Some of your examples sound like they have alternative explanations, related to humans-as-social-animals.
Thank you for the post, it was an interesting read :)
It's true - I may have a tendency to neglect the role of signalling and be too eager to take people's actions at face value. As always, a lot of what people do is probably signalling, but I think there's still truth in the underlying idea of optimising for complexity.
It's definitely an interesting observation!