AI Changes the Cost in Costly Signalling
AI lowers the cost of signals that once demonstrated effort, skill, taste, or commitment. Once polished work becomes cheap to produce, its separating power collapses and credibility shifts toward evidence that remains difficult to fake.
A beautifully tailored cover letter once suggested that a candidate could communicate, think clearly, study a company, and connect its needs to their experience. AI can now manufacture that entire bundle of apparent competence for almost anyone.
R1When polish no longer carries a price
A costly signal works because producing it demands something pretenders are less able or willing to spend: time, skill, money, risk, or sustained effort. Observers use that hidden cost as a shortcut from visible output to invisible quality.
AI breaks the shortcut without necessarily changing the underlying quality. It makes articulate prose, tailored applications, finished homework, and sophisticated-looking commentary dramatically easier to produce. The surface signal spreads to people who do and do not possess the trait it once indicated, so the two groups stop separating. Attention then moves toward harder-to-automate evidence: demonstrated performance, accumulated reputation, trusted curation, and the judgment required to distinguish substance from polished slop.
E1 R1Where it shows up
The tailored application
In hiring, a well-written cover letter once bundled several clues about a candidate: communication, analysis, preparation, and genuine interest. Cheap automated tailoring makes that bundle much weaker evidence.
R1The completed assignment
The polished idiot
Online, sophisticated articles and posts can mask weak thinking. AI raises the production quality of the appearance without guaranteeing any improvement in the ideas underneath.
R1Cheap production is not proof of emptiness
AI weakens a signal only where observers previously treated the cost of producing the artifact as evidence of an underlying trait. A polished output may still be excellent, and AI assistance does not itself prove incompetence; the narrower claim is that polish alone can no longer bear the evidentiary weight it once did.
E1 R1Replace one proxy with a verification step
Choose one decision in which you currently reward polished output—screening an applicant, grading work, or trusting an article—and identify the trait you actually need to verify. Add evidence tied more directly to that trait: a live demonstration, a record of reliable work, a trusted curator, or your own substantive evaluation.
E1Episodes that teach this
- Why IDIOTS are Winning | Future IQ start here 5,368 views