News Feeds

AI is consuming staggering amounts of energy—already over 10% of U.S. electricity—and the demand is only accelerating. Now, researchers have unveiled a radically more efficient approach that could slash AI energy use by up to 100× while actually improving accuracy. By combining neural networks with human-like symbolic reasoning, their system helps robots think more logically instead of relying on brute-force trial and error.

Star formation is a dramatic and complex process that erupts throughout the Universe. Yet, a lot of the action gets hidden by clouds of gas and dust. That's where observatories such as the James Webb Telescope JWST and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) come in handy. They use infrared light and radio waves, respectively, to pierce the veil surrounding the process of starbirth.

NASA astronaut and Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman took this picture of Earth from the Orion spacecraft's window after completing the translunar injection burn. There are two auroras (top right and bottom left) and zodiacal light (bottom right) is visible as the Earth eclipses the Sun.

I guess the Torygraph is considered “mainstream media” in the UK, and, like American MSM, seems to be touting religion in a way we didn’t see a few years ago. In this short article, which I found through the disparaging tweet below (an accurate, tweet, it seems), Baron David Frost, a conservative political bigwig in the UK, tells us why we should be going to church this Easter.  He seems to love “full-fat supernatural Christianity,” which apparently means the whole Catholic hog, from snout to tail. No “skim Christianity” for him!

Go below to read the article.

Hello, I am mental.

— Richard Smyth (@rsmythfreelance.bsky.social) 2026-04-03T07:46:00.501Z

Click the screenshot below to go to an archived version of the Torygraph piece, which describes Lord Frost (is that the same thing as a Baron?) this way:

Lord Frost led the negotiations that finally took Britain out of the EU in 2020.  A Cabinet minister in the Boris Johnson government, he resigned in protest at the handling of Covid lockdowns, and has since been a persistent advocate of a more fully conservative approach to policy on the Right. He is a non-affiliated peer in the House of Lords.

Wikipedia adds this:

David George Hamilton Frost, Baron Frost (born 21 February 1965) is a British diplomat, civil servant and politician who served as a Minister of State at the Cabinet Office between March and December 2021. Frost was Chief Negotiator of Task Force Europe from January 2020 until his resignation in December 2021.

Frost spent his early professional career in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), becoming Ambassador to Denmark, EU Director at the FCO, and Director for Europe and International Trade at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. He was a special adviser to Boris Johnson when the latter was Foreign Secretary in Theresa May’s government.

And yes, I have to say, although it’s Easter, the guy is mental, for he thinks that anybody who has had an elevating aesthetic or emotional experience is providing evidence not just for God, but for the God of Rome.

I’ll put a few topics under bold headings (mine). The indented parts are from the article by Baron Frost.

The evidence for a revival of Christianity is weak. First, Frost makes this admission:

The Quiet Revival – the view that people are coming back to church and the long years of decline might be over – has been much discussed in ecclesiastical circles this last year. A YouGov poll in a Bible Society report seemed to vindicate it by asserting the number of 18 to 24-year-olds attending church monthly had jumped from 4 per cent in 2018 to 16 per cent in 2024.

It’s fair to say that these figures were a bit controversial right from the start. And the doubts were justified last week, when YouGov, in its latest polling flop, had to admit it had made an error and had not applied proper quality control to its sample.

So are we back to square one? Is the whole thing just confirmation bias and wishful thinking?

So he gives the “evidence” for the revival, which he has to find in places other than the polls. One is in hearsay, another his own behavior:

I don’t think so. Something is definitely happening, if not exactly what the Bible Society described. There is too much other evidence. Numbers coming into the Catholic Church each Easter, here and across the West, are increasing (I was one in 2025). Footballers are open about their faith in a way that didn’t happen a decade back. Sales of printed Bibles have doubled. There is even a mini boom in the Greek Orthodox Church going on.

Summing it up, the Rev Daniel French, chaplain at Greenwich University and Irreverend podcaster, said: “I see considerable curiosity about faith, particularly from young adults, often men. The old assumptions that religious conversations are taboo have evaporated. My week is filled with impromptu chats about God in a way it wasn’t ten years ago.”

Why is the West becoming more Christian? It isn’t, but this is what the sweating Baron says: it’s the Internet and the stagnation of society, Jake!

Why might this be? It’s speculative, but my experience suggests several different reasons. One is the simple availability of different Christian voices on the internet. If your only exposure to Christianity is in your school religious studies class with a dull and inexpert teacher, as it might have been in the past, it could turn you off for good. But if you can hear Glen Scrivener or Bishop Robert Barron online, you are more likely to think: “I need to take this seriously.”

There is also the collapse of the narrative of inevitable progress, the belief that young people will always be economically better off than their parents, the growing dysfunction in society starting with the pandemic, all may be generating a tendency to look beyond economics for life satisfaction.

Of course we know that there is a negative correlation between religiosity and well-being, a correlation that holds across both nations and U.S. states. The worse off you are, the more religious you are. Further, there’s a positive correlation between income inequality (measured by the “Gini index”) and religiosity: the higher the inequality, the more religious people are. That the former produces the latter, so it’s not a spurious correlation, is supported by the fact that religiosity rises a year after inequality rises.  Likewise with falls of inequality and falls of religiosity. That’s not proof, but is support for the connection made famous by Karl Marx, a quotation that is often truncated to distort its meaning:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

What Marx was saying was not that religion was good for people because it soothed them, but that it was bad for people because it was what people did when they could not find relief from their suffering and oppression through means that could actually improve their situation. They thus have to turn to the opium of belief.

The Baron sees evidence for God every time people have an aesthetic or spiritual experience.  Not just evidence for God, apparently, but evidence for Catholicism!:

Reflect on the experiences in your life where you feel, for a moment, you might have had an experience of something beyond this world, a moment in the English countryside, a phrase of music that tugs at the heartstrings, and ask yourself why you feel that, if material reality is really all there is. Consider too that most people in history, and indeed most people in the world today, have not had that belief, and maybe aren’t all wrong. Maybe western secular society doesn’t know everything about everything.

But of course people throughout the world have this kind of experience, people including atheists like Richard Dawkins and me. And not for a minute do we think that emotionality is evidence for gods. Is it evidence for Allah, and also for Xenu and Vishnu?

The evidence that these emotions and epiphanies are the product of material reality can be seen, for one thing, because you can have them simply by taking drugs. I remember once when I was in college, doing a science fellowship during the summer, I took LSD and walked through the quad (the “Sunken Garden”) at William and Mary.  There were high-school brass bands having some kind of competition, and, in my psychedelic daze, their ragged, dissonant music seemed like the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard. Was that evidence for God? Had I not been tripping, I would have run away in horror.

The Baron admits that Christianity is meaningless unles you believe its foundational truths. You don’t often see this kind of admission since “sophisticated” believers don’t like to admit it, nor will they say explicitly what they believe:

After all, the important thing about Christianity is not whether it makes you feel better or whether it is good for society, but whether it is true. If it is, we should all want to know that, and if it isn’t, we are right to reject it. The one thing we should not do is not properly consider it. And in Western society that is all too easy.

I’ve considered the “evidence”, which of course is almost entirely what’s in the Bible.  And I don’t buy it, as I suspect most of the readers here don’t.  And what about the gazillion other faiths of the world. Why does Frost reject Mormonism, Hinduism, Islam, and cargo cults but accept the “truth” of Christianity? (Like Christians, adherents to cargo cults keep waiting for a savior who never comes.) I’d like the Baron to tell me how he knows not just the Resurrection and Jesus’s “miracles” were true, but why the writing of the Quran is a bogus story. And why, among Christian religions, are the dictates of Catholicm true? (The Baron touts the revival of religion as involving mainly Catholicism and “Protestant evangelicals.)  Gimme that full-fat religion!

The Baron tells us why we should go to Church.

In an essay entitled Man or Rabbit?, CS Lewis gently mocked those who didn’t reject Christianity but tried to ignore it, not from disbelief, but from a suspicion that it might be true after all and that acknowledging it would be inconvenient – rather like someone who doesn’t open their bank statements for fear of what might be in them. Don’t be like that person. Face the issue head on. At least give Christianity a fair hearing. Show up to church this Easter. You never know what might happen.

I ignore Christianity because it’s a full-fat superstition supported by no evidence. I’m amused that he quotes C. S. Lewis, who I admit I find hilariously stupid about religion even though his Mere Christianity is probably the most influential work of popular theology ever. I’ve read it, of course, and I always have to laugh when I read “Lewis’s trilemma“—an argument for the divinity of Jesus and truth of his message. Lewis actually stole this argument from others, as several people had made it before him. Here’s Lewis’s version:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. … Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.

Of course there are alternatives to “liar, lunatic, or Lord”; I’m sure you can think of at least one: people made up what Jesus said in the Bible. You can read alternative criticisms here.

But the real question is whether Frost himself is a liar, lunatic, or Lord. And we already know the answer: he’s a Lord.

I guess I’m just splenetic on this day when people go to Church to worship something for which there’s no evidence. And, contra Frost, I won’t be showing up to church this Easter. Instead, I’m writing this post.

The Cambrian Period, beginning at 538.8 Ma (million years ago) and lasting about 52 million years, is famous for marking the transition from simple and largely unicellular animals to, beginning at the period’s inception, representatives of modern groups.  This apparently rapid onset of modern forms of multicellular animals constitutes the famous “Cambrian Explosion.”

The Cambrian was preceded by the 96-million-year-long Ediacaran period, extending from 635 million years ago to the beginning of the Cambrian. The Ediacaran fauna, consisting of some multicellular animals of unknown affinity and things looking like members of some modern groups like cnidarians (represented today by jellyfish, corals and anemone). But most of the Ediacaran groups appeared to have died out at the end of the Ediacaran, and for unknown reasons.

The boundary between the Ediacran and the Cambrian thus marks a major transition in animal life.   Many of the “modern” groups that first arose during the Cambrian don’t have apparent ancestors in the Ediacaran, and so those modern groups were thought to have evolved almost instantaneously (in geological time!). But surely modern groups had ancestors during the Ediacaran: unless you’re a Biblical fundamentalist, you realize that ancestors of modern groups had to have existed well before the Cambrian explosion.

Now a paper in Science, based on a fossil group called the Jiangchuan Biota that spans the period from 559-534 million years ago, shows that representatives of “modern” groups seen in the Cambrian explosion were indeed present in the late Ediacaran, pushing back the time of origin of modern phyla 4-5 million years.  This conclusion was possible because of the remarkable preservation of the animals (and some algae), all present as carbonaceous films on rocks—the same kind of films (presumably due to rapid burial) that enabled us to see the remarkable Burgess Shale fauna of the middle Cambrian. The new find was in the province of Yunnan in Southwestern China.

You can see the paper by clicking the screenshot below, reading the pdf here, or reading the shorter blurb at an Oxford University sit. at the bottom. All photos below are taken from the paper.

I won’t go into all the terminology involved in identifying the groups but will show a few fossils from the paper strongly suggesting that some “modern” groups arose in the late Ediacaran.

First, an anomalous animal that appears to be some kind of worm, but one with a “holdfast” disc on its butt. We don’t know what this one is, but it has oral projections or tentacles. The disc is very clear:

Another wormlike animal (note that these are small: a few millimeters) having a clear oral region. Again, we’re not sure what this is, but the preservation as a carbon film is remarkable:

A deuterostome (animals where the first opening in the embryo becomes the anus rather than the mouth), a group thought to have appeared in the Cambrian but here seen in the Ediacaran: this one resembles  Herpetogaster, known from the early Cambrian which, according to Wikipedia, “possessed a pair of branching tentacles and a tough but flexible body that curved helically to the right like a ram’s horn and was divided into at least 13 segments”. This one, like Herpetogaster, has tentacles (at leat four) and a stalk.  It’s interpreted as a relative of acorn worms, relatives of modern echinoderms which are hemichordates, the closest living group to modern chordates (animals with notochords and a dorsal nerve chord, which include all vertebrates).

The one below,described in the paper as “Margaretia-like animal now known as a dwelling tube for an enteropneust hemichordate worm”. It’s also described as having “regular, oval-shaped holes running along its length”. Again, we see what is likely an early hemichordate, showing that the relatives of modern chordates seem to have been present several million years before the Cambrian explosion began.

The one below is identified as a ctenophore, or comb jelly, a phylum of early animals previously known only from the mid-Cambrian. “OS” stands for “oral skirt”, described as “a specialized, often scalloped, muscular, or rigid structure surrounding the mouth, primarily found in Cambrian-era fossil comb jellies such as Ctenorhabdotus and Thalassostaphylos. Unlike modern ctenophores, these ancient species used the skirt for feeding, potentially to engulf large prey.”

Finally, this animal is thought to be an early cnidarian with tentacles and a holdfast (HF). Although one form identified as a cnidarian had already been recognized from the Ediacaran, here we have another that’s different, showing a radiation of cnidarians before the Cambrian.

These fossil data support already-existing molecular data suggesting that animal groups had already evolved and diversified before the Cambrian, though until now no fossils, or only a few suggestive fossils, were known.

The authors’ summary below, though written in scient-ese, basically says that a major radiation of animal phyla had already begun before the Ediacran/Cambrian boundary, but we did not know about it because the conditions for forming this kind of trace fossil, requiring rapid burial in marine sediment (and subsequent finding by investigators!) were infrequent:

The new Jiangchuan animal fossils, dominated by bilaterians of apparently diverse affinities, with rarer fossils more typical of late Ediacaran deposits, could be described as a “Cambrian-type” assemblage from the late Ediacaran. A dominantly bilaterian assemblage from the late Ediacaran may not have been discovered until now as a result of the paucity of carbonaceous compressions from this time, hinting at a broader taphonomic bias (51).

If you want a short, readable summary of the importance of this fine, click below to read a shorter summary from Oxford University.

Researchers have created a nanoscale structure that traps infrared light in a layer just 40 nanometers thick—over 1,000 times thinner than a human hair. By using a unique material with exceptional light-bending properties, they can confine and intensify light far beyond previous limits. This setup also dramatically boosts light conversion effects, turning infrared into visible blue light. The advance could pave the way for smaller, faster photonic technologies.

It turns out that Tweeting about RCTs 100+ times is a lot easier than delivering even a single RCT.

The post Dr. Vinay Prasad Said He Would Deliver New COVID Vaccine RCTs. He Failed and Should STFU. first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Mars may look like a quiet, dusty world, but it’s actually buzzing with hidden electrical activity. Powerful dust storms and swirling dust devils generate static electricity strong enough to spark faint glowing discharges across the planet, triggering chemical reactions that reshape its surface and atmosphere. Scientists have now shown that these tiny lightning-like events can create a surprising mix of chemicals—including chlorine compounds and carbonates—and even leave behind distinct isotopic “fingerprints.”

Modern food systems may look stable on the surface, but they are increasingly dependent on digital systems that can quietly become a major point of failure. Today, food must be “recognized” by databases and automated platforms to be transported, sold, or even released, meaning that if systems go down, food can effectively become unusable—even when it’s physically available.

Scientists have taken a major step toward futuristic energy tech by building a working prototype of a quantum battery—one that can charge, store, and release energy using the strange rules of quantum physics instead of chemistry. This tiny, laser-powered device hints at a future where energy storage is not only faster but actually improves as systems get larger, flipping the rules of conventional batteries.

A new study presented at the 2026 LPSC suggests that if life does exist in Venus' clouds, there's a chance it came from Earth.

We have our usual three items plus lagniappe today.  Read on:

First, click below to see a recent Guardian story about how a mean local council tried to ban this British woman from feeding feral cats, and how the neighbors (and a charity) stepped up to help her.

An excerpt:

“Two ladies from York have just been in,” said Collette Boler at the till of her small cafe in Thurnscoe, near Barnsley. Her voice began to choke up.

“They came in with a box of chocolates and a card, a box of cat food, a bag of cat biscuits and just said ‘carry on doing what you’re doing, you’re absolutely fabulous’. And a man’s just given me a tenner for cat food. It’s been incredible.”

The grandmother of seven has become an unlikely icon for cat lovers everywhere after finding herself banned from feeding a colony of feral felines she has looked after for 20 years.

She had been visiting them twice a day, including Christmas Day, even spending her own money on vet bills and having some neutered, which she admitted cost “a fortune”.

But two weeks ago Boler – affectionately known as the “crazy cat lady” – was subject to what some of her supporters see as a heavy-handed and overzealous ban, after a neighbouring business complained to the council over cat faeces on its premises.

Now if Boler continues to feed the cats, she will be issued with a community protection notice – a type of antisocial behaviour order – which could result in a fine of up to £2,500.

But she has been overwhelmed with support after others stepped in to help, including neighbours, strangers and a national cat charity.

. . .The Cat Action Trust 1977 has stepped in by writing to Barnsley council to urge it to repeal Boler’s ban.

“Feeders like Collette actually play a really important role,” said Alice Ostapjuk-Wise, a volunteer for the national charity which advocates for the “invisible issue” of cats that have never had contact with humans. “[Feeders] can alert us when a new cat arrives that might not be neutered.” The charity carries out neutering to control their numbers.

The Cat Action Trust 1977 has collected food for the Barnsley cats, which are frightened of humans and mostly stay out of sight, though the council has not made clear whether it too will face consequences for feeding them.

Ostapjuk-Wise said: “We just want to do what we can because some councils actually choose to exterminate feral cat colonies, and that’s the last thing we want.

“The path they seem to be taking so far appears to be very inhumane, basically starving the cats. That’s not going to solve the problem.”

. . .Barnsley council did not respond to a request for comment but previously told local media it recognised Boler’s “good intentions” but the community protection warning was “an early step to prevent the situation from getting worse”.

“We always aim to protect public health and safety, and we encourage anyone concerned about stray animals to work with recognised animal welfare organisations, so support can be provided safely.”

Boler said she had “never expected” so much attention. “I just wish they’d let me feed my cats,” she said. “That’s all I want. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

The Barnsley council sucks. Just because they don’t like feral cat feces, they’re starving the cats to death. There is a change.org petition with nearly 4,000 signatures that you can sign, and I just signed it. Please join me; it costs you nothing and may help save the Barnsley cats from the meanies.

And here’s a FB video with an interview of Boler, who seems very nice.

*********************

This is a wonderful 14-minute video of the cats of Istanbul and how the locals care for them. I love that city–not just for the fact that it harbors “strays” who are effectively pets, but also because it’s beautiful and has lots of attractions.

This is really what it’s like to be in Istanbul. If you want a good commercial movie about Istanbul’s cats, do watch the movie “Kedi” (the Turkis words for cats), made in 2016.  It has a 98% critics’ rating rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a rating that only the very best movies get.

I*********************

The World’s Best Cat Litter site answers a recurring question among cat owners:

There are a variety of answers. Some condensed answers:

It’s in their nature

Kneading is an instinctual trait that begins in kittenhood. When kittens are feeding from their mother, they push on her mammary glands with their paws to help stimulate milk flow. For the mother, this releases oxytocin, also known as the bonding hormone.

You might notice your cat dribbling a little when they are kneading. This is natural too! Some cats go into “milking mode” even though they are older and fully weaned. They just get in the zone and subconsciously expect the milk that would have come from their mother.

They’re claiming their territory

Did you know that cats have scent glands in their paw pads? Scent glands are a way for cats (and other animals) to mark their territory, a trait that is especially important in the wild.

Cats tend to make biscuits on their favorite human, other pets in the home, and their favorite blankets. As a cat kneads, they release their scent to mark something as theirs. So if your cat has a habit of kneading on your stomach, congratulations! You are officially their property.

They’re making their bed

In the wild, felines knead tall grass to create a comfortable space for sleeping.

At home, your cat might like to make biscuits on your blankets, clothes, or even your body. This just means they are trying to get cozy and snuggly for a long cat nap.

They love you!

Kneading is typically a behavior that happens when a cat feels happy and secure, but they aren’t necessarily expecting milk from the process.

They’re going into heat

Female, unspayed cats are known to knead their paws before “estrus,” or going into heat. The act of kneading is a sign to male cats that the feline wants and is able to mate.

There’s further information about whether you should prevent them from kneading (no!), and advice to trim their nails so they don’t do damage when they make biscuits.

Or you can watch this explanatory video:

*********************

Lagniappe: An appropriate tweet showing a street sign in Istanbul asking people to be attentive for road cats:

Street Cat Sign in Istanbul pic.twitter.com/ecxZeMny17

— DaVinci (@BiancoDavinci) March 18, 2026

. . . and an educational FB meme from Debra:

h/t: Matthew, Ginger K.

A new breakthrough is transforming MXenes—ultra-thin, high-tech materials—into something far more powerful and precise. Researchers have developed a cleaner, more controlled way to build these materials using molten salts and iodine, eliminating the messy chemical processes that once left their surfaces disordered. The result is a perfectly arranged atomic structure that lets electrons flow with remarkable ease, boosting conductivity by up to 160 times.

Dying stars may be wiping out nearby giant planets as they expand into red giants. Astronomers found that these close-in planets become increasingly rare around more evolved stars, suggesting many have already been swallowed. The likely cause is a gravitational tug that drags planets inward until they break apart or fall into the star. It’s a dramatic glimpse into the chaotic final stages of planetary systems.

A group of undergraduate students stumbled into a cosmic time capsule—one of the oldest stars ever discovered—while combing through massive astronomy datasets. What began as a class project quickly turned into a breakthrough when they spotted an extraordinarily “pristine” star made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, hinting it formed near the dawn of the universe.

Asteroid impacts may have helped kick-start life on Earth by creating hot, chemical-rich environments ideal for early biology. These impact-generated hydrothermal systems could have lasted thousands of years—long enough for life’s building blocks to form. Scientists now think these environments may have been common on early Earth, making them a strong candidate for where life began. The idea could also guide the search for life on other worlds.

Saturn’s magnetic field isn’t the smooth, symmetrical shield scientists see around Earth. Instead, it’s noticeably skewed, and researchers now think they understand why. By analyzing years of data from the Cassini spacecraft, scientists found that a key region where solar particles enter Saturn’s atmosphere is consistently shifted to one side. This distortion appears to be driven by the planet’s rapid spin combined with a thick cloud of charged particles coming from its moon Enceladus.

Saturn’s magnetic field isn’t the smooth, symmetrical shield scientists see around Earth. Instead, it’s noticeably skewed, and researchers now think they understand why. By analyzing years of data from the Cassini spacecraft, scientists found that a key region where solar particles enter Saturn’s atmosphere is consistently shifted to one side. This distortion appears to be driven by the planet’s rapid spin combined with a thick cloud of charged particles coming from its moon Enceladus.

In a new proposal, a team of scientists explores how aerial robotic platforms (areobots) with in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) capability could operate for years in Venus' atmosphere.

Humans have to signal just like birds have to sing, beavers have to build, bears have to hibernate, fish have to swim, and wolves have to howl. Such behaviors are how those animals make themselves legible to one another. Social life under uncertainty forces them to externalize what matters like fitness, temperament, and willingness to cooperate. Humans face the same basic problem with more complicated traits like temperament, virtue, skill, and intelligence—traits that aren’t directly observable. So people must signal them to coordinate and to survive. Humans are a highly cooperative species that will cooperate with almost anyone on almost any task if they are trustworthy and reliable enough as a cooperation partner—it is our evolutionary superpower.

The temptation, especially in the age of social media, is to treat signaling as a mode pathology of people who need attention and lack good taste—a symptom of moral decadence or attention addiction. So much so that until recently, the term virtue signaling was a favored insult. But even if much of what gets called virtue signaling is shallow or cheap, the underlying practice is a structural feature of social life. If people never signaled their moral commitments, reliability, or competence, strangers would have no basis for trust, coalition, or cooperation. In such a world, hiring and romance, to give a couple examples, would be harder and more expensive. Signaling is what we get instead of omniscience.

 If people never signaled their moral commitments, reliability, or competence, strangers would have no basis for trust, coalition, or cooperation.

Start with the simplest case—other people—who are, at best, partial strangers to one another (and even to themselves). People do not directly observe the counterfactual behavior of other people—things they would have done under different conditions. People do not directly perceive the strength of their willpower, their long-run loyalty, or their competence once the training wheels are off. What we see are limited slices and outcomes. Under those conditions, reputations are a necessary compression device—a running summary of the signals someone has sent over time. And the more costly and stable those signals are, the more weight observers give them.

This is why temperament, virtue, intelligence, and skill are surrounded by behavioral scaffolding. Calmness under pressure is signaled by how people behave in cramped and stressful situations. Trustworthiness is signaled by patterns of keeping or breaking commitments when defection would have been tempting. Intelligence is signaled by the difficulty of problems one can reliably solve. Skill is signaled through portfolios, track records, and performances that are costly to fake and time-consuming to build. None of this guarantees accuracy, but it does allow for some sorting in a world where full information is off the table.

People discover who they are by seeing what they actually do in situations that impose real costs.  

Less obvious, but crucial for understanding why signaling is inescapable, is that we are also partial strangers to ourselves. Introspection does not give us the same kind of access to our dispositions that we sometimes imagine. People often misjudge their own resolve, generosity, loyalty, and competence. They discover who they are by seeing what they actually do in situations that impose real costs. In that sense, signaling is a way of generating evidence for ourselves when first-person access is unreliable.

This is self-signaling. When people make public commitments, take on demanding projects, or voluntarily incur costs that close off tempting alternatives, they are creating a record that will constrain their future self. Once they have logged enough signals of a certain kind—being the colleague who always shows up prepared, the partner who follows through, the person who sees difficult tasks through to completion—it becomes psychologically and socially harder to act out of character. The signals help stabilize identity over time in the face of temptation and fatigue. They are, in effect, side bets placed against one’s own future wavering.

A great deal of moral psychology can be reinterpreted through that lens. Consider moral outrage, which at first glance looks like a purely internal reaction: an emotional upsurge in response to perceived wrongdoing. It does not feel strategic from the inside. But when researchers isolate outrage and punishment in controlled experiments, a different pattern appears. In a set of studies, Jillian Jordan and David Rand find that people express more outrage and are more willing to punish selfish behavior when they lack the opportunity to signal their virtue through direct helping. When opportunities to share resources or incur costs for others are blocked, participants “compensate” with condemnation instead.

The key twist is that these experiments are anonymous, one-shot interactions. No one in the subject pool can build a usable, long-term reputation off their choices. And yet people behave as if punishment and moral condemnation will function as signals of trustworthiness and moral commitment even when, in fact, they will not. This is what Jordan and Rand call a reputation heuristics account where our minds are calibrated for environments in which reputation usually is at stake, so those heuristics continue to operate even in artificially anonymous contexts. Moral outrage, on this picture, is one of the mechanisms by which we communicate that we can be counted on to side with the cooperative, norm-abiding majority.

Trying to strip all signaling out of moral life would be like trying to strip chirping from the life of birds.

The usual complaint is that this makes outrage “fake,” as if any reputational logic behind an emotion automatically discredits it. That assumes that either one really cares or they are performing for an audience. The data suggests that the impulse to signal one’s moral commitments and the felt experience of moral concern are tightly coupled. People want to be good and be seen as good, and the psychology that bundles those aims together is what actually enforces many norms in practice. That does not mean every expression of outrage is proportionate or wise. But it does mean that trying to strip all signaling out of moral life would be like trying to strip chirping from the life of birds.

The same work also helps explain why some moral signals function like moral junk food. In other writing, I have compared low-cost moral outrage to ultra-processed snacks: engineered to satisfy strong cravings with minimal nutritional value. Outrage, especially in online environments, is often cheap, fast, and highly visible. Donating significant time or money, bearing interpersonal costs to repair harm, or changing one’s own habits in light of a moral insight are expensive, slow, and often invisible. When opportunities for high-cost moral behavior are scarce or blocked, the cheaper substitute predictably fills the gap. People must still demonstrate that they care about fairness, harm, and loyalty. When costlier moral actions are constrained, cheaper signals in the form of moral outrage are often substituted.

Economically speaking, when the cost of supplying a valued good rises, people shift to substitutes. That is the structure behind the experimental results: when participants are denied the chance to help, they lean harder on condemnation. The signaling need remains, and the portfolio of available signals changes. Craving for reputational evidence is built deeply into how cooperation and trust function.

Signals help stabilize identity over time in the face of temptation and fatigue. They are, in effect, side bets placed against one's own future wavering.

And not just in the moral domain. Employers face self-selection problems: applicants know far more about their own character and competence than hiring committees. In romantic settings, each person knows more about their own long-term intentions and vulnerabilities than the other. Friends, business partners, and political allies all confront versions of the same problem. Under those conditions, signals are one of the main ways both sides try to reduce the risk of pairing with the wrong person.

Degrees, certificates, job titles, grants, and publications are costly to accumulate and relatively hard to fake at scale. They are imperfect, often biased toward certain kinds of talents, but serve an indispensable sorting function in the absence of omniscience. Employers rely on them because the alternative is guessing. The same goes for how people signal temperament and character in everyday life. Someone who consistently reacts to provocation with restraint is signaling about their temperament.

Romantic life adds an extra layer because the signals here often involve foreclosing alternatives. A willingness to invest significant time, to endure periods of difficulty, or to incur costs for a partner’s sake are all signals that burn resources that could have gone elsewhere—what economists call opportunity costs. A promise that leaves all options open is cheap. A sacrifice that rules out other paths sends a clearer message about one’s priorities. This is a reminder that absent signals, no one would know what sort of partner they were dealing with until it was too late and the incentives would be even more against pairing up.

Seen in this light, the analogy with nonhuman animals reappears in a less sentimental form. Birds sing because individuals that failed to advertise themselves effectively left fewer descendants. Beavers that did not build or maintain dams paid the price. Social animals whose signals did not reliably track underlying traits found their cooperative arrangements collapsing. Humans occupy a different ecological and cultural niche, but the basic information problem is the same. Only the content of the signals has changed.

Signaling is the price we pay for cooperation under uncertainty.

So when people insist that humans should stop virtue signaling and be authentic, it is worth noting how much that demand presupposes a world where others already know what we are like, a world without asymmetric information or risk, a world where employers, partners, and friends do not need to make educated guesses. That is not the world we inhabit. People must signal temperament, virtue, skill, and intelligence because they are partial strangers both to others and to themselves, and social life requires bets about who can be trusted with what. Signaling is the price we pay for cooperation under uncertainty.