Modern art, intelligence and social signaling

Hi, I’ve been thinking…

Have you ever sat through a modern art performance and ended up watching the audience more than the stage?
The lone early clap. The scanning eyes, tiny sonar pings, hunting for a reflection: “you saw what I saw; you understood what I understood.” Sometimes the work is sharp and the applause is earned. But sometimes the king is naked and the loudest performance is the crowd performing understanding to itself. That moment, the applause as a status handshake shows up everywhere.
Either way, the loudest performance in the room is often the audience proving to itself that it belongs.

People try to connect this to IQ and taste and I think that’s a dead end.
Intelligence helps once you care, but it doesn’t decide what you care about. Openness to experience predicts who wanders into the tricky stuff. And neither explains the theater of the scan-and-clap ritual. That ritual is about status maintenance: you show you belong by behaving like those who already do. It’s a loop that rewards fluency.
The script comes from status dynamics. Call it the status game loop. You show you belong by acting like those who already belong. You clap at the right beats, nod at the right jargon, signal your capability to signal.
The loop is self-sealing: people mistake the performance of understanding for understanding itself, because the reward is inside the loop.
This is also not unique to art. It’s a general pattern that reappears wherever knowledge is fuzzy, costly, or symbolic.

It’s tempting to dunk on this. But there’s a deeper mechanism worth naming: the cultural capital. Some signals are genuinely costly to fake: fluency in a literature, experience with a practice, taste developed through time and scars. The problem isn’t signaling per se; but when signaling becomes the product.
When the Applause is the art.

Language supercharges all of this. In theory, words are identifiers, hash codes that resolve to meaning. In practice, we treat them like talismans. If a term carries prestige or moral weight, arguing over its exact form becomes a secular ritual. The argument may not reduce confusion in the same time reducing its social risk. That’s the magical theory of language sneaking into scholarly clothes: speak the spell correctly, or the meaning fails.
If you’ve ever seen a dust-up over the “proper” rendering of Genghis Khan - Czyngis-chan vs. Dżyngis vs. whatever the house style is - when both sides clearly point to the same historical guy, you’ve seen the spellbook at work.
The fight doesn’t resolve ambiguity - it resolves hierarchy.
Correct orthography is a shibboleth.
And, just by the way, that word - shibboleth - earns its origin story. In the Book of Judges, fugitives at a river crossing were forced to say “shibboleth.” Those who couldn’t pronounce the “sh” were exposed as outsiders.
Password disguised as vocabulary test. We still use them. In academia, pronunciation, hyphens, diacritics, transliterations, capitalization. These rarely change the truth, instead they sort tribes. “Say it our way or reveal yourself.”

Academia advertises itself as the republic of reasons - open to criticism, hostile to sacred cows.
In practice, it’s often a greenhouse: sealed, humid, perfect for cultivating self-reinforcing ideas. The isolation is incentive-shaped. You’re rewarded for being legible to a very specific audience and relatively invisible to everyone else. Citations are the currency, not corrections. “Openness to critique” often means “openness from people who share my premises, vocabulary, and incentives.” Within that environment, performance hardens into culture.

Richard Feynman is a clean counterexample to the talisman mindset. He told the story of being asked what a bird was called in different languages and brushed it off: the name isn’t the thing. Knowing the label isn’t knowing the behavior, the structure, the why. Naming isn’t knowing.
Here’s the punchline: academics love to quote Feynman while doing the opposite - treating terminology like magic spells and policing diction more aggressively than claims. It’s an irony so common it barely registers.
Now add the isolation layer. A lot of academic work can be done, and sometimes must be done, without regular friction with the broader world. Theoretical math. Parts of engineering. Theory-heavy fields that circulate primarily within their own journals and conferences, and so on. Big fish, small pond. Spend long enough inside, and the pond begins to feel like the ocean. The dialect feels like the language. People outside the bubble start to look… unsophisticated. The projection becomes comfortable: we are the stewards of nuance; they don’t get it.

That habit leaks into everyday life. You’ve heard the dinner-table seminar: commas policed with theological zeal; pedantry presented as care for clarity; the casual correction that asserts rank more than truth. It’s awkward because it’s not a conversation but a broadcast looking for applause. The home becomes a soft mirror of the colloquium room.
…If you think I’m being harsh here, just sit through a conference Q&A with the sound off. Watch the shape of the “questions.” Many are micro-lectures whose function is credential display where the goal is to plant a flag: “I’m fluent.”
The panel nods. The audience exhales. Nothing changes. The ritual was the deliverable.

And when someone does ask a falsifiable question, the common response is fog, “it’s more complicated”, which often translates to “the paradigm can’t afford your test.”

Now, why does this loop persist?
Because the incentives punish doubt and reward assent. Publicly poking a fashionable idea carries social penalties. Joining the applause carries none.
So … people clap.

Gatekeepers, reviewers, grant panels, promotion committees, speak the same dialect and reward those who demonstrate fluency.

Signals that circulate inside the greenhouse matter more than effects that escape it. Graduate training then completes the circuit by teaching simulated mastery on demand-compress a field into a slide, pivot under pressure, improvise citations. Useful skills, but when content thins out they become a performance you can keep doing indefinitely. And if your work rarely collides with external constraints, no market pressure, no engineering failure modes, no patient outcomes, no public uptake, your best feedback becomes applause timing and citation counts.
The loop is comfortable, and comfort is sticky.

This isn’t an argument that expertise is fake or that jargon is useless. Some domains are hard and deserve compressed language; dialects exist to move fast among people who share context.
The point isn’t to smash the dialects. It’s to keep them as keys, not idols.

Let’s bring Feynman back, with respect and a warning label. The real homage isn’t to quote him; it’s to act like him. Treat names as pointers, not proofs. Treat confusion as a signal to dig, not a shame to hide. Treat audiences as collaborators, not mirrors. And notice the times you invoke Feynman to bless a ritual he would have torched.
This isn’t an argument also for anti-intellectualism. It’s an argument for anti-incantation. Keep the words. Lose the spells. Keep the rituals, but tether them to reality*. Let shibboleths be historical lessons, not entry tests. Recognize that the “regular folk” you’ve been trained to underestimate carry a lot of tacit knowledge and hard-won heuristics, and that fluency in a narrow dialect is not the same as wisdom. If your ideas can’t survive a conversation outside your pond, maybe the pond is the product.

I’d summarize the ethic like this: reality first, status second. Not because status is trivial—it isn’t—but because status without reality decays into farce. If the king is naked, say so.
Preferably with a method section, a prediction, and … the patience to clap five seconds late.

These are weird times, and I fully reserve the right to be wrong. But everything I’ve said here is wholehearted. Godspeed and thanks for listening.