The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

That people show off these illegible globs in public only makes sense from a signaling perspective: They are saying, “look at how many nodes I have in my brain, amazing nodes, I have so many nodes that a peon such as yourself can’t even guess what’s going on here!”

The human brain is hardwired to infer intentions behind words. Every time you engage in conversation, your mind automatically constructs a mental model of your conversation partner. You then use the words they say to fill in the model with that person’s goals, feelings and beliefs.

When we curate how we present, we know that others can draw further inferences. But there are rules to that: it’s limited by human cognition, you can often appeal a mischaracterisation by talking to the person, you know how to course-correct ... That's informal governance.

Signaling and counter-signaling are hidden methods of communicating with each other. We do it all the time as a way to “prove” we are who and what we claim to be.