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Comment by Procrastes | Hacker News Reader

> charitable behavior is heavily driven by visibility (hardly any donations are anonymous)

That doesn't bear out with what I see. Looking at a dataset of 2.8 million donations through our site, roughly 20% are anonymous. That's not the majority, but it's much more than "hardly any."

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And of all the ones that aren't anonymous, many many of them are only known to the recipient and the giver. If I give $30 to someone, just because I haven't anonymized it doesn't mean I think the world at large will know. I'm not sharing a list of my charitable giving with my friends, and I don't know many people who do trumpet their small-dollar donations.

A primary consumer of signaling is the signaller. We do things to convince ourselves of our qualities, which isn't necessarily bad.

Once you add that in, no wonder someone could find a way to tie 90% of human behavior to "signalling." Why did you do something? To convince yourself that you are the sort of person who would do that thing. This story works with a large majority of things people do. That seems too clever by half.

>We do things to convince ourselves of our qualities

This just seems like basic logic though? If you want to be X and Y provides the means, then it makes sense to do it right? There can't be a hidden agenda if you're actively pursuing it

Well that’s a convenient tautology, then.

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