I don't know if virtue signaling is the right term. The better term might be "shibboleth" for so-called rationalists. It's as if you took the kids who loved lists of logical fallacies and told them they could resolve all disputes if they just reduced them to first principles and used words like "prior."

Nevermind that the first principles lose all context of the original issue - we're in a world of pure logic, where we can use theorems! To the rationalist community, everything looks like a good opportunity to write a lengthy essay reinventing the wheel with Bayes theorem. It's a cargo cult of basic statistics dressing up otherwise uninteresting arguments.

It's very tedious for people like myself who actually studied statistics and apply it professionally. Bayes theorem is barely even a theorem - it's literally a basic rearrangement of the axioms of probability. It's not some supreme revelation that imbues arguments with more credibility. Most of the time I see it invoked in discussion, it's not even rigorously quantified. You can choose arbitrary priors, so at the end of the day you never arrive at an objective truth. It's profundity for its own sake, and nothing is really achieved.