Re: infohazards

This seems like a problem with ethics and intelligence in general. The more you know, the more you see how things are connected, the more actions are ethically forbidden to you. Other people do not care, and they still sleep well at night, thinking of themselves as virtuous.

My solution is that I split the ethical considerations into two parts: things I care about, and things I don't.

Things I care about include, for example, not hurting other people. I would try to avoid hurting other people, even if others did it all the time. Because I care intrinsically about people not being hurt more than I care about comparing myself to others. I do the right thing and fuck the rest of the world, kind of.

Thing I do not care about include, for example, honesty about my credentials. Because this is intrinsically a signalling game, there is no real substance behind it. I am not going to plainly lie (that might backfire), but I am not spending any energy on going the extra mile towards honesty. I write the things that seem good, I write them in the way that seems good, I skip the things that don't seem good. If I am technically correct but connotationally misleading, I do not care. The purpose of the CV is to maximize my chances without being technically incorrect; mission accomplished.

Pick your ethical battles, I guess? Worry only about the things that on reflection are worth worrying about?

If you don’t signal the expected way then you are, if not being dishonest, at least misleading people — in many cases it is less honest.

Everyone knows your job application is written to puff you up, and they price it in. If you don’t have the correct amount of puffery, you’re misleading people into thinking you’re worse than you are.

It’s a bad way to communicate and a bad race-to-the-bottom equilibrium but not actually dishonest.

You can write “Dear X” on a letter to a person you don’t know. People used to sign off letters “Your obedient servant”. It evolves for weird signaling reasons but is not taken literally.

Imagine if you had always been like this, not only during the last time. There is a large problem where people who feel like this are in a huge competitive disadvantage (or end up "corrupted"). And these people tend to be the most ethical ones. It is really not surprising that people tend to get less ethical as one looks at higher status jobs/positions.

See also https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/ - this particular thing is visible and salient, and you're feeling more guilt than it deserves.

Remember, signaling is rarely content-free - there's a reason it is selected for, and becomes more important over time.  Resumes (especially resumes for jobs with tens of thousands of roughly-similar candidates) are pretty low-information, so don't sweat it too much - the purpose is ONLY to get through the door, and nobody actually cares about it beyond that.  Actual capabilities and work experience is shown (mostly) in the interviews, and then in day-to-day work.  That's far more important, and has a lower ratio of signaling to signal.  

I've felt exactly this way. A tactic that kept me going for another few CV-like things was to pick something orthogonal in my writing to optimize, so I could focus on that while writing what I needed to: writing without the letter 'e', conforming to a meter, writing sentences in alphabetical order, etc.

Or you can choose to subvert the system from the inside, which would justify your being part of it in the first place, which would justify filling out those CVs and striving to get as much influence as possible in order to be more effective at you future plans to make the system less broken. Imagine yourself in a position to hire others and choosing not to fall into the trap. That would be subverting the system for the better, and you won't get there without getting hired first. Some people would find that motivating enough.