Religious dogma as group identity

Religious and other dogmas need not make sense. Indeed, they may work better if they are not logical. Logical and useful ideas pop-up independently and spread easily, and widely accepted ideas are not very good badges. You need a unique idea to identify your group. It helps to have a somewhat costly idea as a dogma, because they are hard to fake and hard to deny. People would need to invest in these bad ideas, so they would be less likely to leave the group and confront the sunk cost. Also, it's harder to deny allegiance to the group afterwards, because no one in their right minds would accept an idea that bad for any other reason.

If you have a naive interpretation of the dogma, which regards it as an objective statement about the world, you will tend to question it. When you’re contesting the dogma, people won’t judge your argument on its merits: they will look at it as an in-group power struggle. Either you want to install your own dogma, which makes you a pretender, or you’re accepted a competing dogma, which makes you a traitor. Even if they accept that you just don’t want to yield to the authority behind the dogma, that makes you a rebel. Dogmas are just off-limits to criticism.

Public display of dismissive attitude to your questioning is also important. Taking it into consideration is in itself a form of treason, as it is interpreted as entertaining the option of joining you against the authority. So it’s best to dismiss the heresy quickly and loudly, without thinking about it.

My heretical by LW standards/scary/worst possible world idea on this is that society needs such dogma. It needs it badly, because coordination is hard. Weak evidence in this direction is that no society ever seems to have existed without it.

That's not the scary part. The scary part is that screwy metaphysical entities like say a God here or there or Reincarnation may in fact impose lower costs on a society than a dogmatic adherence to a particular interpretation of say "justice" or "fatherland" or "the dictatorship of the proletariat".

It would seriously suck to live in that world.

Fortunately, being a rock star from Mars, I live in the world of happy dust and goddesses.

Do you think lesswrong.com has a dogma which is somewhat complex and engenders a group identity? Cryonics anybody? Religious tolerance around here consists of a truce between the one-boxers and the two-boxers. I was told just the other day that if I didn't think sentience arises from the operation of a turing machine that I was probably in the wrong place.

How about the academic world of PhD physicists? Their dogma is not expensive because it is "wrong" but rather it is expensive because it requires great and specialized skills and knowledge to manipulate it. It results in people who characteristically have different opinions than their complementary group, and who tend to trust each other in certain arenas more than they would trust non-phd physicists.

I suspect that this affiliation through agreed-upon dogma is more a feature than a bug, more a mechanism for creating larger more complex creations through uniting the efforts of many people. For the groups we agree with we prefer not to notice that they have some real features in common with the groups we don't agree with, but I submit that our tribe dogma should include a recognition of that fact (and actually, I think it mostly does.)

"Religious dogma as group identity" is such a tautological statement in my head I had to reread it to actually understand that it was supposed to mean something.

You know, that actually explains a lot on how some people in my entourage reacted back when I complained that the current Islamic othodoxy was in fact contrary to both the letter and the spirit of Muhammad's teachings and revelations, and that they should be re-examined thoroughly, and that a new, better, more consistent morality should be extracted from them. I was told that wouldn't be Islam anymore, and that why don't I start my own sect I'm at it (said in tones of disbelieving indignation). That didn't make any sense to me back then, but now it all fits...

There is certainly some plausibility to the idea that more blatantly silly beliefs make even better in group indicators; I suppose the question is how to test that hypothesis.

Religious and other dogmas need not make sense. Indeed, they may work better if they are not logical. Logical and useful ideas pop-up independently and spread easily, and widely accepted ideas are not very good badges. You need a unique idea to identify your group. It helps to have a somewhat costly idea as a dogma, because they are hard to fake and hard to deny. People would need to invest in these bad ideas, so they would be less likely to leave the group and confront the sunk cost. Also, it's harder to deny allegiance to the group afterwards, because no one in their right minds would accept an idea that bad for any other reason.

I more or less agree, I wrote something quite similar in "The importance of Not Getting The Joke":

Now, perhaps not so obviously, could it be people have some incentives to say and even believe or at least try to believe things that are obviously wrong even to people of their tribe (political/religious/ect. affilation)? Why would something like this arise? My mind at this point wandered to conspicuous consumption.

"Conspicuous consumption is lavish spending on goods and services acquired mainly for the purpose of displaying income or wealth."

Could there be such a thing as conspicuous wrongness?

"Look how much I identify with our group, I'm even willing to buy even if it dosen't do us much good. If I wasn't so virtuous I could never believe something this silly."

But why would sticking to the script when its blatantly false to others in the tribe boost your status and self-esteem? Well, sticking to it when its blatantly obvious to most people dosen'tcostyou anything now does it? Sticking to it when its merely uncertain only costs you the esteem of the out group (worthless in most cases)?

I think that a lot of people take assertions about facts as status claims.

Think of the dissatisfied rebellious youths who dislike their math teachers for telling them how things are. Or quite a few pop songs (King of Anything comes to mind).

This seems very likely to me. I would also like to read more on the subject from someone who's done some extensive research.

I'll be addressing this in one of my upcoming ritual articles.

Nowadays, a religion dogma can serve in a way you described. But at the beginning of the dogma it was a dead serious matter. A precious truth. Still, it received a little respect in far away tribes, for they have some different spaghetti monster mythologia and you would be doomed there with your native tribe's tales.

So, you are right here. Therefore, one can best stayed at home. Except during a war, when he can spreads some genes across, if he was very lucky.