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wedrifid comments on Should we have secular churches? - Less Wrong
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Why ask "should we"? You can have whatever you like - just so long as you don't expect me to participate.
The most annoying part of church wasn't the silly belief in a "God" - that made no real difference. It was the fact that it was an arbitrary social hierarchy with absolutely no practical purpose via which any concept of 'merit' could be realised. Such entities do not benefit me.
Could you elaborate? My experience with churches is not extensive, but those I'm familiar with, looking at them as individual entities rather than large institutions like the Catholic Church, mostly had fairly flat social hierarchies.
Based on the Paul Graham essay, I think wedrifid's talking about the prestige assignment and character formation processes that are typically found within social contexts (like the laity of the church) where there is no coherent or "objective" measure of virtue.
The theory claims that in such circumstances you get something more like high school or new york socialite circles (where the optimization pressure is supposed to center around attention to incredibly subtle human social nuances and gaming gossip networks and such) and less like the scientific or business communities (where the optimization pressures are suppose to focus on processes somewhat "external" to human factors and substantial development of "practical" skills and knowledge are necessary to thrive).
It sounds like you refer to a more formal concept than I.