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ciphergoth comments on Can Humanism Match Religion's Output? - Less Wrong
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The reason Catholics are better organized than humanists is that they're official, communal, and hierarchical and we're not. The reason cults are better organized than Catholics is that they're even more official, communal, and hierarchical.
If the Pope says "Donate ten percent of your money to me," then there's an expectation that ordinary Catholics will obey. They've committed to following what the Pope says.
If you, Eliezer, posted on this forum "Please donate ten percent of your money to the Institute That Must Not Be Named", well...actually, I don't know what would happen. A few rare people might do it to signal that we liked you. But although we often follow you, we are not your followers. We haven't made a committment to you. We associate with you as long as it's convenient for us, but as soon as it stops being convenient, we'll wander off.
If you really want to get an infrastructure as powerful as the Catholic Church, you need to ask us to officially swear loyalty to you and start publically self-identifying as Rationalists with a capital R (the capital letter is very important!) You need to put us through some painful initiation ritual, so we feel a commitment to stick around even when the going gets tough. You need to make us publically profess how great Rationalism is to all our friends enough times that it would be a major social embarrassment to get kicked out for not obeying you enough. You need to establish a norm that following Eliezer's requests is so completely expected it would be strange to refuse and we'd be going against all our friends. And then you need to keep telling us about how much better off we are as capital-R Rationalists than as members of the boring old general public. Then you can start ordering us to donate ten percent of our income and expect Pope-level compliance rates.
The cultists do all of this, and the Catholics try but generally fail, which is why many Catholics don't listen to the Pope nearly as much as atheists think. If you didn't want to go quite this far, even making us pay $5 for a (physical, laminated, colorful) Less Wrong membership card would probably make a difference. Once we did that, we'd be members of something, instead of people who came to a blog every so often to discuss an interest. The brain cares a lot about this sort of thing.
[edit: better explanation below in response to ciphergoth]
Yes, we know that churches and cults thrive by exploiting well-understood cognitive biases, but you're sort of sidestepping the central thrust of what EY is getting at in this, which AFAICT is simply:
Isn't there some way we could make use of the power of collective action because it's actually a good idea, rather than relying on cognitive bias to cohere us? Rather than hanging onto the biases that bring us together, couldn't we get there by fighting the biases that keep us apart?
No, I'm not saying they thrive by bias, exactly, or at least not the simple kind of bias. They thrive by having a hierarchy and being official. They thrive because they've made a commitment.
Consider marriage. In an ideal world, two people would stay monogamous purely because they loved each other. In reality, that monogamy is going to be tested, and there's going to be some point at which they don't want to keep it. When they're rational, they know the best thing for their future and their children is to stay together, but they realize that they might be too short-sighted to do so later. So they use the institution of marriage to make it socially, financially, and theologically impossible for them to split up later. It's the present self binding potentially irrational future selves. Not only is it not a bias, but if it's done right it's an antidote to bias.
There's that one website, whatsitsname, where you send them money and a resolution. Maybe it's "I will go to the gym every day for a month", and you send them $100. At the end of the month, if you went to the gym every day, they send your money back; if you didn't, they keep it. I wouldn't say you were biased into going to the gym, I'd say you discovered a clever technique to make you do it.
Organizations, at least the ones you join voluntarily, are another clever technique for causing that kind of commitment. And yeah, a lot of the techniques they use to do it, like the initiation ceremonies, are biases. But I don't consider biases that smart people invoke voluntarily to control their akrasia to always be great evils.
I think using bias to fight bias is an extremely risky technique, since it must surely call for self-deception on some level. I'm not a fan of marriage or monogamy either so those examples don't ring bells for me.
Yvain, what's the website? I'm not skilled enough to find it from those clues. Asking because I outlined the exact same idea in a blog post in Russian about a year ago, thinking it was original, and now am curious to see the implementation.
Hmm...got it bookmarked somewhere...ah! http://www.stickk.com/