Be careful about keeping descriptive and normative separate.
The correlation that we are talking about is descriptive and has to do with observable reality. What you think should be done and how is normative and has to do with your value judgments.
You're right, my apologies.
My value judgment about disincentives still stands, though. Religious communities have a framework for applying social and other disincentives (and incentives) in order to achieve their desired result. That framework could be useful if adapted to the purpose of promoting rationality.
Yesterday I attended church service in Romania where I had visited my sister and the sermon was about the four things a (christian) community has to follow to persevere and grow.
I first considered just posting the quote from the Acts of the Apostles (reproduced below) in the Rationality Quotes Thread but I fear without explanation the inferential gap of the quote is too large.
The LessWrong Meetups, the EA community and other rationalist communities probably can learn from the experience of long established orders (I once asked for lessons from free masonry).
So I drew the following connections:
According to the the sermon and the below verse the four pillars of a christian community are:
Other analogies that I drew from the quote:
And what I just right now notice is that embedding the rules in the scripture is essentially self-reference. As the scripture is canon this structure perpetuates itself. Clearly a meme that ensures its reproduction.
Does this sound convincing and plausible or did I fell trap to some bias in (over)interpreting the sermon?
I hope this is upvoted for the lessons we might draw from this - despite the quote clearly being theistic in origin.