Of course, all this is purely speculative. And the causation might go the other way: instead of adopting a high-cost idea signalling one's membership in the group, it might be that high-cost ideas tend to create groups, because low-cost ideas tend to be adopted by large numbers of people.
My thinking is that the discussion of high cost ideas being dopey and primarily for signalling membership in a group is only partially correct, only a part of the story. In the case of physics, engineering, more applied parts of math and computer science, and probably many forms of understanding of management, politics, and "social engineering," these high cost ideas have high benefit in terms of what you can manage to do.
Also I would imagine the causation does go both ways what with these being natrualistic systems. Nature has never been shy about exploiting valuable causalities just to keep the story simple, it seems to me.
In general, I think a lot of the signalling arguments tend to overstate things, staring so excitedly at the secondary effects of group cohesion and definition and missing the intrinsic value that many of these signals have. If spending 7 years getting a phd in physics (I enjoyed myself, I wasn't in a rush, that's my story and i'm sticking to it) is signalling my membership in a group I very much want to be in, it has also created in me a bunch of very valuable capabilities in terms of mastering the physical world around me and mastering the intellectual (social political) world around me in certain narrow ways. I guess I feel as though the REASON I want to be in this group is because the people in this group can do stuff I want to be able to do. THat is, I'm impressed by their wizards and want to learn some of their magick.
See what I mean? Religious jargon of signalling and membership seems one way when you are talking about something that you think is BS but an entirely different way when talking about something that you "believe in." But it is the same human stuff. Its a tool that we benefit from using every bit as much as do the people in other groups. Indeed, if we are to "win", we better be benefitting from it more than they are.
I'd suggest that high-cost ideas are generally high-benefit, or at least high-apparent-benefit (see: love-bombing in cults), in order to incentivize people to believe them.
I definitely think it's important to recognize that almost all group beliefs are both signalling and something that people actually believe and that has effects on their life. The PhD's role as a signal of membership in the Physicist Conspiracy doesn't conflict with the PhD's role of learning interesting things about physics; in fact, they're complementary. (However, it's certainly possi...
I was reading the "Professing and Cheering" article and it reminded me about some of my own ideas about the role of religious dogma as group identity badges. Here's the gist of it:
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.
Do you know of some other texts which shed some light on this idea?