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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29550 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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I wish there were a study which looked into the personality and religious beliefs of scientific fraudsters. It doesn’t appear to be linked to race, culture, or country of origin, but I can easily see religious belief being correlated with lower levels of fraud because it’s all about intrinsic moral motivation and identity. And if that’s so, our institutions should require religious belief in a personal diety for high-level positions which require trust, without favoritism toward any one system of belief or denomination.

Institutions which require belief in God, but not a specific belief, are uniquely vulnerable.

Like, the Knights of Columbus and the LDS church are some of the more based large organizations with fairly tight control over membership- and requiring members to specifically practice a particular religion is part of it. The LDS church would not function on the basis of ‘anyone who believes in Jesus and tithes’. The knights of Columbus would turn into a progressive skin suit if they dropped the specificity of religious practice requirements.

At best, your proposal sounds like communist party membership- checking a box to say you did it, with no real effect on actual beliefs.

The LDS Church is notoriously full of affinity frauds and MLMs. When arranging my babymoon, I remember wondering why hotel room rates were so high in SLC in the summer, and discovering when we got into town that there were two large MLM conventions on at the same time. Sitting at one table in the brunch room at the Grand American Hotel planning a hike while at the next table over a Mormon with a blinged-out name badge was explaining to two evangelical churchladies with rather less blinged-out name badges how they could convince their church members that God wanted them to buy MLM crap was an eye-opening experience.

our institutions should require religious belief in a personal diety for high-level positions which require trust, without favoritism toward any one system of belief or denomination.

That’s what the Masons tried… and ended up accused of all sorts of evils.

That’s what the Boy Scouts tried… and ended up a skinsuit for the egregore.

Do you expect it to be different from any other crime? That is, well-surveyed but completely unable to suss out causation. The main predictor is going to be material cost/benefit analysis, not internal experience of morality.

Speaking of confusing correlation and causation—requiring leaders to publicly profess belief in something unprovable, immeasurable, and also fictional would not encourage trust.

There are large differences between types of crime. Fabricating science is not a crime of passion. I don’t think it is impossible to suss out causation. An easy way to determine causation is by analyzing adopted twin data according to religiosity and family income and so on.

main predictor is going to be material cost/benefit analysis, not internal experience of morality

We have cases of people who abstain from a crime despite the opportunity. Personal religion involves costs and benefits that are salient and compelling, some of which are non-material and some are material-to-be.

requiring leaders to publicly profess belief in something unprovable

We do not require students applying to university to tell us what their teachers say about them, we require the teachers to tell us.

This ignores the potential for either favoritism or lack of oversight towards people who are in the same church. After all, our church has the best people. /s

Loads of fraudsters have intrinsic moral motivation and identity. There are people who fake for money and fame, yes, but lots who fake because they believe they're RIGHT and they think they're the chosen one who will finally solve X. The fact that the data doesn't support X is just a temporary setback - the next experiment will surely prove they were right all along, but right now they need to bolster it a bit.

Sophisticated religious systems include humility-generating training regimens involving introspection and self-judgment, whether that be confessions or something more rigorous like the Ignatian Examen.

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