Mormonism is the religion I grew up in which I frequently cite as being a much higher-control group than rationalism, and I hope people here don’t see it as worthy of emulating in any significant way. Reading through this, several core points you cite as a positive I see as central reasons mormonism is dangerous and core to how it maintains its misbehavior. Central authority permits, and in mormonism seems to in fact implement, deference without review such that the frequent immoral advice (usually related to outgrouping or constraining important freedoms that a young individual should have) given by the central church is treated as moral; regular recitation of a fixed set of lessons; having a predefined set of people to interact with, some of whom are inevitably covertly power-seeking and who can succeed at this by veneer of niceness; having a specific authority who can assign roles and who is shielded from criticism by claiming the assignment came from god.
That all said, you’re right that it works if your goals favor community over individual. And I do think many of the lessons encoded in this structure are moderately good. And having a mechanism for role assignment does seem potentially good. But I’d caution that emulating mormonism is not how you reduce your risk of the bad things that turn religion into toxic cult; mormonism is right on the edge of severe cult itself, in my view. when I try an “is it a cult?” questionnaire for a group, rationalism typically scores 40-50%, and mormonism scores 90%+. I do agree that its recipe for communitybuilding produces community, but it’s one I left due to toxicity.
I’m interested to see your response to this. I tried to write it soberly, but my negative experience with mormonism undoubtedly shows through a lot. If you’re able to handle replying in a way that responds to the structure rather than the emotions, I’m interested to hear what you see as the good parts that might be robust to abuse and worth exporting. But I’m cautious, because one of the major ways mormonism scores high on cult behavior is treatment of people who leave and proselytization; I’d be hopeful you can comment in a way that separates mechanistic understanding from religious views.
I was assuming that building strong community is a good thing, because of the post this is responding to. If Scott (or other people) are looking at Mormonism to see what they can learn about building strong communities in a liberal society, it is better if they have an accurate understanding of how the community works.
I think that the things that seem most likely to be worth exporting are ministering and callings. Callings seem harder to export. but have been very important for me feeling part of the community. Ministering seems easier to export, and I wouldn’t be that surprised if rationalists end up doing it better than we do.
Some of the things you’re talking about do not feel like the Church as I have experienced it. I only have my limited view, and for example have never lived in Utah, so maybe we’ve just experienced different things.
I don’t think that any of the leaders I have known could reasonably be described as “covertly power-seeking and who can succeed at this by veneer of niceness”. Including the leaders who I have had significant disagreements with. All of the ones I’ve dealt with are sincerely trying, and would be relieved to have a less effortful calling. I don’t think that most of the niceness you see in the Church is actually a veneer. (N here is maybe 20, if you include bishops, counselors, and elders’ quorum presidents.)
Mechanistically, the Church is a really ineffective route for power seeking. ‘Advancing’ in callings is a slow, highly uncertain process, during which time you are expected to do a ton of service. Maybe there’s some inflection point above stake president where this stops being true (I wouldn’t know), but at least at the levels I’ve been able to see, the incentives point strongly against trying to get more power.[1] If this is a bigger problem in Utah than elsewhere, then I would guess that it would be because having a leadership calling helps you get promotions at work (or something else), and so there are more incentives coming from outside the Church itself.
I agree that there is too much deference without review. I would prefer deference with review. For example, the first time I was called to be ward mission leader, I told my bishop why I thought I was not a particularly good choice for the role, and suggested that we both go and think & pray about it and talk again next week. We did, and I ended up accepting the calling. The leaders I’ve had have reacted well to this—at least some of them seem to prefer it to either deference without review or outright refusal. This is a direction I am trying to push Church culture in.
The set of lessons is not fixed. The lesson topics are suggested by the Church. This only results in the same lesson if the teacher is putting in a minimal amount of effort. Even in this case, someone in the class can dramatically improve it by asking an interesting[2] question, at least if there are some other people who are willing to engage. If no one there is willing to put in anything more than a minimal amount of effort, then the lessons will be repetitive and boring—and no amount of institutional design will fix it.
I endorse proselytizing. If you think that your believes are true and good, then it is good to offer them to the rest of the world. Even if it is through Harry Potter fanfiction instead of only rigorous argument.
I don’t know what treatment you’ve received when leaving the Church. My impression is that people’s friendships in the Church gradually fade away because it’s much harder to maintain a friendship when you don’t have a built in plan to see each other at least once a week, and as people move away and you don’t meet the new people. This can mean that you feel isolated if you come back to visit, but this doesn’t seem like an avoidable problem. If you’ve been treated worse than this, then I’m sorry.
Then why do people do it? Because of a sense of duty—there are norms against refusing callings. My guess is that if the norms around not refusing callings significantly weaken, bishop would be one of the harder callings to get anyone to agree to do.
‘Interesting’ here does not mean ‘controversial’. ‘Interesting’ means ‘something that other people will have nontrivial responses to’. Flagrantly controversial questions are often not interesting, if they result in predictable responses. Crafting interesting questions for Sunday school is an art that I’ve practiced, and I think it’s worthwhile for other people in the Church to practice too.
I’m a big fan of strong communities and I don’t mean to say not to do them. The place that utah mormonism caused severe chafing in my life was related to rules and social structures that are reasonably core to mormonism. That’s not to say the things I found to cause problem don’t serve a purpose, but I don’t think they’re worth the significant cost. I only wanted to bring up the warning that it’s not just the case that all is well in mormonland, even though there are some things which do seem to be kinda nice there that are somewhat missing elsewhere. Covertly powerseeking is something I’ve heard about and had suspicions about locally, but I’d put much higher probability on it in the core priesthood.
I agree that refusable assignments might be a pretty good idea for an intentionally organized community, though I would propose that some sort of unusual local democracy might be a better option for how to choose people. zany idea, derived from straightforwardly turning mormon callings into local democracy: something where everyone is electable as [ranked choice/probabilistic vote/liquid democracy/star voting/etc] by default, and then refusal happens after the election, and the first non-refused option is the one who takes it? that might still have the problems with having a single person assigning. and I don’t like how expensive it ends up being to do elections. (...what if you had a cryptographic pseudoRNG seeded once per person from something unchangeable about them generate the subset of people who will vote this year...)
Ministering—home teaching/visiting teaching, when I knew it—seems sus to me. I don’t trust it to not cause toxic groupthink. If I saw a group doing that from a distance my first impulse would be to avoid them, and it would take a lot of transparency and epistemological soundness on the part of everyone involved for me to take that guard down much at all.
I think you’d be interested in Tocqueville’s description of how New England towns worked in the early 1800s. My guess is that the system of callings descends from it, and it was substantially more democratic.
Search: “Limits of the township” to find the relevant section.
I will note that mormonism is very big, and in any big group there will be abuses of power, so the existence of you claiming you experienced such things is to me not so much evidence that this is the norm or even really a problem with the strategies discussed in the post.
If you could be more specific about the rates of what kinds of abuse happen, then that would be more informative.
The things I’m talking about are primarily things that you hear on the pulpit during general conference, and then are implemented on the edges. Official rules and structures. I’m not super interested in getting into specifics but it’s typical stuff for exmormons to complain about; my point is really that I just want you to think carefully about what effects different things would have. It should be fairly obvious what parts of mormonism I’m talking about if you encounter them and share my preferences.
I want you to be specific so I don’t have to assume what you’re talking about and how you think it affects members, and how what is described in the post relates to any of that.
For example, are you talking about them being against gayness? That seems much more caused by their theology & cosmology than anything described in the OP. Regardless of whether a community implements what is described, it would suck to be gay in a community that hates gayness.
really the core problem I see is that the structure is well adapted to push people to accept things that are unreasonable requests. I’m not interested in getting into specifics because I don’t want to have to narrate out a bunch of personal experiences, so my claim is only about the structure supporting information flow from center outwards, not about what specific things it happens to be carrying in the case of mormonism.
In the secular society we favor individuals over communities so much that those individuals often complain about not having a community at all. Coordination is famously hard. So maybe a certain degree of prioritizing a community is a good thing, to overcome the free-rider problem. It seems to me that many people who wish they had a community would refuse to help if someone else volunteered to create one. How much of that is something they would endorse on reflection, and how much is just a reflex?
The easiest way to avoid becoming a cult is not to have a community at all.
I think a good lesson that probably many people need to hear is that everything has a cost, some work needs to be done, so if you want to have a community, you should volunteer to do the necessary but boring stuff. Otherwise there will be no community.
“we”, which is to say “rationalists”, should not be a “community”.
So maybe a certain degree of prioritizing a community is a good thing, to overcome the free-rider problem.
The problem with prioritizing a community strikes me as similar to the problem of allowing doublethink. Yes, both can be helpful in the moment, if done at the right time, because they allow us to overcome fundamental flaws and inefficiencies in our cognition.
But they’re both insidious parasites that worm their way in and fight back hard if you ever try to remove them. When you choose to doublethink, the bias you embrace not only affects the topics you meant for it to, but also clouds your judgement when you try to determine if you ever want to stop doublethinking. So you run a heavy risk of entering a one-way door, where the person that comes out on the other side looks like you, sounds like you, feels like you, but is constrained to never want to walk back out again.
Likewise, when you empower a community to have control over individuals that goes beyond what’s entirely epistemically justifiable (maybe, for example, because the latter doesn’t result in sufficiently effective coordination), it’s very, very hard to ever disempower it, when things go astray. Because it starts fighting back in precisely those epistemically unjustifiable ways (like weaponizing biases and emotions that cloud the judgement and overcome reason, etc.) that make the entire edifice very, very dangerous.
As I have said before, the biggest danger with giving power to anyone, within a certain set of constraints, isn’t that they will use this power to enact unwise policies. It’s that they will use the power to remove the constraints.
This is tricky. Different people want different degrees of community, but even “give everyone the exact degree that they desire” wouldn’t make everyone happy, because those who want a lower degree might resent feeling excluded by those who have a higher degree. :(
Then the tech of our day can possibly help us! If social media provided asymmetric visibility so that everyone would get seemingly community that they want...
(should not be implemented before solving other issues, like how to make the resulting information bubbles harmless)
I don’t think the former is possible without the latter. As I observe the people around me, the community they truly, deeply (in the core of their hearts) want is precisely one that validates them and their feelings and all their beliefs. They crave precisely those information bubbles that you want to eliminate.
Mormonism is the religion I grew up in which I frequently cite as being a much higher-control group than rationalism, and I hope people here don’t see it as worthy of emulating in any significant way. Reading through this, several core points you cite as a positive I see as central reasons mormonism is dangerous and core to how it maintains its misbehavior. Central authority permits, and in mormonism seems to in fact implement, deference without review such that the frequent immoral advice (usually related to outgrouping or constraining important freedoms that a young individual should have) given by the central church is treated as moral; regular recitation of a fixed set of lessons; having a predefined set of people to interact with, some of whom are inevitably covertly power-seeking and who can succeed at this by veneer of niceness; having a specific authority who can assign roles and who is shielded from criticism by claiming the assignment came from god.
That all said, you’re right that it works if your goals favor community over individual. And I do think many of the lessons encoded in this structure are moderately good. And having a mechanism for role assignment does seem potentially good. But I’d caution that emulating mormonism is not how you reduce your risk of the bad things that turn religion into toxic cult; mormonism is right on the edge of severe cult itself, in my view. when I try an “is it a cult?” questionnaire for a group, rationalism typically scores 40-50%, and mormonism scores 90%+. I do agree that its recipe for communitybuilding produces community, but it’s one I left due to toxicity.
I’m interested to see your response to this. I tried to write it soberly, but my negative experience with mormonism undoubtedly shows through a lot. If you’re able to handle replying in a way that responds to the structure rather than the emotions, I’m interested to hear what you see as the good parts that might be robust to abuse and worth exporting. But I’m cautious, because one of the major ways mormonism scores high on cult behavior is treatment of people who leave and proselytization; I’d be hopeful you can comment in a way that separates mechanistic understanding from religious views.
I was assuming that building strong community is a good thing, because of the post this is responding to. If Scott (or other people) are looking at Mormonism to see what they can learn about building strong communities in a liberal society, it is better if they have an accurate understanding of how the community works.
I think that the things that seem most likely to be worth exporting are ministering and callings. Callings seem harder to export. but have been very important for me feeling part of the community. Ministering seems easier to export, and I wouldn’t be that surprised if rationalists end up doing it better than we do.
Some of the things you’re talking about do not feel like the Church as I have experienced it. I only have my limited view, and for example have never lived in Utah, so maybe we’ve just experienced different things.
I don’t think that any of the leaders I have known could reasonably be described as “covertly power-seeking and who can succeed at this by veneer of niceness”. Including the leaders who I have had significant disagreements with. All of the ones I’ve dealt with are sincerely trying, and would be relieved to have a less effortful calling. I don’t think that most of the niceness you see in the Church is actually a veneer. (N here is maybe 20, if you include bishops, counselors, and elders’ quorum presidents.)
Mechanistically, the Church is a really ineffective route for power seeking. ‘Advancing’ in callings is a slow, highly uncertain process, during which time you are expected to do a ton of service. Maybe there’s some inflection point above stake president where this stops being true (I wouldn’t know), but at least at the levels I’ve been able to see, the incentives point strongly against trying to get more power.[1] If this is a bigger problem in Utah than elsewhere, then I would guess that it would be because having a leadership calling helps you get promotions at work (or something else), and so there are more incentives coming from outside the Church itself.
I agree that there is too much deference without review. I would prefer deference with review. For example, the first time I was called to be ward mission leader, I told my bishop why I thought I was not a particularly good choice for the role, and suggested that we both go and think & pray about it and talk again next week. We did, and I ended up accepting the calling. The leaders I’ve had have reacted well to this—at least some of them seem to prefer it to either deference without review or outright refusal. This is a direction I am trying to push Church culture in.
The set of lessons is not fixed. The lesson topics are suggested by the Church. This only results in the same lesson if the teacher is putting in a minimal amount of effort. Even in this case, someone in the class can dramatically improve it by asking an interesting[2] question, at least if there are some other people who are willing to engage. If no one there is willing to put in anything more than a minimal amount of effort, then the lessons will be repetitive and boring—and no amount of institutional design will fix it.
I endorse proselytizing. If you think that your believes are true and good, then it is good to offer them to the rest of the world. Even if it is through Harry Potter fanfiction instead of only rigorous argument.
I don’t know what treatment you’ve received when leaving the Church. My impression is that people’s friendships in the Church gradually fade away because it’s much harder to maintain a friendship when you don’t have a built in plan to see each other at least once a week, and as people move away and you don’t meet the new people. This can mean that you feel isolated if you come back to visit, but this doesn’t seem like an avoidable problem. If you’ve been treated worse than this, then I’m sorry.
Then why do people do it? Because of a sense of duty—there are norms against refusing callings. My guess is that if the norms around not refusing callings significantly weaken, bishop would be one of the harder callings to get anyone to agree to do.
‘Interesting’ here does not mean ‘controversial’. ‘Interesting’ means ‘something that other people will have nontrivial responses to’. Flagrantly controversial questions are often not interesting, if they result in predictable responses. Crafting interesting questions for Sunday school is an art that I’ve practiced, and I think it’s worthwhile for other people in the Church to practice too.
I’m a big fan of strong communities and I don’t mean to say not to do them. The place that utah mormonism caused severe chafing in my life was related to rules and social structures that are reasonably core to mormonism. That’s not to say the things I found to cause problem don’t serve a purpose, but I don’t think they’re worth the significant cost. I only wanted to bring up the warning that it’s not just the case that all is well in mormonland, even though there are some things which do seem to be kinda nice there that are somewhat missing elsewhere. Covertly powerseeking is something I’ve heard about and had suspicions about locally, but I’d put much higher probability on it in the core priesthood.
I agree that refusable assignments might be a pretty good idea for an intentionally organized community, though I would propose that some sort of unusual local democracy might be a better option for how to choose people. zany idea, derived from straightforwardly turning mormon callings into local democracy: something where everyone is electable as [ranked choice/probabilistic vote/liquid democracy/star voting/etc] by default, and then refusal happens after the election, and the first non-refused option is the one who takes it? that might still have the problems with having a single person assigning. and I don’t like how expensive it ends up being to do elections. (...what if you had a cryptographic pseudoRNG seeded once per person from something unchangeable about them generate the subset of people who will vote this year...)
Ministering—home teaching/visiting teaching, when I knew it—seems sus to me. I don’t trust it to not cause toxic groupthink. If I saw a group doing that from a distance my first impulse would be to avoid them, and it would take a lot of transparency and epistemological soundness on the part of everyone involved for me to take that guard down much at all.
I think you’d be interested in Tocqueville’s description of how New England towns worked in the early 1800s. My guess is that the system of callings descends from it, and it was substantially more democratic.
Search: “Limits of the township” to find the relevant section.
I will note that mormonism is very big, and in any big group there will be abuses of power, so the existence of you claiming you experienced such things is to me not so much evidence that this is the norm or even really a problem with the strategies discussed in the post.
If you could be more specific about the rates of what kinds of abuse happen, then that would be more informative.
The things I’m talking about are primarily things that you hear on the pulpit during general conference, and then are implemented on the edges. Official rules and structures. I’m not super interested in getting into specifics but it’s typical stuff for exmormons to complain about; my point is really that I just want you to think carefully about what effects different things would have. It should be fairly obvious what parts of mormonism I’m talking about if you encounter them and share my preferences.
I want you to be specific so I don’t have to assume what you’re talking about and how you think it affects members, and how what is described in the post relates to any of that.
For example, are you talking about them being against gayness? That seems much more caused by their theology & cosmology than anything described in the OP. Regardless of whether a community implements what is described, it would suck to be gay in a community that hates gayness.
really the core problem I see is that the structure is well adapted to push people to accept things that are unreasonable requests. I’m not interested in getting into specifics because I don’t want to have to narrate out a bunch of personal experiences, so my claim is only about the structure supporting information flow from center outwards, not about what specific things it happens to be carrying in the case of mormonism.
In the secular society we favor individuals over communities so much that those individuals often complain about not having a community at all. Coordination is famously hard. So maybe a certain degree of prioritizing a community is a good thing, to overcome the free-rider problem. It seems to me that many people who wish they had a community would refuse to help if someone else volunteered to create one. How much of that is something they would endorse on reflection, and how much is just a reflex?
The easiest way to avoid becoming a cult is not to have a community at all.
I think a good lesson that probably many people need to hear is that everything has a cost, some work needs to be done, so if you want to have a community, you should volunteer to do the necessary but boring stuff. Otherwise there will be no community.
And as some have always said:
The problem with prioritizing a community strikes me as similar to the problem of allowing doublethink. Yes, both can be helpful in the moment, if done at the right time, because they allow us to overcome fundamental flaws and inefficiencies in our cognition.
But they’re both insidious parasites that worm their way in and fight back hard if you ever try to remove them. When you choose to doublethink, the bias you embrace not only affects the topics you meant for it to, but also clouds your judgement when you try to determine if you ever want to stop doublethinking. So you run a heavy risk of entering a one-way door, where the person that comes out on the other side looks like you, sounds like you, feels like you, but is constrained to never want to walk back out again.
Likewise, when you empower a community to have control over individuals that goes beyond what’s entirely epistemically justifiable (maybe, for example, because the latter doesn’t result in sufficiently effective coordination), it’s very, very hard to ever disempower it, when things go astray. Because it starts fighting back in precisely those epistemically unjustifiable ways (like weaponizing biases and emotions that cloud the judgement and overcome reason, etc.) that make the entire edifice very, very dangerous.
As I have said before, the biggest danger with giving power to anyone, within a certain set of constraints, isn’t that they will use this power to enact unwise policies. It’s that they will use the power to remove the constraints.
This is tricky. Different people want different degrees of community, but even “give everyone the exact degree that they desire” wouldn’t make everyone happy, because those who want a lower degree might resent feeling excluded by those who have a higher degree. :(
Then the tech of our day can possibly help us! If social media provided asymmetric visibility so that everyone would get seemingly community that they want...
(should not be implemented before solving other issues, like how to make the resulting information bubbles harmless)
I don’t think the former is possible without the latter. As I observe the people around me, the community they truly, deeply (in the core of their hearts) want is precisely one that validates them and their feelings and all their beliefs. They crave precisely those information bubbles that you want to eliminate.