Last Saturday I found myself at a service in honor of the winter solstice.
We began by consecrating the space – turning first east, then south, then west, then north, promising to honor the virtues traditionally symbolically associated with those directions. We rose and sat together. We sang songs in unison – about the darkness of uncertainty, the vastness of nature, the promise of tomorrow. We extinguished LED candles, one by one, reflecting on death, and on what it meant to live in a broken and ontologically meaningless world...…

In a country where religious people tend to be happier than the 24 percent who identify as “religiously unaffiliated,” it makes sense perhaps that groups bent on optimizing human behavior would try to salvage what they see as the measurable good from religious experience.
To “hack the good” from religion, then, means taking away metaphysical truth or a higher power from religion so that it becomes fundamentally a communal activity designed to reinforce group bonds and, no less importantly, group values.
Those values include religious principles such as altruism, but members of these secular communities are invited in turn to commit themselves to scientific research to solve social problems, including death itself, if only by helping to fund such research. In doing so they affirm their membership in the group.