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fubarobfusco comments on Cult impressions of Less Wrong/Singularity Institute - Less Wrong
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Disclaimer: My partner and I casually refer to LW meetups (which I attend and she does not) as "the cult".
That said, if someone asked me if LW (or SIAI) "was a cult", I think my ideal response might be something like this:
"No, it's not; at least not in the sense I think you mean. What's bad about cults is not that they're weird. It's that they motivate people to do bad things, like lock kids in chain-lockers, shun their friends and families, or kill themselves. The badness of being a cult is not being weird; it's doing harmful things — and, secondarily, in coming up with excuses for why the cult gets to do those harmful things. Less Wrong is weird, but not harmful, so I don't think it is a cult in the sense you mean — at least not at the moment.
"That said, we do recognize that "every cause wants to be a cult", that human group behavior does sometimes tend toward cultish, and that just because a group says 'Rationality' on the label does not mean it contains good thinking. Hoping that we're special and that the normal rules of human behavior don't apply to us, would be a really bad idea. It seems that staying self-critical, understanding how cults happen and why, and consciously taking steps to avoid making in-group excuses for bad behavior or bad thinking, is a pretty good strategy for avoiding becoming a cult."
People use "weird" as a heuristic for danger, and personally I don't blame them, because they have good Bayesian reasons for it. Breaking a social norm X is positively correlated with breaking a social norm Y, and the correlation is strong enough for most people to notice.
The right thing to do is to show enough social skill to avoid triggering the weirdness alarm signal. (Just like publishing in serious media is the right thing to avoid the "pseudoscience" label.) You cannot expect that outsiders will do an exception for LW, suspend their heuristics and explore the website deeply; that would be asking them to privilege a hypothesis.
If something is "weird", we should try to make it less weird. No excuses.
So we should be Less Weird now? ;)
We should be winning.
Less Weird is a good heuristic for winning (though a bad heuristic for a site name ).
Often by the time a cult starts doing harmful things, its members have made both real and emotional investments that turn out to be nothing but sunk costs. To avoid ever getting into such a situation, people come up with a lot of ways to attempt to identify cults based on nothing more than the non-harmful, best-foot-forward appearance that cults first try to project. If you see a group using "love bombing", for instance, the wise response is to be wary - not because making people feel love and self-esteem is inherently a bad thing, but because it's so easily and commonly twisted toward ulterior motives.
That is until people start bombing factories to mitigate highly improbable existential risks.