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."
What's bad about cults is not that they're weird. It's that they motivate people to do bad things...
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 &quo...
I have several questions related to this:
If you visit any Less Wrong page for the first time in a cookies-free browsing mode, you'll see this message for new users:
Here are the worst violators I see on that about page:
And on the sequences page:
This seems obviously false to me.
These may not seem like cultish statements to you, but keep in mind that you are one of the ones who decided to stick around. The typical mind fallacy may be at work. Clearly there is some population that thinks Less Wrong seems cultish, as evidenced by Google's autocomplete, and these look like good candidates for things that makes them think this.
We can fix this stuff easily, since they're both wiki pages, but I thought they were examples worth discussing.
In general, I think we could stand more community effort being put into improving our about page, which you can do now here. It's not that visible to veteran users, but it is very visible to newcomers. Note that it looks as though you'll have to click the little "Force reload from wiki" button on the about page itself for your changes to be published.