Objectivists may have "rationalists" in some sense, but did they ever claim to have good cognitive and social tools against phyg-ishness? Of course they didn't, because they expended no effort on developing such tools...
Depends how wide your scope is. It's fairly rare for groups to use the cult terminology (my impression is that LW developed its vocabulary in that area mainly thanks to early accusations of being a personality cult centered on EY; consider Two Cult Koans). But it's quite common for groups to identify as "the non-clique clique", to borrow a phrase from a recent conversation: that's an identity shared by all of Objectivism, LW rationality, and most strains of social justice. Their methods for attempting that status vary, but all indications are that it's a hard problem, which is exactly why we should wait on data before making any strong claims about our methodology.
As to Objectivism specifically, my knowledge of the group is limited to Rand's writings, but she seems to have been under the impression that what she saw as rigorous axiomatization would be enough to prevent the pitfalls of ideology. She put a huge amount of effort into streamlining her philosophy along those lines, far more than we've put into combating happy death spirals and the affect heuristic directly. In retrospect that was clearly a bad approach, but in her own context it wasn't obviously so; it seemed to have worked for mathematics, after all, which was making huge strides around when she was writing.
But it's quite common for groups to identify as "the non-clique clique", to borrow a phrase from a recent conversation:
Unfortunately, "the non-clique clique" is vulnerable to outgroup-homogeneity and related biases. It's all too easy to think that they are a clique with simplistic views, wereas we (our own tribe) are a diverse group with a variety of opinions and well-argued viewpoints. It's not clear that this adds anything in terms of basic hygiene.
...... what she saw as rigorous axiomatization would be enough to prevent the pitfa
One of the lessons highlighted in the thread "Less Wrong NYC: Case Study of a Successful Rationalist Chapter" is Gender ratio matters.
There have recently been a number of articles addressing one social skills issue that might be affecting this, from the perspective of a geeky/sciencefiction community with similar attributes to LessWrong, and I want to link to these, not just so the people potentially causing problems get to read them, but also so everyone else knows the resource is there and has a name for the problem, which may facilitate wider discussion and make it easier for others to know when to point towards the resources those who would benefit by them.
However before I do, in the light of RedRobot's comment in the "Of Gender and Rationality" thread, I'd like to echo a sentiment from one of the articles, that people exhibiting this behaviour may be of any gender and may victimise upon any gender. And so, while it may be correlated with a particular gender, it is the behaviour that should be focused upon, and turning this thread into bashing of one gender (or defensiveness against perceived bashing) would be unhelpful.
Ok, disclaimers out of the way, here are the links:
Some of those raise deeper issues about rape culture and audience as enabler, but the TLDR summary is:
EDITED TO ADD:
Despite the way some of the links are framed as being addressed to creepers, this post is aimed at least as much at the community as a whole, intended to trigger a discussion on how the community should best go about handling such a problem once identified, with the TLDR being "set of restraints to place on someone who is burning the commons", rather that a complete description that guarantees that anyone who doesn't meet it isn't creepy. (Thank you to jsteinhardt for clearly verbalising the misinterpretation - for discussion see his reply to this post)