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Jiro comments on Notes on Brainwashing & 'Cults' - Less Wrong
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As pointed out in the OP by one author, the cults in question have in many ways been assimilated by the mainstream and so are far less 'weird' than ever before. Has that helped their retention rates? Environmentalism and meditation are completely mainstream now, have the Hare Krishnas staged a comeback?
The counterfactual is not available or producible, and so this is meaningless to point out. If the Hare Krishnas did not hold 'creepy' beliefs, in what sense is this counterfactual organization similar to the Hare Krishnas? If Transcendental Meditators did not do as weird a thing as meditate, how are they Transcendental Meditators? Defining away all the unique characteristics does not add any insight.
"You often see a boss abusing a subordinate, which leads insufficiently dedicated employees to leave. This is because bosses wish to sacrifice quantity and being able to handle work for 'quality' of subordinates."
No, there is nothing unique about cults in this respect. Monkeys gonna monkey. And for the exact same reason businesses do not casually seek to alienate 99% of their employees in order to retain a fanatical 1%, you don't see cults systematically organization-wide try to alienate everyone. You see a few people in close proximity to elites being abused. Just like countless other organizations.
Which explains the success of deprogrammers, amirite?
I would suggest that if beliefs believed by cults becoime mainstream, that certainly decreases one barrier to such a cult's expansion, but because there are additional factors (such as creepiness) that alone is not enough to lead the cult to expand much. It may be that people's resistance to joining a group drastically increases if the group fails any one of several criteria. Just decrementing the number of criteria that the group fails isn't going to be enough, if even one such criterion is left.
The level of abuse done by bosses and cult leaders is different, so although the statement is literally true for both bosses and cult leaders, it really doesn't imply that the two situations are similar.
Maybe, but I don't know how we'd know the difference.
Is it really? Remember how many thousands of NRMs there are over the decades, and how people tend to discuss repeatedly a few salient examples like Scientology. Can we really compare that favorably regular bosses with religious figures? Aside from the Catholic Church scandal (with its counterparts among other closemouthed groups like Jewish and Amish communities), we see plenty of sexual scandals in other places like the military (the Tailhook scandal as the classic example, but there's plenty of recent statistics on sexual assault in the military, often enabled by the hierarchy).