It especially annoys me when people respond to evidence-based arguments that LessWrong is not a cult with, "Well where did you come to believe all that stuff about evidence, LessWrong?"

Before LessWrong, my epistemology was basically a more clumsy version of what is now. If you described my present self to my past self, and said "Is this guy a cult victim?" he would ask for evidence. He wouldn't be thinking in terms of Bayes's theorem, but he would be thinking with a bunch of verbally expressed heuristics and analogies that usually added up to the same thing. I used to say things like "Absence of evidence is actually evidence of absence, but only if you would expect to see the evidence if the thing was true and you've checked for the evidence," which I was later delighted to see validated and formalized by probability theory.

You could of course say, "Well, that's not actually your past self, that's your present self (the cult victim)'s memories, which are distorted by mad thinking," but then you're getting into brain-in-a-vat territory. I have to think using some process. If that process is wrong but unable to detect its own wrongness, I'm screwed. Adding infinitely recursive meta-doubt to the process just creates a new one to which the same problem applies.

I'm not particularly worried that my epistemology is completely wrong, because the pieces of my epistemology, when evaluated by my epistemology, appear to do what they're supposed to. I can see why they would do what they're supposed to by simulating how they would work, and they have a track record of doing what they're supposed to. There may be other epistemologies that would evaluate mine as wrong. But they are not my epistemology, so I don't believe what they recommend me to believe.

This is what someone with a particular kind of corrupt epistemology (one that was internally consistent) would say. But it is also the best anyone with an optimal epistemology could say. So why Mestroyer::should my saying it be cause for concern? (this is an epistemic "Mestroyer::should")

Something more than a salon and less than a movement, then... English has a big vocabulary, there must be a good word for it.

From my POV it seems like people starting a 'are we a cult' threads/conversations do it mainly for signaling purposes.

I think people also say things just to get conversation going. We need to look at making it easier to find useful ways of getting attention.

When when will these rants go meta?

nope http://lesswrong.com/lw/atm/cult_impressions_of_less_wrongsingularity/60ub

You say "cult" like it's a bad thing.

Seriously though, using a term with negative connotations is not a rational approach t begin with. Like asking "is this woman a slut?". It presumes that a higher-than-average number of sexual partners is necessarily bad or immoral. Back to the cult thing: why does this term have a derogatory connotation? Says wikipedia:

In the mass media, and among average citizens, "cult" gained an increasingly negative connotation, becoming associated with things like kidnapping, brainwashing, psychological abuse, sexual abuse and other criminal activity, and mass suicide. While most of these negative qualities usually have real documented precedents in the activities of a very small minority of new religious groups, mass culture often extends them to any religious group viewed as culturally deviant, however peaceful or law abiding it may be.

Secular cult opponents like those belonging to the anti-cult movement tend to define a "cult" as a group that tends to manipulate, exploit, and control its members. Specific factors in cult behavior are said to include manipulative and authoritarian mind control over members, communal and totalistic organization, aggressive proselytizing, systematic programs of indoctrination, and perpetuation in middle-class communities.

Some of the above clearly does not apply ("kidnapping"), and some clearly does ("systematic programs of indoctrination, and perpetuation in middle-class communities" -- CFAR workshops, Berkeley rationalists, meetups). Applicability of other descriptions is less clear. Do the Sequences count as brainwashing? Does the (banned) basilisk count as psychological abuse?

Matching of LW activities and behaviors to those of a cult (a New Religious Movement is a more neutral term) does not answer the original implicit accusation: that becoming affiliated, even informally, with LW/CFAR/MIRI is a bad thing, for some definition of "bad". It is this definition of badness that is worth discussing first, when a cult accusation is hurled, and only then whether a certain LW pattern is harmful in this previously defined way.

Being a cult is a failure mode for a group like this. Discussing failure modes has some importance.

There also the issue that cult are powerful and speaking of Lesswrong as a cult implies that Lesswrong has a certain power.

I believe we are cult. The best cult in the world. The one whose beliefs works. Otherwise, we're the same; an unusual cause, a charismatic ideological leader, and, what distinguishes us from a school of philosophy or even a political party, is that we have an excathology to worry about; an end-of-the-world scenario. Unlike other cults, though, we wish to prevent or at least minimize the damage of that scenario, while most of them are enthusiastic in hastening it. For a cult, we're also extremely loose on rules to follow, we don't ask people to cast off material posessions (though we encourage donations) or to cut ties with old family and friends (it can end up happening because of de-religion-ing, but that's an unfortunate side-effect, and it's usually avoidable).

I could list off a few more traits, but the gist of it is this; we share a lot of traits with a cult, most of which are good or double-edged at worst, and we don't share most of the common bad traits of cults. Regardless of whether one chooses to call us a cult or not, this does not change what we are.