I have been contemplating this point. One of the things that sets off red flags for people outside a group is when people in the group appear to have cut'n'pasted the leader's opinions into their heads. And that's definitely something that happens around LW.

I don't know. On the one hand side, that's how you would expect it to look if the leader is right. On the other hand, "cult leader is right" is also how I would expect it to feel if cult leader was merely persuasive. On the third hand side, I don't feel like I absorbed lots of novel things from cult leader, but mostly concretified notions and better terms for ideas I'd held already, and I remember many Sequences posts having a critical comment at the top.

A further good sign is that the Sequences are mostly retellings of existing literature. It doesn't really match the "crazy ideas held for ingroup status" profile of cultishness.