Anyone tried to use the outside view on our rationalist community?

I mean, we are not the first people on this planet who tried to become more rational. Who were our predecessors, and what happened to them? Where did they succeed and where they failed? What lesson can we take from their failures?

The obvious reply will be: No one has tried doing exactly the same thing as we are doing. That's technically true, but that's a fully general excuse against using outside view, because if you look into enough details, no two projects are exactly the same. Yet it is experimentally proved that even looking at sufficiently similar projects gives better estimates than just using the inside view. So, if there was no one exactly like us, who was the most similar?

I admit I don't have data on this, because I don't study history, and I have no personal experience with Objectivists (which are probably the most obvious analogy). I would probably put Objectivists, various secret societies, educational institutions, or self-help groups into the reference class. Did I miss something important? The common trait is that those people are trying to make their thinking better, avoid some frequent faults, and teach other people to do the same thing. Who would be your candidate for the reference group? Then, we could explore them one by one and guess what they did right and what they did wrong. Seems to me that many small groups fail to expand, but on the other hand, the educational institutions that succeed to establish themselves in the society, become gradually filled with average people and lose the will to become stronger.