In real life you sometimes get people who write, using different words, under dozen different articles: "I suspect that this all is just Eliezer's cult designed to extract money from naive people". How much of that is acceptable criticism, and how much is just annoying? Discussing that thing once, thoroughly? Yes, definitely. Dropping the idea around all the time? That's just poluting the space. Problem is that at the moment some people are already deeply annoyed, other people go meta and say we need criticism.

Democracy does not work well online. In real life, one person cannot be at more than one place. Online, one person is enough to be everywhere (within one website). In real life, you can avoid an annoying person by simply going elsewhere and taking your friends with you. Online, you must somehow stop people from doing annoying things, otherwise there is no way to avoid them, except by avoiding the whole website.

I don't have a problem with criticism. I have a problem with boring repetitive criticism. Someone says that having a ceremony is cultish. Okay. Let's discuss that. Someone says again that having a ceremony is cultish. Okay, here is some explanation, here are the differences. Someone says yet again that having a ceremony is cultish. Okay, I heard that already; give me a new information or stop repeating yourself. -- I would have no problem if someone wrote a critical article explaining the dangers of having a ceremony even in its LessWrongian variant, and proposed alternative ways to create personal connections. But dropping hostile comments to other peoples' articles is so much easier. Well, I am not impressed.

People who try hard to appear smart typically have a problem cooperating on anything. For a textbook example, visit Mensa. It is a miracle that Mensa ever gets anything done, because every time anyone proposes an idea, all people loudly disagree, to signal that they are not sheep. Okay, I get it, they are not sheep; but it is still funny how an organization consisting purely of highly intelligent people became such a laughing stock for the rest of the world. Probably they were too busy signalling that they are not sheep, so they missed the forest for the trees.

There is a time to disagree, and there is also a time to agree. If someone has a policy of e.g. never singing a song together with other people (because that might irrationally modify their feelings towards them), I accept if they decide to never sing a song together with fellow rationalists. Yes, they are consistent. I respect that. But if someone is willing to sing a song with random strangers, but would never sing a song with rationalists, that would be reversing stupidity. It means sabotaging yourself and your goals; trying to get some nonexistent points for doing things the hard way.

The proper moment for criticism is when something worth criticising happens. Not when someone merely pattern-matches something to something, and cannot stop obsessing about that. Here is a group of people who all voluntarily decided to share some powerful emotional moments together. Did they commit suicide later? No! Did they donate all their money to Eliezer? No! Did they send disconnection letters to their relatives? No! Did they refuse to talk with their friends who didn't participate in the ritual? No! Did they kill someone or send death threats? No! Are they reduced to mindless zombies? No! Are they keeping the details secret from the rest of the world, threatening to punish whistleblowers? No! -- So why the hell does someone keep repeating that it essentially is the same thing; and why should I pay any attention at all to that kind of criticism?

Don't hold weird ceremonies.

This brings up some interesting history, actually. Synthetic subcultures -- fraternal orders, service organizations, social clubs not associated with a particular hobby -- used to be a lot more common than they are now; the Freemasons are probably the best-known example, but far from the only one. Ritual was quite common among them, basically as a group-cohesion hack. Now, the lines between an initiatory society and a mystery religion are pretty hard to draw, but generally these organizations didn't claim religious status and I'm inclined to believe them.

For reasons I don't fully understand, these started falling out of fashion sometime during the mid-20th century. The main survivals these days, at least in the United States, are college frats and sororities, service clubs along animal-club lines (Lions Club, etc.), and certain branches of Masonry; generally these are in decline, or have substantially changed their model, or both. You could also make a case for the Scouting movement. which survived thanks to its educational niche.

I'm starting to think of the social branch of the LW community as something like a stab at reviving this sort of organization, and I think rituals like the OP's are best viewed in that context. Unfortunately that's not a prototype that's likely to occur to most people, and so I do see ritual as a potential PR difficulty, maybe something that should be offloaded onto local communities rather than promoted globally. Raemon seems to be thinking along similar lines, to his credit.

But in any case I wouldn't consider it positive evidence for anything untoward. It's just a social tool, and not even an intrinsically Dark Artsy one -- though the existing rituals are not my cup of tea, personally speaking.