Followup to:  Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate, Cultish Countercultishness

I used to be a lot more worried that I was a cult leader before I started reading Hacker News.  (WARNING:  Do not click that link if you do not want another addictive Internet habit.)

From time to time, on a mailing list or IRC channel or blog which I ran, someone would start talking about "cults" and "echo chambers" and "coteries".  And it was a scary accusation, because no matter what kind of epistemic hygeine I try to practice myself, I can't look into other people's minds.  I don't know if my long-time readers are agreeing with me because I'm making sense, or because I've developed creepy mind-control powers.  My readers are drawn from the nonconformist crowd—the atheist/libertarian/technophile/sf-reader/Silicon-Valley/early-adopter cluster—and so they certainly wouldn't admit to worshipping me even if they were.

And then I ran into Hacker News, where accusations in exactly the same tone were aimed at the site owner, Paul Graham.

Hold on.  Paul Graham gets the same flak I do?

• Paul Graham has written a word or two about rationality... in a much more matter-of-fact style.
• Paul Graham does not ask his readers for donations.  He is independently wealthy.
• Paul Graham is not dabbling in mad-science-grade AI.  He runs Y Combinator, a seed-stage venture fund.
• Paul Graham is not trying to save the world.  He's trying to help a new generation of entrepreneurs.

I've never heard of Paul Graham saying or doing a single thing that smacks of cultishness.  Not one.

He just wrote some great essays (that appeal especially to the nonconformist crowd), and started an online forum where some people who liked those essays hang out (among others who just wandered into that corner of the Internet).

So when I read someone:

1. Comparing the long hours worked by Y Combinator startup founders to the sleep-deprivation tactic used in cults;
2. Claiming that founders were asked to move to the Bay Area startup hub as a cult tactic of separation from friends and family;

...well, that outright broke my suspension of disbelief.