There have been several cults in LW history, whether it's the Zizians, or Leverage cults.
Today I want to talk about these cults and the tradeoffs LW makes.
Zizians
The Zizians were a cult that focused on relatively extreme animal welfare, even by EA standards, and used a Timeless/Updateless decision theory, where being aggressive and escalatory was helpful as long as it helped other world branches/acausally traded with other worlds to solve the animal welfare crisis.
They apparently made a new personality called Maia in Pasek, and this resulted in Pasek's suicide.
They also used violence or the threat of violence a lot to achieve their goal.
This caused many problems for Ziz, and she now is in police custody.
Edit: Removed the Vassarites due to updated information that they didn't use psychedelics to jailbreak people's minds.
Now I'll talk about what in my view are the tradeoffs of the level of cults.
And I think one tradeoff is that the less cults you have, the more you miss weird opportunities that generate most of the value.
EDIT: I have removed the takeaways section due to the fact that we don't have base rates for people entering cults..
Or rather: