[ImaCake]

Not sure why you got down voted for this. The opening paragraph of the article reads as suspicious to the observant outsider:

>The rationalist community was drawn together by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky’s blog post series The Sequences, a set of essays about how to think more rationally.

Anyone who had just read a lot about Scientology would read that and have alarm bells ringing.

[meowface]

Asterisk magazine is basically the unofficial magazine for the rationalist community and the author, Ozy Brennan, is a prominent rationalist blogger. Of course the piece is pro-rationalism. It's investigating why rationalism seems to spawn these small cultish offshoots, not trying to criticize rationalism.

[throwanem]

"Unofficial?" Was that a recent change? But my point is that because the author neither can nor will criticize the fundamental axioms or desiderata of the movement, their analysis of how or why it spins off cults is necessarily footless. In practice the result amounts to a collection of excuses mostly from anonymees, whom we are assured have sufficient authority to reassure us this smoke arises from no fire. But of course it's only when Kirstie Alley does something like this we're meant to look askance.

[aa-jv]

Out of curiosity, why would the bells be ringing in this case? Is it just the fact that a single person is exerting influence over their followers by way of essays?

[throwanem]

Even a marginal familiarity with the history of Scientology is an excellent curative for the idea that you can think yourself into superpowers, or that you should ever trust anyone who promises to teach you how.

The consequences of ignorance on this score are all drearily predictable to anyone with a modicum of both good sense and world knowledge, which is why they've come as such a surprise to Yudkowsky.

[radekn]

It's been 17 years since the series was written and rationalists haven't become a cult with Yudkowsky as leaders, so it's safe to say those were false alarms

[throwanem]

Not with Yudkowsky as leader, that much is true.