Comment by hax0ron3

The premise of the article might just be nonsense.

How many rationalists are there in the world? Of course it depends on what you mean by rationalist, but I'd guess that there are probably several tens of thousands, at very least, people in the world who either consider themselves rationalists or are involved with the rationalist community.

With such numbers, is it surprising that there would be half a dozen or so small cults?

There are certainly some cult-like aspects to certain parts of the rationalist community, and I think that those are interesting to explore, but come on, this article doesn't even bother to establish that its title is justified.

To the extent that rationalism does have some cult-like aspects, I think a lot of it is because it tends to attract smart people who are deficient in the ability to use avenues other than abstract thinking to comprehend reality and who enjoy making loosely justified imaginative leaps of thought while overestimating their own abilities to model reality. The fact that a huge fraction of rationalists are sci-fi fans is not a coincidence.

But again, one should first establish that there is anything actually unusual about the number of cults in the rationalist community. Otherwise this is rather silly.