Comment by lupusreal

Yup. It's fundamentally irrational for anybody to believe themselves sufficiently rational to pull off the feats of supposed rational deduction that the so called Rationalists regularly perform. Predicting the future of humanity decades or even centuries away is absurd, but the Rationalists irrationally believe they can.

So to the point of the article, rationalist cults are common because Rationalists are irrational people (like all people) who (unlike most people) are blinded to their own irrationality by their overinflated egos. They can "reason" themselves into all manner of convoluted pretzels and lack the humility to admit they went off the deep end.