Comment by sriram_malhar

It is so strange that this article would hijack the term "rationalist" to mean this extraordinarily specific set of people "drawn together by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky’s blog post series The Sequences, a set of essays about how to think more rationally".

As a counter example (with many many more people) is the Indian Rationalist Association (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Rationalist_Association) to "promote scientific skepticism and critique supernatural claims". This isn't a cult of any kind, even if the members broadly agree about what it means to be rational with the set above.