Comment by rsynnott

> The Sequences [posts on LessWrong, apparently] make certain implicit promises. There is an art of thinking better, and we’ve figured it out. If you learn it, you can solve all your problems, become brilliant and hardworking and successful and happy, and be one of the small elite shaping not only society but the entire future of humanity.

Ooh, a capital S and everything. I mean, I feel like it is fairly obvious, really. 'Rationalism' is a new religion, and every new religion spawns a bunch of weird, generally short-lived, cults. You might as well ask, in 100AD, "why are there so many weird Christian cults all of a sudden"; that's just what happens whenever any successful new religion shows up.

Rationalism might be particularly vulnerable to this because it lacks a strong central authority (much like early Christianity), but even with new religions which _did_ have a strong central authority from the start, like Mormonism or Scientology, you still saw this happening to some extent.