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Why are there so many rationalist cults?

There’s a lot to like about the Rationalist community, but they do have a certain tendency to spawn — shall we say — high demand groups. We sent a card-carrying Rat to investigate what’s really going on.

Here is a sampling of answers from people in and close to dysfunctional groups: “We spent all our time talking about philosophy and psychology and human social dynamics, often within the group.” “Really tense ten-hour conversations about whether, when you ate the last chip, that was a signal that you were intending to let down your comrades in selfish ways in the future.” “Like somebody's going through a real bad breakup and you need to, like, hold their hair out of the toilet over text, tell them that it's going to be okay and help them put their life back together, except for years.” But he had been stuck in a dead-end job for years when Brent Dill looked at him and said “you’re smart, you can be in charge of build for my Burning Man camp.” Suddenly, he was putting in sixteen-hour days running a team of a dozen people, and he was good at it. One interviewee said, “One kind of cult you can have is when you and ten of your closest friends all live in a house together and you have the blackout curtains drawn and a lot of MDMA, and you sit around and talk about the implications of the whatever.” The rationalist community keeps spawning groups like this.

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