You're right about Less Wrong feeling like a cult, though. It gives me the heebie-jeebies.
They even have a succession plan similar to finding the next Dalai Lama:
I think some of the feeling of cultishness might stem from a homogeneity of expression, but it kinda makes sense for a community of people dedicated to being rational -- after all, two rational agents with identical priors cannot "agree to disagree" in the mathematical sense. The community would tend to converge on common "correct" things and would have similar rebuttals for "incorrect" things, right?
I fear that a faith in mathematical reasoning for all problems can easily make you come out the other end thinking your opinions are mathematically correct, with minimal reflection on core issues such as the applicability of classical logical models or a mechanistic view of how people do (or ought to) behave - this kind of uncritical historically divorced reflection has not fared well in the past, with even economists admitting their model of the economic man is as much fiction as their worldwide Robinson Crusoe from a century earlier.
Honestly the best strategy is attend local meet-ups, come across as intelligent and interested to the people who hold gatekeeping power over the informal non-public groups, and get in the loop that way. This is significantly easier in Berkeley, where a lot of folks end up moving to. You can also skip some of these steps by attending a CFAR workshop, which will both introduce you to many members of the LW community and put you on an alumni-only mailing list which houses a chunk of the general discussion.
Overall I think Scott has some interesting articles and the general idea of rationalism is .. fine. But that's not at all what the communities around it are like. You just get tons of 'rational racism' with HBD (human biodiversity for those not in the know, which is basically just race realism with a nerdy veneer), IQ worship, and a group that collectively abandons anything like the rationalist ideal and becomes a post-hoc clusterfuck.
The community can almost be thought of like these racist AIs: garbage in, garbage out. They cling to any bit of rational-sounding data that supports their preconceptions, and have to adopt severe anti-academic stances to reject the mountains of data that contradict their views.
I suppose the deeper rot is that these rationalists fancy themselves like scientists, able to interact with primary data and draw conclusions, but any actual expert (i.e. someone that has performed research and published it in a community of peers, not whacko journals) is just confused how anyone could be so wrong. You regularly see posts where someone comes in who actually knows what they're talking about, authoritatively shows that all the nonsense they've been talking about makes no sense, and at best they get a 'huh, interesting' before the nonsense picks back up.
The idea of a rationalist community is to organize around questioning your own assumptions, confronting diverse views, and engaging in good-faith debate. But the reality is that basically none of that happens for anything controversial to the community, so it's just a veneer of legitimacy for in-group circle-jerking. And it just so happens that the in-group tends to be pretty damn racist.
The "meat" of interest here for those too lazy to click (I encourage people click through, though, really, and maybe even take a glance at https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.5577) is probably this long parenthetical:
> (But taking Roko's premises at face value, his idea would zap people as soon as they read it. Which - keeping in mind that at the time I had absolutely no idea this would all blow up the way it did - caused me to yell quite loudly at Roko for violating ethics given his own premises, I mean really, WTF? You're going to get everyone who reads your article tortured so that you can argue against an AI proposal? In the twisted alternate reality of RationalWiki, this became proof that I believed in Roko's Basilisk, since I yelled at the person who invented it without including twenty lines of disclaimers about what I didn't necessarily believe. And since I had no idea this would blow up that way at the time, I suppose you could even read the sentences I wrote that way, which I did not edit for hours first because I had no idea this was going to haunt me for years to come. And then, since Roko's Basilisk was a putatively a pure infohazard of no conceivable use or good to anyone, and since I didn't really want to deal with the argument, I deleted it from LessWrong which seemed to me like a perfectly good general procedure for dealing with putative pure infohazards that jerkwads were waving in people's faces. Which brought out the censorship!! trolls and was certainly, in retrospect, a mistake.)
Edit: this plus more is all covered by the LW wiki's page someone else linked, check that out too if you really care. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk
Can you explain the (understandable) rationale behind Less Wrong censoring discussion of Roko's Basilisk? I've been lead to believe it was censored out of fear that discussing it could somehow inspire its actual creation.
Honestly from a distance Less Wrong has always struck me as vaguely cult-like, but I'm open to the possibility I've just gotten the wrong impression.