Cults do talk quite a bit about why they're not a cult.

They even have an essay about _cultish countercultishness_: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gBma88LH3CLQsqyfS/cultish-co...

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?

Have they ever addressed the criticisms of rationality, technological rationality and instrumental rationality of the Frankfurt School in the 50s and 60s? Or, more generally, the critique of positivism and the collapse of rationality to facts connected with formal logic? These are fairly big topics in philosophy, so it would seem really naive if they haven't covered them.

I'm not personally familiar with those critiques and I haven't exhaustively read anything close to all the content from LessWrong, but I can point out that Yudkowski himself has a number of criticisms of Traditional Rationality. I think the most helpful thing I can add is that the paradigm embraced at LW is Bayesian rationality and not pure formal logic. Being massively reductionist, it seems to boil down to updating your expectations to be more in line with reality -- that being less wrong is about having an accurate account of your uncertainty of the beliefs that you hold, taking into account your priors, inherent bias, model complexity, etc.

This just seems like a very strange and restrictive way to model real-life problems, and it just seems to export the meat of the problem (taking into account priors, what exactly is bias, and if it's possible to be aware of it); for instance, I imagine that many people who subscribe to LW thought are probably uncritical of the ideological function of liberal democracy, for instance - or rationality being used to justify the status quo. These sort of things were taken up by critical theory, so there seems to be some overlap between critical theory and what it is to be rational.

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.

But I haven't seen cults talking about how to personally ensure you're not falling into trap of cult-like thinking. LW is a rather self-conscious community.

Some pretend to, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Cult_Awareness_Network

Sorry for the tangent, but from the outside I've also felt very "outside" the LW community. I'm not exactly sure how to "join" it. I know that I'm supposed to read the various required readings first, but then what? How do I see what LW is "talking about" or "fighting about" at a point in time? I mean this in a serious, logistical sense. Thanks!

The LW community has decentralized and deformalized things to a huge extent. It's not just you - the logistics of participating are much less clear than it used to be, and the whole system is far less legible.

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.

I'm out of the loop now, but it used to be like everywhere else (HN included) - you follow the posts and participate in comments, and after a while you suddenly find yourself to be an established community member.