I imagine that the leader of the Singularity Institute (now Center for Applied Rationality) using the workshops as a recruitment ground for his personal psychedelic drug cult, and his followers then killing a bunch of innocent people, did not do any favors to their perception among the wider public [1].

(This is about the SF Bay Area subculture dubbed the rationalists, obviously not related to the philosophical moment of the same name, critiqued by Kant in the late 18th century)

[1] https://medium.com/@sefashapiro/a-community-warning-about-zi...