In practice, I don't remember reading an article on the rationality community written from such position. Most articles are based on other articles, which are based on yet other articles... ultimately based on someone's opinion posted on their blogs. (Plus the police reports about the Zizians.)
I think it would be really nice for a change if e.g. some journalist infiltrated the rationality community under a fake identity, joined one of their meetups or workshops, talked to a few people there, and then heroically exposed to the public all the nefarious plans... or the lack thereof. Shouldn't be that hard, I think. New people are coming all the time, no one does a background check on them. Yet for some mysterious reason, this never happens.
Notice how this article describes more bad things in the community than a typical outsider-written article. Three specific rationalist cults were named! The difference is not insider vs outsider, but having specific information vs vibes-based reporting.
No conspiracy, I agree. Only clickbait, and one obsessed Wikipedia admin.
However, different newspapers have different quality; sometimes dramatically different. Ironically, Zizians are usually reported on by the ones that keep professional standards. So it's quite funny to see how psychopathic murderers are treated with respect and reported on factually, while nerds who study artificial intelligence and send money to anti-malaria charities are accused of... well, whatever the journalists' imagination can accuse them of.
(Have you heard of the "TESCREAL" theory? Apparently, effective altruists are secretly Nazis, because... you know, the idea of improving the world is related to the genre of science fiction, and some science fiction fans in previous century also happened to be fans of eugenics, therefore... you know, wink wink. Seriously, this is documented in Wikipedia, because it comes from a "reliable source".)
The story from the outside is usually reduced to something like "rationalism is a wacky cult", with the recent ones tacking on "and some of its members include this Ziz gang who murdered many people". Like the NYT article a week ago.
Cults are a whole biome of personalities. The prophet does not need to be the same person as the leader. They sometimes are and things can be very ugly in those cases, but they often aren’t. After all, there are Christian cults today even though Jesus and his supporting cast have been dead for approaching 2k years.
Yudkowsky seems relatively benign as far as prophets go, though who knows what goes on in private (I’m sure some people on here do, but the collective We do not). I would guess that the failure mode for him would be a David Miscavige type who slowly accumulates power while Yudkowsky remains a figurehead. This could be a girlfriend or someone who runs one of the charitable organizations (controlling the purse strings when everyone is dependent on the organization for their next meal is a time honored technique). I’m looking forward to the documentaries that get made in 20 years or so.