I think it's a meaningful distinction- most rationalists aren't running murder cults.
But a movement, that demonstrates so remarkably elevated rate of generating harmful beliefs in action as this, warrants exactly the sort of increased scrutiny this article vainly strives to deflect. That effort is in itself interesting, as such efforts always are.
This isn't the defense of rationalism you seem to imagine it to be.
I don't think the modal rationalist is sinister. I think he's ignorant, misguided, nearly wholly lacking in experience, deeply insecure about it, and overall just excessively resistant to the idea that it is really possible, on any matter of serious import, for his perspective radically to lack merit. Unfortunately, this latter condition proves very reliably also the mode.
What perspective would that be?
Why? Which perspective of yours has you so twitchingly desperate to defend it?
For me, that is the crucial information in the article: Yes, multiple people have succeeded to create a cult within the rationality community, but it always involved isolating their victims from the rest of the rationality community. (Now that we see the pattern, could it possibly help us defend against this?)
> This article attempts to establish disjoint categories "good rationalist" and "cultist."
...that you have denied in another comment in the same thread. I guess that makes two of us plainly incompetent.