notes-cults3

" Is $THING presented as a radical paradigm shift or a revolution in software? Do the ideas of $THING mostly come from one or two people, with nobody else further developing the ideas? Are $THING advocates dismissive of other practices and ideas without bothering to properly understand them? Does the topic have “racing thoughts”: people connecting it to a wide variety of different topics without bothering to establish a firm grounding in any of them?1 Are they fixated on an “enemy” technology they blame for modern computing’s problems? For example, “Von Neumann architecture”, OOP, HTML. Do they obsess over categorization— either claiming lots of unrelated things are really $THING, or saying stuff isn’t really $THING because it lacks some minor detail? Do they avoid usual channels of idea diffusion: papers, conferences, arguments on Twitter? Do they refuse to acknowledge any downsides or tradeoffs of $THING versus other approaches? If there are tradeoffs, are they just humblebrags like “this doesn’t work with corporate drones?” Do they have bad behavior on Wikipedia? Sockpuppeting, writing articles as advertisements, picking fights in talk pages, stuff like that. " -- [1]

" Cults are not “obscure religious groups.” It varies widely by state (and in federal jurisprudence), but most states have a “free association”-style test: if members aren’t free to come and go, it’s a cult and not a religion. " -- [2]