Debates of “who’s in what reference class” tend to waste arbitrary amounts of time while going nowhere. A more helpful framing of your question might be “given that you’re participating in a community that culturally reinforces this idea, are you sure you’ve fully accounted for confirmation bias and groupthink in your views on AI risk?”. To me, LessWrong does not look like a cult, but that does not imply that it’s immune to various epistemological problems like groupthink.
Debates of “who’s in what reference class” tend to waste arbitrary amounts of time while going nowhere. A more helpful framing of your question might be “given that you’re participating in a community that culturally reinforces this idea, are you sure you’ve fully accounted for confirmation bias and groupthink in your views on AI risk?”. To me, LessWrong does not look like a cult, but that does not imply that it’s immune to various epistemological problems like groupthink.