This quiz rated the WoW raiding guild that I was a member of as 7% cult. Hmm. Seems a bit excessive?
The biggest contributor to that score was, I assume, the “current leader is also the founder” question, but… that seems like a crazy criterion. So any organization that anyone ever starts is automatically thereby cult-like…?
Whatever is meant by the term “cult” here, it doesn’t seem to have much to do with what most people mean by said term…
The “current leader is also the founder” is a reasonable characteristic common in cults. Many cult-like religious organizations exist to create power or wealth for the founder or the founder’s associates.
However, I suspect that the underlying scoring function is a simple additive model (widespread in psychology) in which each answer contributes a weight toward one of the outcomes. Since this characteristic is most valuable in combination—intensifying other factors that indicate cultishness, it doesn’t serve very well in the current framework.
This quiz rated the WoW raiding guild that I was a member of as 7% cult. Hmm. Seems a bit excessive?
The biggest contributor to that score was, I assume, the “current leader is also the founder” question, but… that seems like a crazy criterion. So any organization that anyone ever starts is automatically thereby cult-like…?
Whatever is meant by the term “cult” here, it doesn’t seem to have much to do with what most people mean by said term…
The “current leader is also the founder” is a reasonable characteristic common in cults. Many cult-like religious organizations exist to create power or wealth for the founder or the founder’s associates.
However, I suspect that the underlying scoring function is a simple additive model (widespread in psychology) in which each answer contributes a weight toward one of the outcomes. Since this characteristic is most valuable in combination—intensifying other factors that indicate cultishness, it doesn’t serve very well in the current framework.