Great lesswrong link. It seems to indicate that people doing things in cults is a bit like spam, huge dropout rate but the people you wind up with will do lots

Great lesswrong link. It seems to indicate that people doing things in cults is a bit like spam, huge dropout rate but the people you wind up with will do lots of silly things. The purpose of the initiation and nonsense is almost to weed out people who are not extremely controllable. So it's not really brainwashing as much as gullible finding.