The Black Team - A Parable of Group Effectiveness

(Or "fantastrophe" for short.)

I think that until we produce a critical mass of full time professional confessors, exposing bad reasoning should be everybody's responsibility and nobody's privilege.

(By "everybody's responsibility", I mean that if you, yes you reading this right now, notice bad reasoning you should expose it, not that you should expect someone else to do it because it is their responsibility too.)

(By "nobody's privilege", I mean that if you are exposing bad reasoning, you have to actually make the case that it is bad reasoning rather than wrapping yourself in the mantle of "exposing locally popular bad reasoning" as members of a dedicated group might feel compelled to do, and be willing to consider counter arguments that it is actually good reasoning after all.)

This makes it sound more like a cult rather than a group of rational people working together.

...they "grew long mustaches which they would twirl with melodramatic flair as they savaged a programmer's code", for god's sake. This is just a group of people who decided to have fun with their identities, go about their jobs in a bit more theatrical a manner than usual, and make people's days more surreal, and managed to get their work done more effectively and more enjoyably in the process. (Rational doesn't mean boring.) I'm sort of used to random things in nearby memespace regions being accused of being cults, but this doesn't even seem to have the surface similarities that are usually brought up to support those accusations.

Or to put a positive spin on it, it shows that cultishness can sometimes be used to do good, productive work.

Are you saying that rational people are not supposed to have fun?

"...With the Terminal Values of Their Employer"

(blink)

Of what employer are you presuming quality code is a terminal value?

EDIT: Or, if I've misunderstood you... what employer terminal values are you presuming, here?