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RobinHanson comments on Tell Your Rationalist Origin Story - Less Wrong
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Comments (399)
Are you sure "rationalist" is a good label here? It suggests the claim that you are rational, or at least more rational than most. "Rational" has so many associations that go beyond truth-seeking.
'Aspiring rationalist'? I don't get a sense that Rationality significantly diverges from truth-seeking, especially the philosophical sense of the concept. What associations of 'rational' are beyond truth-seeking?
We need some kind of word that means "seeker after less wrongness", and refers pragmatically to a group of people who go around discussing epistemic hygiene and actually worrying about how to think and whether their beliefs are correct. I know of no shorter and clearer alternative than "rationalist". There are some words I'm willing to try to rescue, and this is one of them.
Perhaps it's not worth complaining, but historically "rationalist" was contrasted with "empiricist." Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza were rationalists, while Locke and Hume were empiricists. Obviously that's not a contrast you mean to be invoking, though maybe that use of "rationalist" is rare enough that there's no risk of confusion.
More recently, rationalist has tended to have a meaning closer to its current one, but with strong negative affect associated with it. Peter Drucker, for instance, seems to use it as a term of reproach in "Adventures of a Bystander", to mean the sort of small souled narrow-minded person who thinks that they can be right and others wrong and are allowed to say so because they have reasons for their beliefs instead of having made them up to express feelings but the assumption is that one shouldn't do this because doing it leads to communism, fascism, or other forms of authoritarianism. If people don't have the right to believe what they want then some authority must have the right to tell them what to believe. Traditional conservatives can associate this attitude with communism and other badness. Basically, rationalism is used to mean affiliation with authoritarian regimes who claim the prestige of science.
@Daniel, I agree with this observation. Minimizing being wrong is a pretty recent intellectual development. Epistemic minimax is probably logically a better name, although it sort of sucks.
We don't want to minimax since we aren't playing a zero sum game. We just want to maximize expected utility with a few caveats and with a few blanks filled in.
Apparently, "aletheia" is Greek for truth, and "veritas" is Latin. You can pick either and stick "phile" at the end. So, say, veritophile.
(My reliable source is two minutes with online dictionaries)
'Info-maximizers'? It's too bad we can't use 'philosopher' – you'd think you just provided it's definition.
"Skeptic"?
The James Randi definition of skeptic seems to have much overlap. I would guess that what EY is looking for has James Randi definition of skeptic as a subset of EY's rationalist belief processes.
How about "asymptotist"? A Google search suggests it is available.
An interesting question. I've been unwilling to accept EY's use (rescue) of "rationalist", though that might just be because I've been calling myself an "irrationalist" (in the spirit of Nietzsche's "amoralist") for many years now (for some values of "many").
I agree that rationalist has baggage in the minds of most people, and it evokes rationalization and related antithetical concepts for many.
If Less Wrong expands the community and shapes future discussions on rationalist topics in the way that I expect it to, this might just be the last good time to coin a new term.
I nominate righters and truthers, in that order.
In my dialect of english, "righter" and "truther" have unpleasant connotations about as strong as the connotations around "rationalist".
My dialect may be different than yours, of course.
What is your dialect? In my dialect (Californian American), neither word has much of a connotation at all. They both have a vague feel of something I might read in a modern science fiction book talking about different factions of posthumans, or something in that vein, but I don't think most people where I live (in the SF bay area) would think they have any connotation. I was intentionally trying to think of a new word without any pre-existing baggage.
I live in the american northeast.
To be specific, "Righter" sounds to me like religious right and righteousness. "Truther" sounds like 9-11 truther and Colbert's truthiness. It might just be me.
Interesting. I've heard right-winger, but never righter alone. I hadn't heard of 9-11 truther, but that definitely rules out truther for sure. I am familiar with truthiness, but it didn't come to mind for me in thinking about truther. It's interesting how idiosyncratic language is, especially when it comes to connotation.
"righter" is straight out - it sounds like "writer" in spoken English. .
It would be clear from context which was intended. English has many homophones, and they don't seem to cause much difficulty. Is that not your experience with the many existing homophones?
I wouldn't say that English has 'many' homophones. And yes, I think they're generally very annoying, when they can be used as the same part of speech. There isn't much confusion between 'led' (past tense of 'to lead') and 'lead' (the heavy metal). However, it always takes a moment to catch up when someone uses 'right' as a verb, and I imagine 'righter' would be even worse, especially as an obscure jargon term.
We are getting a bit off-topic, so this is my last post in this thread.
I'd argue that this constitutes many (note the restrictions too, which result in excluded entries).
With regard to how noticeable homophones are, it feels to me like there is a priming effect due to the context, which results in the sense that was intended being obvious and coming to mind effortlessly. For example, cents and sense sound the same in some dialects, but I doubt many would even consider interpreting the sound in question as cents if they heard the previous sentence spoken. I think most homophones are like that, most of the time, and that it usually takes effort to even notice them, as when trying to think of a pun. I will grant you though that righter and writer are more alike in terms of their meaning, and thus easier to confuse, but I just wouldn't consider that sufficient reason to not even consider it as an option.