The penny has just dropped! When I first encountered LessWrong, the word 'Rationality' did not stand out. I interpreted it to mean its everyday meaning of careful, intelligent, sane, informed thought (in keeping with 'avoiding bias'). But I have become more and more uncomfortable with the word because I see it having a more restricted meaning in the LW context. At first, I thought this was an economic definition of the 'rational' behaviour of the selfish and unemotional ideal economic agent. But now I sense an even more disturbing definition: rational as opposed to empirical. As I use scientific evidence as the most important arbiter of what I believe, I would find the anti-empirical idea of 'rational' a big mistake.
Now that I come to think of it, I've never seen the LW definition of "rationality" used anywhere outside LW and OB, and I've never even seen it explicitly defined. EDIT: http://lesswrong.com/lw/31/what_do_we_mean_by_rationality/ But if you asked me, I would say it means taking your selfish and unemotional economic agent to his logical extreme: rationally examining one's own thought processes in order to optimise them, rationally examining scientific evidence without interference from one's biases, and rationally accepting the possibility that one has made a mistake.
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