Alicorn comments on Reflections on rationality a year out - Less Wrong

90 [deleted] 31 March 2011 01:35AM

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Comment author: Alicorn 07 April 2011 10:46:40PM 1 point [-]

Luminosity is already a technical term for a subset of rationality skills. If it's the subset you usually have cause to talk about, there's nothing wrong with that, but calling the entire thing that seems just mistaken.

Comment author: handoflixue 07 April 2011 10:54:35PM 1 point [-]

nods I am aware it's a subset, thus calling it a kludge.

Certainly, I'm open to a better term, but I happen to deal with a lot of "Spock" rationalists, as have many of the people I talk to, so having some way of distinguishing "no I don't mean that idiocy" is important to me, and this is the best-fit that I've found so far.

The chain of thought, if you're curious: On a non-verbal/intuitive level, I feel like the sub-skill of Luminosity is a lot of what distinguishes "LessWrong" rational from "Spock" rational. Since "LessWrong Rationality" is itself fairly awkward phrase (referring as it does to a single specific community), I substituted "Luminous rationality", and that eventually got short-handed back to just "Luminous". English allows for all sorts of weird confusing things where a word refers to both the set and a specific subset (frex, "man" referring to both "humans" and "humans who are male"), so while it's kludgy, it works for me.

I can completely understand this word not working well for others :)