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

90 [deleted] 31 March 2011 01:35AM

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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 :)