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Yvain comments on Don't call yourself a rationalist. - Less Wrong
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"Critical thinking" is a useful phrase sometimes. It's a real term, and people usually have good associations with it. Saying "we need to teach people better critical thinking skills" usually elicits nods; "we need to teach people to be more rational" is more likely to get them grabbing their guns and heading to the hills.
This rings true, but how odd? Why is "critical thinking" good but "rationality" bad?
Perhaps groups that identify with rationality generally settle on one set of beliefs, and then go about rehearsing their arguments, double counting their evidence, and building up unjustified positive affect, while groups that identify with critical thinking try to admit what they don't know and focus their efforts on finding out?
Like the difference between between "The Brethren of Totally Pure Chastity" and "Inexpert supporters of the very difficult struggle to be effective and not evil".
What real examples are you thinking of?
I'm not sure specifically which examples Hamlet is thinking of, but Objectivists would be an obvious example of a group that tried to be rational and through the problems Hamlet listed as well a handful of other problems like evaporative cooling settled on a single set of beliefs across a wide-variety of different issues and haven't updated much in the last fifty years.
Words often earn their connotations at random.
Even if randomness plays a big role, it feels as if this shouldn't exhaust what we can learn from the story behind the different connotations of these phrases.