Am I the only one who is isn't entirely positive towards the heavy use of language identifying the LW community as "rationalists", including terms like "rationalist training" etc.? (Though he is by far the heaviest user of this kind of language, I'm not really talking about Eliezer here, his language use is whole topic on its own - I'm restricting this particular concern to other people, to the general LW non-Eliezer jargon). Is strongly self-identifying as a "rationalist" really such a good thing? Does it really help you solve problems? (I second the questions raised by Yvain). Though perhaps small, isn't there still a risk that the focus becomes too much on "being a rationalist" instead of on actually solving problems?

Of course, this is a blog about rationality and not about specific problems, so this kind of language is not suprising and sometimes might even be necessary. I'm just a bit hesitant towards it when the community hasn't actually shown that it's better at solving problems than people who don't self-identify as rationalists and haven't had "rationalist training", or shown that the techniques fostered here have such a high cross-domain applicability as seems to be assumed. Maybe after it has been shown that "rationalists" do better than other people, people who just solve problems, I would feel better about this kind of jargon.