khafra comments on Rationally Irrational - Less Wrong

-11 Post author: HungryTurtle 07 March 2012 07:21PM

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Comment author: khafra 09 March 2012 07:06:03PM 4 points [-]

"Lesswrong, a community blog dedicated to the art of optimal goal-seeking, mostly through optimal belief acquisition."

I kinda like that. It's wordier, but it loses some of the connotations of "rational" that invariably trip up newcomers.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 09 March 2012 07:25:57PM 2 points [-]

I have elsewhere argued essentially this, though "optimized" and "optimal" are importantly different. The conclusion I came to reading the comments there was that people vary in how they process the relevant connotations, and arguing lexical choice makes my teeth ache, but personally I nevertheless try to avoid talking about "rational X choosing" when I mean optimizing my choice of X for particular goals.