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badger comments on What's in a name? That which we call a rationalist… - Less Wrong
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I agree, but is there a good alternative? I've heard a couple of complaints that I agree with, but is rationalist just the least bad term?
You don't like Less Wrong reader?
Neither do I, really.
I don't think the outcome of this thread will be to produce an agreed upon name by vote. Its sort of like the French trying to keep their language from being polluted by English words- this just isn't how things get named.
There seems to be a lot of hesitancy in considering this community a movement with aspirations of anything but improving ourselves. If that's the case I suspect there will never be a standardized name. People will call themselves different things. If on the other hand this site leads to advocating outside the confounds of lesswrong.com the name we end up adopting will as likely as not be chosen by our opponents. Even if that isn't the case what we call ourselves will be decided more or less organically. If we people use rationalist a lot maybe that will be it. I'll likely not use among some of the company I keep.
And to contradict the preceding paragraphs... is there something wrong with Bayesians?
(a) Nobody can actually be Bayesian. Nothing made of quarks can be Bayesian.
(b) This is such a good existing word that I would be afraid of contaminating it if something goes wrong, and others might not take well to anyone trying to "steal" it.
Do you mean that they can't use Solomonoff's prior? It's easy for a computer to be Bayesian about a very simple universe, no?
A sufficiently small, discrete universe with known physics? Yes. But not in real life. All real-world hypothesis spaces are exponential or larger.
Hmmm... What matters is the structure you can use to represent a hypothesis space for your purposes, not its size in some silly representation. If you can denote 3^^^^3 states as X and get away with it, it doesn't matter that the number of states is 3^^^^3 and not (horror!) 3^^^3.
The best argument against it is that it isn't really a unique descriptor such that it can be falsified usefully.
Most posts and comments on LessWrong would work just as well if the authors were frequentist statisticians, old fashioned logical positivists, or even people who couldn't really do the math. The epistemic viewpoint doesn't actually hang off of a uniquely Bayesian procedure.