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Grognor comments on Real World Solutions to Prisoners' Dilemmas - Less Wrong
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By definition?
I am largely appreciative of your overall comment, but "rational" is a historically legitimate term to describe naive utility-maximisers in this manner. The original post introduced it in inverted commas, suggesting a special usage of the term. While there are less ambiguous ways this could have been expressed, it seems to me the main benefit of doing so would be to pre-empt people complaining about an unfavourable usage of the term "rational". Your response to it seems excessive.
I think this was a legitimate use of "by definition", since it's the definition we use on this website. You're right that "rational" has often meant "blindly crunching numbers without looking at all available information &c." but I thought we had a widespread agreement here not to use the word like that.
You're right that my response seems excessive, but I don't know if it actually is excessive rather than merely seeming so.
A term "bad rationality" is also used on this website. It is a partial rationality, and it may be harmful. On the other hand, as humans, partial rationality is all we have, don't we?
But now I am discussing labels on the map, not the territory.
You're attaching a negative connotation where there doesn't have to be one. In econ and game theory literature, "rational" means something else, not necessarily something bad. It also refers to something specific. If we want to talk about that specific referent, we have limited options.
I would propose suffixing alternative uses of the word "rational" with a disambiguating particle. Thus above, Yvain could have used "econ-rational". If we ever have cause to talk about the Rationalist philosophical tradition, they can be "p-Rationalists". Annoyingly, I don't actually believe we need to do this for disambiguation purposes.
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