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Oscar_Cunningham comments on Self-Congratulatory Rationalism - Less Wrong
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People on LW have started calling themselves "rationalists". This was really quite alarming the first time I saw it. People used to use the words "aspiring rationalist" to describe themselves, with the implication that e didn't consider ourselves close to rational yet.
Identifying as a "rationalist" is encouraged by the welcome post.
Edited the most recent welcome post and the post of mine that it linked to.
Does anyone have a 1-syllable synonym for 'aspiring'? It seems like we need to impose better discipline on this for official posts.
Consider "how you came to aspire to rationality/be a rationalist" instead of "identify as an aspiring rationalist".
Or, can the identity language and switch to "how you came to be interested in rationality".
Looking at a thesaurus, "would-be" may be a suitable synonym.
Other alternatives include 'budding', or maybe 'keen'.
demirationalist - on one hand, something already above average, like in demigod. On the other, leaves the "not quite there" feeling. My second best was epirationalist
Didn't find anything better in my opinion, but in case you want to give it a (somewhat cheap) shot yourself... I just looped over this
FWIW, "aspiring rationalist" always sounded quite similar to "Aspiring Champion" to my ears.
That said, why do we need to use any syllables at all to say "aspiring rationalist" ? Do we have some sort of a secret rite or a trial that an aspiring rationalist must pass in order to become a true rationalist ? If I have to ask, does that mean, I'm not a rationalist ? :-/
The only thing I can think of is "na" e.g. in Dune, Feyd Rauthah was the "na-baron," meaning that he had been nominated to succeed the baron. (And in the story he certainly was aspiring to be Baron.)
Not quite what you are asking for but not too far either.
And the phrase "how you came to identify as a rationalist" links to the very page where in the comments Robin Hanson suggests not using the term "rationalist", and the alternative "aspiring rationalist" is suggested!
My initial reaction to this was warm fuzzy feelings, but I don't think it's correct, any more than calling yourself a theist indicates believing you are God. "Rationalist" means believing in rationality (in the sense of being pro-rationality), not believing yourself to be perfectly rational. That's the sense of rationalist that goes back at least as far as Bertrand Russell. In the first paragraph of his "Why I Am A Rationalist", for example, Russell identifies as a rationalist but also says, "We are not yet, and I suppose men and women never will be, completely rational."
This also seems like it would be a futile linguistic fight. A better solution might be to consciously avoid using "rationalist" when talking about Aumann's agreement theorem—use "ideal rationalists" or "perfect rationalist". I also tend to use phrases like "members of the online rationalist community," but that's more to indicate I'm not talking about Russell or Dawkins (much less Descartes).
The -ist suffix can mean several things in English. There's the sense of "practitioner of [an art or science, or the use of a tool]" (dentist, cellist). There's "[habitual?] perpetrator of" or "participant in [an act]" (duelist, arsonist). And then there's "adherent of [an ideology, doctrine, or teacher]" (theist, Marxist). Seems to me that the problem has to do with equivocation between these senses as much as with the lack of an "aspiring". And personally, I'm a lot more comfortable with the first sense than the others; you can after all be a bad dentist.
Perhaps we should distinguish between rationaledores and rationalistas? Spanglish, but you get the picture.
"Reasoner" captures this sense of "someone who does an act," but not quite the "practitioner" sense, and it does a poor job of pointing at the cluster we want to point at.
The -dor suffix is only added to verbs. The Spanish word would be razonadores ("ratiocinators").
Recency illusion?