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pjeby comments on Mate selection for the men here - Less Wrong
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Is that really true? It could easily be an availability bias on my part, but I find most non-airheaded women to be supremely rational on the instrumental level. Much more level-headed and focused on results, and far less likely to get obsessed about some stupid thing the way men do, with the possible exception of a man or a social drama, and in both cases, those things are usually short-lived by comparison to male irrational obsessions, or so ISTM.
(Of course, most of the women I meet these days besides my wife are either at internet marketing conferences, or else customers of mine. So, could easily be some sort of bias factor there!)
Yes, but there is a sense of the word "rationalist" that makes HughRistik's quote (and my post) make sense. Something like "strongly motivated to learn science and the art of rationality" or "the kind of person you become if for the last 20 years you have been strongly motivated to . . ."
For the last 20 years???
I'm thinking of "rationalist" in the sense that is used here (such as actually self-identifying as "rationalist"), which may be, as you have argued, overly disdainful of some forms of instrumental rationality (I'm still thinking through that issue).
And note that my post acknowledges that it is based on this premise which may well be false:
It could be that rationality has many components, some of which are more common in males and some of which are more common in females.
That's actually a good example of the sort of obsession I notice rational females avoiding. ;-) (To be fair, I certainly know of women who irrationally obsess on other labels and causes, I just try not to hang out with them.)
This is actually exactly the attitude I take. 'Doing rationality' is the good part, 'being a rationalist' just makes me more likely to want to signal stuff, or to disregard other useful viewpoints. I don't have to be a rationalist to do rationality, so why would I?
But using rationality makes you a rationalist, in the same way that using science makes you a scientist.
Whether you label yourself that, or consider yourself to belong to some social category, is irrelevant.
This is like saying that because an insectivore eats insects, a locavore must eat locations (like some sort of kaiju), ignoring the fact that the word is used to mean "person who eats locally grown food". Words have meanings based on things other than their etymology and grammatical construction.
Acknowledged. However, I think it's a bad idea to make 'rationalist' mean something other than "one who consistently uses rationality".
I don't like 'locavore'.