I often seem to run into problems when I use the de facto label for this group. For example, when I say, "I've been hanging out with rationalists lately," I notice that many people immediately go on the defensive. They might ask why you need a group in order to be rational, or they might say that they don't believe that people are inherently rational. Of course, I made none of those claims, I simply indicated that I was hanging out with rationalists.
You might think that "rationalist" is simply a descriptive label, but it carries positive connotations -- and what people tend to hear is "I'm a superior thinker to you," or maybe "I'm a part of this group, which ascribes the label 'rationalist' to itself, to make ourselves seem higher status than we really are."
Why does this matter?
The community doesn't exist in a vacuum; how the community is viewed from the outside matters. As the community grows and as people gain awareness of it, branding becomes important. People talk to each other, and communities gain reputations. Even if you believe that we are a loose collection of individuals, as soon as you assign a name to yourself, that is sufficient to form a group identity.
The people we interact with tend to share similar interests. The population of New York may be in the millions, and yet I run into the same people at different functions without coordination.
The more negative perceptions associated with a group, the more rapidly evaporative cooling of groups will occur.
What to do?
It's far better to talk about good things that you've gained from being in the group. It's better to say what the group does, not what the group is.
But beyond that, it's about time the community picked a better label to use. I have one idea, but I'll hold off on proposing solutions.
Isn't that the point? We aren't inherently and automatically rational, so we're trying to get better at it.
Thinking about evolution has driven it home for me. You can explain evolution to a third grader, but it took all of humanity tens of thousands of years to come up with the theory. We're really pretty damn stupid, for all our airs about being able to push around all the other animals. I've been reading a book:
Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?: 23 Questions from Great Philosophers, Leszek Kolakowski.
Lots of tiny, bite sized chapters, with the "important questions" raised by philosophers over time. Perfect for a bathroom read. But I'm struck by the nonsense and gibberish that has passed for philosophical thought through the centuries. What a load of crap.
On the bright side, when we do figure something out, we can explain it to third graders. Understanding good ideas isn't hard. Coming up with them is. There is huge mileage in applying the most basic of ideas.
If I start getting confused about an inference problem, I just start writing it out in Jaynes notation. Poof. Technical problems evaporate. Apply indexing or think about orders of abstraction per Korzybski, and poof, problems disappear. There are plenty of great ideas that a third grader can understand that I don't know about yet. That's why I'm here.