You see, I've seen the word "rationalism" used to mean all five of these things at different times:
- The belief that we should come to know the world through reason and experimentation, shunning intuition.
- The belief that we should come to know the world through reason and intuition, shunning experimentation.
- The belief that we should come to know the world through knowledge of (and correction for) cognitive biases, and knowledge of (and correct use of) probability theory.
- Being effective at believing things that are true and not things that are false.
- Being effective at doing things that are good and not things that are bad.
In most of the mainstream philosophy I've read, the word "rationalism" has been used, without qualification, to mean the second of these, even though that type of rationalism strongly contradicts the stuff we call rationalism! One of my friends has freely used the word "rationalism" in conversation, referring to "our" rationalism, completely unaware that, to most people, the word means something completely different. Another of my friends said that he "hates rationalism with a passion"—and I have no idea which of these five things is the one he hates!
Given that "rationalism" to most people (or, at least, most philosophers) means something utterly unlike what it means to us, perhaps calling our philosophy "rationalism" is about as wise as developing a political philosophy, based on socialism but with nationalist influences, and calling it "national socialism".
I suggest that we use the word "sensibilism" instead, since nobody else is using it, it seems unobjectionable, and I think it captures what we're all about.
Edited to remove a proposed solution.
Edited to reinstate that proposed solution, since this discussion is presumably finished.
I occasionally ponder what LW's objective place in the scheme of things might be. Will it ever matter as much as, say, the Vienna Circle? Or even just as much as the Futurians? - who didn't matter very much, but whose story should interest the NYC group. The Futurians were communists, but that was actually a common outlook for "rationalists" at the time, and the Futurians were definitely future-oriented.
Will LW just become a tiresome and insignificant rationalist cult? The more that people want to conduct missionary activity, "raising the sanity waterline" and so forth, the more that this threatens to occur. Rationalist evangelism from LW might take two forms, boring and familiar, or eccentric and cultish. The boring and familiar form of rationalist evangelism could encompass opposition to religion, psych 101 lectures about cognitive bias, and tips on how optimism and clear thinking can lead to success in mating and moneymaking. An eccentric and cultish form of rationalist evangelism could be achieved by combining cryonics boosterism, Bayes-worship, insistence that the many-worlds interpretation is the only rational interpretation of quantum mechanics, and the supreme importance of finding the one true AI utility function.
It could be that the dominant intellectual and personality tendencies here - critical and analytical - will prevent serious evangelism of either type from ever getting underway. So let's return for a moment to the example of the Vienna Circle, which was not much of a missionary outfit. It produced a philosophy, logical positivism, which was influential for a while, and it was a forum in which minds like Godel and Wittgenstein (and others who are much lesser known now, like Otto Neurath) got to trade views with other people who were smart and on their wavelength, though of course they had their differences.
Frankly I think it is unlikely that LW will reach that level. The Vienna Circle was a talking shop, an intellectual salon, but it was perhaps one in ten thousand in terms of its lucidity and significance. Recorded and unrecorded history, and the Internet today, is full of occasions where people met, were intellectually sympatico, and managed to elaborate their worldview in a way they found satisfactory; and quite often, the participants in this process felt they were doing something more than just personally exciting - they thought they were finding the truth, getting it right where almost everyone else got it wrong.
I appreciate that quite a few LW contributors will be thinking, I'm not in this out of a belief that we're making history; it's paying dividends for me and my peers, and that's good enough. But you can't deny that there is a current here, a persistent thread of opinion, which believes that LW is extremely important or potentially so, that it is a unique source of insights, a workshop for genuine discovery, an oasis of truth in a blind or ignorant world, etc.
Some of that perception I believe is definitely illusory, and comes from autodidacts thinking they are polymaths. That is, people who have developed a simple working framework for many fields or many questions of interest, and who then mistake that for genuine knowledge or expertise. When this illusion becomes a collective one, that is when you get true intellectual cultism, e.g. the followers of Lyndon Larouche. Larouche has an opinion on everything, and so to those who believe him on everything, he is the greatest genius of the age.
Then, there are some intellectual tendencies here which, if not entirely unique to LW, seem to be expressed with greater strength, diversity, and elaboration than elsewhere. I'm especially thinking of all the strange new views, expressed almost daily, about identity, morality, reality, arising from extreme multiverse thinking, computational platonism, the expectation of uploads... That is an area where I think LW would unquestionably be of interest to a historian of technological subcultural belief. And I think it's very possible that some form of these ideas will give rise to mass belief systems later in this century - people who don't worry about death because they believe in quantum immortality, popular ethical movements based on some of the more extreme or bizarre conclusions being deduced from radical utilitarianism, Singularity debates becoming an element of political life. I'm not saying LW would be the source of all this, just that it might be a bellwether of an emerging zeitgeist in which the ambient technical and cultural environment naturally gives rise to such thinking.
But is there anything happening here which will contribute to intellectual progress? - that's my main question right now. I see two ways that the answer might be yes. First, the ideas produced here might actually be intellectual progress; second, this might be a formative early experience for someone who went on to make genuine contributions. I think it's likely that the second option will be true of someone - that at least one, and maybe several people, who are contributing to this site or just reading it, will, years from now, be making discoveries, in psychology or in some field that doesn't yet exist, and it will be because this site warped their sensibility (or straightened it). But for now, my question is the first one: is there any intellectual progress directly occurring here, of a sort that would show up in a later history of ideas? Or is this all fundamentally, at best, just a learning experience for the participants, of purely private and local significance?
But it is also likely that there is someone out there who will be effected negatively by this site. Your statement is only slightly relevant to the question of whether LessWrong is overall a positive influence. In other words, it's rhetorical dark arts.