(shrug) Sure.
If we try to do text substitutions without a semantic understanding of what's going on, we get nonsense or worse. This should not be surprising. I'm not actually proposing a regexp search-and-replace, I'm proposing a lexical shift.
What we frequently refer to here as a "rational agent" isn't an optimized agent, it's an optimizing agent -- one that makes the decisions that most effectively implement its goals.
What we frequently refer to here as a "rational choice" is both an optimizing choice (that is, one which when implemented effects the chooser's goals) and an optimized choice (that is, of the set of available choices, the one which has the highest chance of effecting the chooser's goals). It might also be an optimal choice (that is, the one that actually best effects the chooser's goals).
A chooser might pick an option at random which turns out to be (by sheer dumb luck) the optimal choice. Their choice would still be optimized, though the process they used to select it was not a reliable optimizing process.
This seems pretty straightforward and useful to me, which is why I'm adopting this language.
I endorse other people similarly adopting language that seems straightforward and useful to them.
What we frequently refer to here as a "rational agent" isn't an optimized agent, it's an optimizing agent -- one that makes the decisions that most effectively implement its goals.
I am reminded of one of the early videos in Norvig and Thrun's recent online AI class, where "optimal" was used in two different senses in rapid succession — to mean "the algorithm yields the shortest route" and "the algorithm executes in the best time". This yielded some confusion for a friend of mine, who assumed that the speaker meant that these were both aspects of some deeper definition of "optimal" which would then be explained. No such explanation was forthcoming.
A new arrival, Kouran, recently challenged our conventional use of the label "rational" to describe various systems. The full thread is here, and it doesn't summarize neatly, but he observes that we often use "rational" in the context of non-intellectual, non-cognitive, etc. systems, and that this is an unconventional use of the word.
Unsurprisingly, this led to Standard Conversation Number 12 about how we don't really use "rational" to mean what the rest of the world means by it, and about instrumental rationality, and etc. and etc. In the course of that discussion I made the observation a couple of times (here and here) that we could probably substitute some form of "optimal" for "rational" wherever it appears without losing any information.
Of course, status quo bias being what it is, I promptly added that we wouldn't actually want to do that, because, y'know, it would be work and involve changing stuff.
But the more I think about it, the more it seems like I ought to endorse that lexical shift. We do spend a not-inconsiderable amount of time and attention on alleviating undesirable side-effects of the word 'rational,' such as the Spock effect, and our occasional annoying tendency to talk about the 'rational' choice of shoe-polish when we really mean the optimal choice, and our occasional tendency to tie ourselves in knots around "rationalists should win". (That optimized systems do better than non-optimized systems is pretty much the definition of "optimized," after all. If we say that rational systems generally do better than irrational systems, we're saying that rational systems are generally optimal, which is a non-empty statement. But if we define "rational" to mean the thing that wins, which we sometimes do, it seems simpler to talk about optimized systems in the first place.)
There's precedent for this... a while ago I started getting out of the habit of talking about "artificial intelligences" when I really wanted to talk about superhuman optimizing systems instead, and I continue to endorse that change. So, I'm going to stop using "rational" when I actually mean optimal. I encourage others to do so as well. (Or, conversely, to tell me why I shouldn't.)
This should go without saying, but in case it doesn't: I'm not proposing recoding anything or rewriting anything or doing any work here beyond changing my use of language as it's convenient for me to do so.