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army1987 comments on The rational rationalist's guide to rationally using "rational" in rational post titles - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (51)
I strongly dislike the word rational / rationality as labels for what we try to do here, because of its unfortunate Straw Vulcan connotations. Strangely, it seems to me that despite the very similar etymology, those connotations are much weaker in the words reasonable and reason. (For example, I would never think of telling someone I'm giving advice about romance “the most rational thing for you to do is [bla]”, but I have no problem with saying “the most reasonable thing” or “the thing that would make most sense”.)
I'd suggest to replace the last word in LessWrong's tagline from rationality to reason; would that have any drawbacks I can't think of?
Different connotations than those of "rational," but still some unfortunate ones: Reasonable means amenable to common sense, not absurd or shocking, not extreme, not controversial, etc.
EY does use “sane”/“crazy” to mean ‘LW::rational’/‘LW::irrational’ somewhat often, which has those connotations to a much larger extent.
Well, if we wanted something with no connotations at all, we should go with something like “Bayesian decision-theoretical”, but a tagline like “A community blog devoted to refining the art of applied Bayesian decision theory” wouldn't sound as good. :-)
I know this is tongue-in-cheek, but I'm reminded of the twelfth virtue:
"applied Bayesian decision theory" seems to be a particularly bad case of not capturing what rationality is about.
thinking that them sciency sounding words carry no connotations of status, oh the folly of youth. :p
"Reason" and related words also have unfortunate connotations. I actually feel much better about "rationality" than "reason".
Downvoted because without specifying what those unfortunate connotations are (as khafra did), that comment isn't very informative.
I was actually going to mention khafra's comment first, then thought it was redundant. I just wanted to voice my objection so I didn't end up in a silent majority.