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satt comments on Terminology Thread (or "name that pattern") - Less Wrong Discussion
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Some people are more rational than others, but no one is "rational" simpliciter, because no one meets the stringent criterion of applying perfect Bayesian reasoning to everything (or even most things). Consequently, calling people "rational" without qualification is an inflationary use of the term.
Nonetheless, people on LW sometimes refer to rationality as if it's a binary quality some people have and some people don't, which doesn't make sense to me. Searching LW for the phrase "rational people" returns similar examples of this. (In fairness, a lot of examples of the phrase refer to hypothetical ideal reasoners, or are ironic uses, which I'm OK with.)
It'd be useful to replace "rational" in these contexts with a word for someone who meets the looser standard of "thinks systematically & impartially about something without labouring under any obvious bias or appealing to fallacies" — basically the kind of ideal a traditional rationalist or sceptic might use. I've been using the word "quasi-rational", but there's probably a catchier word out there. (Pre-rational? Proto-rational? Sub-rational?)
No. When a word is used "simpliciter" all qualifications that are obviously necessary are implicit. So when somebody is said to be rational it means that with regards to the things that are relevant in the context that you are talking about they are more rational than the usual standard (probably most people, or most people in some group that is obvious from the context).
So the term you are looking for is "rational".
I don't think that can be true in general. One of my examples had someone invoking Aumann's agreement theorem as follows:
Interpreting "rational people" in a quantitative, "more rational than the usual standard" sense there won't work, because Aumann's agreement theorem assumes perfect Bayesian rationality, not merely better-than-usual rationality. I reckon the sentence I quoted is just plain false unless one interprets "rational people" in an absolute sense.
Yes, that statement is just plain false. The problem behind this is people referring to game theoretic agents as "[perfectly] rational people", and then others hearing them assuming that the 'rational people' in game theory are the same kind as real 'rational people'.
Rationality means more that one thing. One of the things it means is taking the pro-science, anti-god side in the Culture Wars. That may well be what it means when used as a binary.
Yes, people sometimes use "rational" to refer to that too. But using the word in that sense on LW has a much bigger risk of muddying the meaning of the term here, since the word's local canonical meaning is quite different.