Your claim seemed wrong to me, so I did a LW google search for “rationalism” and got 10 pages of results. There were about 13 results from 2013 (including this post.) I didn’t look carefully but it seems at least a few of these incidents were using the word correctly. So with all the content posted on LW, “rationalism” is misused perhaps once every few weeks. It’s basically a rare typo, not something worth a discussion post.
It may be rare, but it is certainly not only a typo; Eliezer in particular consistently uses the word with a meaning that is not a usual one.
I don’t mean only that he doesn’t use it with the traditional philosophical meaning that’s opposed to “empiricism”; my impression is that usually (outside the writing of professional philosophers) it means something like “belief that reason in a broad sense is the only good way to seek truth”. (The broad sense in question would include examination of empirical evidence, which is why this is not the traditional philosophical meaning.)
I’m all for rationalism in that sense, but I don’t think that’s how Eliezer usually uses the term; he seems to use it to mean something more like “the practice of rationality”, and to use “rationalist” to mean “practitioner of rationality”. Hence, e.g., the Sequence-post called “Your strength as a rationalist”, and HPMOR!Harry’s question to Draco along the lines of “Do you really think you’re so good a rationalist that I should just trust what you say?”, etc.
Your claim seemed wrong to me, so I did a LW google search for “rationalism” and got 10 pages of results. There were about 13 results from 2013 (including this post.) I didn’t look carefully but it seems at least a few of these incidents were using the word correctly. So with all the content posted on LW, “rationalism” is misused perhaps once every few weeks. It’s basically a rare typo, not something worth a discussion post.
It may be rare, but it is certainly not only a typo; Eliezer in particular consistently uses the word with a meaning that is not a usual one.
I don’t mean only that he doesn’t use it with the traditional philosophical meaning that’s opposed to “empiricism”; my impression is that usually (outside the writing of professional philosophers) it means something like “belief that reason in a broad sense is the only good way to seek truth”. (The broad sense in question would include examination of empirical evidence, which is why this is not the traditional philosophical meaning.)
I’m all for rationalism in that sense, but I don’t think that’s how Eliezer usually uses the term; he seems to use it to mean something more like “the practice of rationality”, and to use “rationalist” to mean “practitioner of rationality”. Hence, e.g., the Sequence-post called “Your strength as a rationalist”, and HPMOR!Harry’s question to Draco along the lines of “Do you really think you’re so good a rationalist that I should just trust what you say?”, etc.