There once was a time when people who were obsessed with knowledge (and the appropriate action flowing therefrom) were called scientists. Now they are just adherents to scientism, and the rest of us have to pick up terms to describe our taking the mantle. Where the “rationalist” community seems to be is at the intersection of metacognition and “rational” (whatever that means :P ). Neither describes the movement entirely on its own, but with their powers combined...
A love of knowledge? I have always had a terrible memory for all types of knowledge except metacognition. I only learned the age and scale of the universe in recent years for mostly spiritual reasons and I am still way way more interested in uncovering the meta-level of these things, the sorts of ages and scales that we can infer would be common for life-supporting laws-of-physics (the meta seems more directly relevant to anthropic problems).
There once was a time when people who were obsessed with knowledge (and the appropriate action flowing therefrom) were called scientists. Now they are just adherents to scientism, and the rest of us have to pick up terms to describe our taking the mantle. Where the “rationalist” community seems to be is at the intersection of metacognition and “rational” (whatever that means :P ). Neither describes the movement entirely on its own, but with their powers combined...
Interesting post, thanks.
A love of knowledge? I have always had a terrible memory for all types of knowledge except metacognition. I only learned the age and scale of the universe in recent years for mostly spiritual reasons and I am still way way more interested in uncovering the meta-level of these things, the sorts of ages and scales that we can infer would be common for life-supporting laws-of-physics (the meta seems more directly relevant to anthropic problems).