I’m thinking of “rationalist” in the sense that is used here (such as actually self-identifying as “rationalist”), which may be, as you have argued, overly disdainful of some forms of instrumental rationality (I’m still thinking through that issue).
And note that my post acknowledges that it is based on this premise which may well be false:
If an interest or proficiency in rationality is related to cognitive or personality traits that show sex differences in mean or variance, such as systemizing or Openness to Ideas, then the pool of female rationalists would be lower that the pool of male rationalists.
It could be that rationality has many components, some of which are more common in males and some of which are more common in females.
That’s actually a good example of the sort of obsession I notice rational females avoiding. ;-) (To be fair, I certainly know of women who irrationally obsess on other labels and causes, I just try not to hang out with them.)
This is actually exactly the attitude I take. ‘Doing rationality’ is the good part, ‘being a rationalist’ just makes me more likely to want to signal stuff, or to disregard other useful viewpoints. I don’t have to be a rationalist to do rationality, so why would I?
But using rationality makes you a rationalist, in the same way that using science makes you a scientist.
This is like saying that because an insectivore eats insects, a locavore must eat locations (like some sort of kaiju), ignoring the fact that the word is used to mean “person who eats locally grown food”. Words have meanings based on things other than their etymology and grammatical construction.
I’m thinking of “rationalist” in the sense that is used here (such as actually self-identifying as “rationalist”), which may be, as you have argued, overly disdainful of some forms of instrumental rationality (I’m still thinking through that issue).
And note that my post acknowledges that it is based on this premise which may well be false:
It could be that rationality has many components, some of which are more common in males and some of which are more common in females.
That’s actually a good example of the sort of obsession I notice rational females avoiding. ;-) (To be fair, I certainly know of women who irrationally obsess on other labels and causes, I just try not to hang out with them.)
This is actually exactly the attitude I take. ‘Doing rationality’ is the good part, ‘being a rationalist’ just makes me more likely to want to signal stuff, or to disregard other useful viewpoints. I don’t have to be a rationalist to do rationality, so why would I?
But using rationality makes you a rationalist, in the same way that using science makes you a scientist.
Whether you label yourself that, or consider yourself to belong to some social category, is irrelevant.
This is like saying that because an insectivore eats insects, a locavore must eat locations (like some sort of kaiju), ignoring the fact that the word is used to mean “person who eats locally grown food”. Words have meanings based on things other than their etymology and grammatical construction.
Acknowledged. However, I think it’s a bad idea to make ‘rationalist’ mean something other than “one who consistently uses rationality”.
I don’t like ‘locavore’.