I’ve never described myself as “a rationalist” to anyone outside the LW community. For local purposes, I think “rationalists” is a short, simple, and suitably evocative term for the lengthier “people who care about avoiding common pitfalls of thought that lead to false belief”. For outside purposes, if I want to inform people of my LW-specific affiliation, I e-mail them a link to the website or an individual article. If I just want to tell them that I’m interested in believing true things, I signal about my commitment to honesty, my curiosity, or my intelligence.
For local purposes [“rationalists” seems suitable].
For outside purposes [I use a description not a label]
I think it’s pretty much impossible for us to have any sort of private label for ourselves. Even if we were to use a label for ourselves within this site and never use that outside of the site, that use of it within the site is still going to be projecting that label to the wider world.
Anyone from outside the community who looks at the site is going to see whatever label(s) we employ. And even if we employ a label just on this site, it’s still likely to be part of the site’s “reputation” in outside circles—i.e. the label is still likely to reach people who’ve never seen the site.
A lot of the content on Less Wrong is describing various types of mental mistakes (biases and whatnot). In terms of this aspect of the site, Less Wrong is like a kind of Wikipedia for mental mistakes.
As with Wikipedia, it’s something that could be linked to from elsewhere – like if you wanted to use it help explain type of mistake to someone. There’s a lot of potential for using the site in this way, considering that the internet consists in a large part of discussions and discussions always involve some component of reasoning.
Seen in this way, the site is not just a community (who could have their own private terminology) but also an internet-wide resource. So we should think of any label as global, and I think that’s more of a reason to consider having no label at all.
Yeah, this is basically the only option right now isn’t it? The question of how to identify ourselves to people who don’t read the site is totally irrelevant until the site gains serious notoriety. I can think of maybe three internet communities that can successfully be identified by using names they gave themselves and for the most part they aren’t flattering comparisons. I don’t think lesswrong dot com is on the verge of leading a global movement that would require a pithy label.
All that matters then is whether or not it is convenient and whether or not using “rationalist” is deterring new readers from sticking around. Rationalist is definitely is a convenient word to use but I don’t think it is indispensable. It also looks like we have medium-to-strong anecdotal evidence that using it might be deterring potential new users (on the other hand it could be attracting other users and we have no particular reason to expect such people to point to the use of the word rationalist as a reason for them sticking around).
I think the answer is probably that we have already spent to much time thinking about this question and that there is no way to legislate what we call ourselves. If people want to keep “rationalist” from becoming an entrenched label they should just keep using terms other than “rationalist” so that no word ever becomes the official label.
I’ve never described myself as “a rationalist” to anyone outside the LW community. For local purposes, I think “rationalists” is a short, simple, and suitably evocative term for the lengthier “people who care about avoiding common pitfalls of thought that lead to false belief”. For outside purposes, if I want to inform people of my LW-specific affiliation, I e-mail them a link to the website or an individual article. If I just want to tell them that I’m interested in believing true things, I signal about my commitment to honesty, my curiosity, or my intelligence.
Heavily paraphrasing:
I think it’s pretty much impossible for us to have any sort of private label for ourselves. Even if we were to use a label for ourselves within this site and never use that outside of the site, that use of it within the site is still going to be projecting that label to the wider world.
Anyone from outside the community who looks at the site is going to see whatever label(s) we employ. And even if we employ a label just on this site, it’s still likely to be part of the site’s “reputation” in outside circles—i.e. the label is still likely to reach people who’ve never seen the site.
A lot of the content on Less Wrong is describing various types of mental mistakes (biases and whatnot). In terms of this aspect of the site, Less Wrong is like a kind of Wikipedia for mental mistakes.
As with Wikipedia, it’s something that could be linked to from elsewhere – like if you wanted to use it help explain type of mistake to someone. There’s a lot of potential for using the site in this way, considering that the internet consists in a large part of discussions and discussions always involve some component of reasoning.
Seen in this way, the site is not just a community (who could have their own private terminology) but also an internet-wide resource. So we should think of any label as global, and I think that’s more of a reason to consider having no label at all.
Here’s an example of such external referencing of Less Wrong posts
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1750-the-planning-fallacy
Yeah, this is basically the only option right now isn’t it? The question of how to identify ourselves to people who don’t read the site is totally irrelevant until the site gains serious notoriety. I can think of maybe three internet communities that can successfully be identified by using names they gave themselves and for the most part they aren’t flattering comparisons. I don’t think lesswrong dot com is on the verge of leading a global movement that would require a pithy label.
All that matters then is whether or not it is convenient and whether or not using “rationalist” is deterring new readers from sticking around. Rationalist is definitely is a convenient word to use but I don’t think it is indispensable. It also looks like we have medium-to-strong anecdotal evidence that using it might be deterring potential new users (on the other hand it could be attracting other users and we have no particular reason to expect such people to point to the use of the word rationalist as a reason for them sticking around).
I think the answer is probably that we have already spent to much time thinking about this question and that there is no way to legislate what we call ourselves. If people want to keep “rationalist” from becoming an entrenched label they should just keep using terms other than “rationalist” so that no word ever becomes the official label.