May I humbly suggest that “become a rationalist” be replaced with “study rationality” or “improve their rationality”, as appropriate (and “higher level” with whatever it means), and “rationalists [that empirically seem . . .]” with whatever group you actually observed?
(As you can tell, I’ve taken up the word “rationalist” as a pet peeve. I hope I’m not being more annoying than useful by repeatedly trying to dissolve the word.)
The group I observed was LWers who self-identify as rationalists.
I don’t think that dissolving the word is particularly helpful in this case though. I rearranged a few parts in order to avoid a (fairly common, fairly justified) peeve, and not doing that much more to elucidate what I mean by it, compared to the similar comment with a similar question w/r/t what a better rationalist means.
On the other hand, I’m somewhat irked with the lack of information on what seems to me to be a non-wrong question.
Well, my peeve with the word “rationalist” is that it has many meanings. It could mean “rationality student”, “rationality enthusiast”, or “person who is rational”, not to mention “person who shuns intuition in favor of reason” and “person who shuns evidence in favor of reason”. I think avoiding the word “rationalist”, and instead saying what we mean by the word, could make our prose a lot more precise and not much longer.
May I humbly suggest that “become a rationalist” be replaced with “study rationality” or “improve their rationality”, as appropriate (and “higher level” with whatever it means), and “rationalists [that empirically seem . . .]” with whatever group you actually observed?
(As you can tell, I’ve taken up the word “rationalist” as a pet peeve. I hope I’m not being more annoying than useful by repeatedly trying to dissolve the word.)
Replaced the first, fair point.
The group I observed was LWers who self-identify as rationalists.
I don’t think that dissolving the word is particularly helpful in this case though. I rearranged a few parts in order to avoid a (fairly common, fairly justified) peeve, and not doing that much more to elucidate what I mean by it, compared to the similar comment with a similar question w/r/t what a better rationalist means.
On the other hand, I’m somewhat irked with the lack of information on what seems to me to be a non-wrong question.
Well, my peeve with the word “rationalist” is that it has many meanings. It could mean “rationality student”, “rationality enthusiast”, or “person who is rational”, not to mention “person who shuns intuition in favor of reason” and “person who shuns evidence in favor of reason”. I think avoiding the word “rationalist”, and instead saying what we mean by the word, could make our prose a lot more precise and not much longer.