I just want to highlight that there are at least two separate things that one could mean by the world “rationalist”.
This first is a practitioner of a method, or an aspirant to an ideal, of truth-seeking.
The second is a participant of a particular social cluster.
By the first definition, one might call many scientists or other intellectuals “rationalists” even if they never engage with, or in fact dislike, LessWrong and co.
My impression is that when Eliezer first wrote the sequences, he was using the world in the first sense, as in “how can we become better rationalists?” But, overtime (unsurprisingly), it came to describe the social group of people sprung up around the nucleus of those sequences.
In 2020, most people, if they have an association with the word “rationalist” at all, it is either the philosophical school, or the social group, because many people (say, my parents, or members of the SF tech industry), are not going to know much more about what it means to be a “rationalist” than “Oh. I know some people who are into that.” So our label for a method / ideal naturally turns into a tribal marker.
I think one thing that would be really great is if there was some way to have terms for those two things, without having them inevitably smoosh together.
For the past year, I’ve used “rationalist” to mean “person who has made a serious study of truthseeking skills”, and used “LessWrong folk” or “Berkeley Rationality Community” or other more specific names to refer to the second group
I just want to highlight that there are at least two separate things that one could mean by the world “rationalist”.
This first is a practitioner of a method, or an aspirant to an ideal, of truth-seeking.
The second is a participant of a particular social cluster.
By the first definition, one might call many scientists or other intellectuals “rationalists” even if they never engage with, or in fact dislike, LessWrong and co.
My impression is that when Eliezer first wrote the sequences, he was using the world in the first sense, as in “how can we become better rationalists?” But, overtime (unsurprisingly), it came to describe the social group of people sprung up around the nucleus of those sequences.
In 2020, most people, if they have an association with the word “rationalist” at all, it is either the philosophical school, or the social group, because many people (say, my parents, or members of the SF tech industry), are not going to know much more about what it means to be a “rationalist” than “Oh. I know some people who are into that.” So our label for a method / ideal naturally turns into a tribal marker.
I think one thing that would be really great is if there was some way to have terms for those two things, without having them inevitably smoosh together.
For the past year, I’ve used “rationalist” to mean “person who has made a serious study of truthseeking skills”, and used “LessWrong folk” or “Berkeley Rationality Community” or other more specific names to refer to the second group
That sounds good, but also most outsiders are still going to refer to us as “the rationalists“.
Which is not to say that we can do anything about that, or that we ought to try and change how other people refer to the groups to which we belong.
I didn’t think of ‘what others call us’ as the topic of this post, and think it’s much harder to change.
Fair point.