A rationalist, in the sense of this particular community, is someone who is trying to build and update a unified probabilistic model of how the entire world works, and trying to use that model to make predictions and decisions.
… the entire world? As far as I can tell, the vast majority of rationalists would like to have an accurate probabilistic model of the entire world, but are only trying to maintain and update small-ish relevant parts of it. For example, I have (as far as I can recall) never tried to build any model of Congolese politics (until writing this sentence, actually, when I stopped to consider what I do believe about it), nor tried to propagate what I know that relates to Congolese politics (which is non-zero) to other topics.
You have a prior on Congolese politics, which draws from causal nodes like “central Africa”, “post-colonialism”, and the like; the fact that your model is uncertain about it (until you look anything up or even try to recall relevant details) doesn’t mean your model is mute about it. It’s there even before you look at it, and there’s been no need to put special effort into it before it was relevant to a question or decision that mattered to you.
I’m just saying that rationalists are trying to make one big map, with regions filled in at different rates (and we won’t get around to everything), rather than trying to make separate map-isteria.
I agree that my global map contains a region for Congolese politics. What I’m saying is that I’m not trying to maintain that bit of the map, or update it based on new info. But I guess as long as the whole map is global and I’m trying to update the global map, that suffices for your definition?
… the entire world? As far as I can tell, the vast majority of rationalists would like to have an accurate probabilistic model of the entire world, but are only trying to maintain and update small-ish relevant parts of it. For example, I have (as far as I can recall) never tried to build any model of Congolese politics (until writing this sentence, actually, when I stopped to consider what I do believe about it), nor tried to propagate what I know that relates to Congolese politics (which is non-zero) to other topics.
You have a prior on Congolese politics, which draws from causal nodes like “central Africa”, “post-colonialism”, and the like; the fact that your model is uncertain about it (until you look anything up or even try to recall relevant details) doesn’t mean your model is mute about it. It’s there even before you look at it, and there’s been no need to put special effort into it before it was relevant to a question or decision that mattered to you.
I’m just saying that rationalists are trying to make one big map, with regions filled in at different rates (and we won’t get around to everything), rather than trying to make separate map-isteria.
I agree that my global map contains a region for Congolese politics. What I’m saying is that I’m not trying to maintain that bit of the map, or update it based on new info. But I guess as long as the whole map is global and I’m trying to update the global map, that suffices for your definition?
It does.