I wish I’d remembered to include this in the original post (and it feels wrong to slip it in now), but Scott Aaronson neatly paralleled my distinction between rationalists and post-rationalists when discussing interpretations of quantum mechanics:
But the basic split between Many-Worlds and Copenhagen (or better: between Many-Worlds and “shut-up-and-calculate” / “QM needs no interpretation” / etc.), I regard as coming from two fundamentally different conceptions of what a scientific theory is supposed to do for you. Is it supposed to posit an objective state for the universe, or be only a tool that you use to organize your experiences?
Scott tries his best to give a not-answer and be done with it, which is in keeping with my categorization of him as a prominent rationalist-adjacent.
Wait. Does it mean that, given that I prefer instrumentalism over realism in metaphysics and Copenhagen over MWI in QM (up to some nuances), I am a post-rationalist now? That doesn’t feel right. I don’t believe that the rationalist project is “misguided or impossible”, unless you use a very narrow definition of the “rationalist project”. Here and here I defended what is arguably the core of the rationalist project.
It’s not the same distinction, but I expect it’s correlated. The correlation isn’t strong enough to prevent people from being in the other quadrants, of course. :-)
I wish I’d remembered to include this in the original post (and it feels wrong to slip it in now), but Scott Aaronson neatly paralleled my distinction between rationalists and post-rationalists when discussing interpretations of quantum mechanics:
Scott tries his best to give a not-answer and be done with it, which is in keeping with my categorization of him as a prominent rationalist-adjacent.
Wait. Does it mean that, given that I prefer instrumentalism over realism in metaphysics and Copenhagen over MWI in QM (up to some nuances), I am a post-rationalist now? That doesn’t feel right. I don’t believe that the rationalist project is “misguided or impossible”, unless you use a very narrow definition of the “rationalist project”. Here and here I defended what is arguably the core of the rationalist project.
It’s not the same distinction, but I expect it’s correlated. The correlation isn’t strong enough to prevent people from being in the other quadrants, of course. :-)