Alternative hypothesis: Post-rationality was started by David Chapman being angry at historical rationalism. Rationality was started by Eliezer being angry at what he calls “old-school rationality”. Both talk a lot about how people misuse frames, pretend that rigorous definitions of concepts are a thing, and broadly don’t have good models of actual cognition and the mind. They are not fully the same thing, but most of the time I talked to someone identifying as “postrationalist” they picked up the term from David Chapman and were contrasting themselves to historical rationalism (and sometimes confusing them for current rationalists), and not rationality as practiced on LW.
Any idea what a good recent thing/person/blog example of embodying that historical rationalist mindset? The only context I have for the historical rationalist a is Descartes, and I have not personally seen anyone who felt super Descartes-esque.
The default book that I see mentioned in conversation that explains historical rationalism is “Seeing like a state” though I have not read the whole book myself.
Cool. My back of the mind plan is “Actually read the book, find big names in the top down planning regimes, see if they’ve written stuff” for whenever I want to replace my Descartes stereotype with substance.
Alternative hypothesis: Post-rationality was started by David Chapman being angry at historical rationalism. Rationality was started by Eliezer being angry at what he calls “old-school rationality”. Both talk a lot about how people misuse frames, pretend that rigorous definitions of concepts are a thing, and broadly don’t have good models of actual cognition and the mind. They are not fully the same thing, but most of the time I talked to someone identifying as “postrationalist” they picked up the term from David Chapman and were contrasting themselves to historical rationalism (and sometimes confusing them for current rationalists), and not rationality as practiced on LW.
I’d buy that.
Any idea what a good recent thing/person/blog example of embodying that historical rationalist mindset? The only context I have for the historical rationalist a is Descartes, and I have not personally seen anyone who felt super Descartes-esque.
The default book that I see mentioned in conversation that explains historical rationalism is “Seeing like a state” though I have not read the whole book myself.
Cool. My back of the mind plan is “Actually read the book, find big names in the top down planning regimes, see if they’ve written stuff” for whenever I want to replace my Descartes stereotype with substance.