This is one of those things that frustrates me. There should be a nice concise word for the sorts of materials that are being collected on this site that doesn’t require a ton of clarification, doesn’t invoke whatever demons have caused ‘rationalism’ to be associated with anti-feminism in some circles, or suggest an innate contradiction with the useful pieces of empirical practice.
How many times in the past few months have I tried to express to someone, “I’ve been learning all sorts of interesting things about cognitive defects and undesirable human behavioral phenomena, applications of Bayes theorem, and other collected topics concerning epistemology in an effort to be less crazy, help others be less crazy, and be a more effective human”—or something along those lines? If for no other reason than brevity, I would love to have a word that helps succinctly express that, or something reasonably close to it, such that if you look into the word, you understand that it covers this type of interest.
Incidentally, if anyone can tell me what that “rationalism is anti-woman” thing is about, I’d really love to know. I don’t see any particularly compelling reason that ‘traditional rationalism’ should be associated with anti-feminism (except as expressed by anti-feminists who also happened to subscribe to that philosophy, and even then, I don’t know who those people are.)
Incidentally, if anyone can tell me what that “rationalism is anti-woman” thing is about, I’d really love to know. I don’t see any particularly compelling reason that ‘traditional rationalism’ should be associated with anti-feminism (except as expressed by anti-feminists who also happened to subscribe to that philosophy, and even then, I don’t know who those people are.)
Political interests do not have to be intrinsically opposed to have conflict. It is in the interests of feminism to target some territories in concept-space to colonize to further it’s goals—such as asserting an epistemic fact about something to do with sex the belief of which will strengthen feminism. “Traditional rationalism” will also claim territories in such a way. When those claims overlap there is the potential for conflict. “Traditional rationalism” will have different priorities regarding assertions made on that subject than “feminism” and so the natural escalation for either side is to ” are anti-”.
It is not hard to think of examples of epistemic claims about subjects which would necessarily offend significant elements of one or the other of those groups but which are required by the other. Of course I will not give examples here because that will necessarily be offensive to at least one of said groups. (I support your-side.)
Rationalism would have been a good name if it wasn’t already taken, since Eliezer’s rationality is a philosophy among other things.
This is one of those things that frustrates me. There should be a nice concise word for the sorts of materials that are being collected on this site that doesn’t require a ton of clarification, doesn’t invoke whatever demons have caused ‘rationalism’ to be associated with anti-feminism in some circles, or suggest an innate contradiction with the useful pieces of empirical practice.
How many times in the past few months have I tried to express to someone, “I’ve been learning all sorts of interesting things about cognitive defects and undesirable human behavioral phenomena, applications of Bayes theorem, and other collected topics concerning epistemology in an effort to be less crazy, help others be less crazy, and be a more effective human”—or something along those lines? If for no other reason than brevity, I would love to have a word that helps succinctly express that, or something reasonably close to it, such that if you look into the word, you understand that it covers this type of interest.
Incidentally, if anyone can tell me what that “rationalism is anti-woman” thing is about, I’d really love to know. I don’t see any particularly compelling reason that ‘traditional rationalism’ should be associated with anti-feminism (except as expressed by anti-feminists who also happened to subscribe to that philosophy, and even then, I don’t know who those people are.)
Political interests do not have to be intrinsically opposed to have conflict. It is in the interests of feminism to target some territories in concept-space to colonize to further it’s goals—such as asserting an epistemic fact about something to do with sex the belief of which will strengthen feminism. “Traditional rationalism” will also claim territories in such a way. When those claims overlap there is the potential for conflict. “Traditional rationalism” will have different priorities regarding assertions made on that subject than “feminism” and so the natural escalation for either side is to ” are anti-”.
It is not hard to think of examples of epistemic claims about subjects which would necessarily offend significant elements of one or the other of those groups but which are required by the other. Of course I will not give examples here because that will necessarily be offensive to at least one of said groups. (I support your-side.)
I only just understood this reply today. Thank you. (Edit: by which I mean, there are related lessons I learned today)