cognitive rationalists / cograts—disambiguates that we’re named after the cognitive-science jargon ‘rationality’, and aren’t e.g. the old philosophy movement
I think referencing Bayes in the name would be a mistake for the same reason as metacognition—it’s a tool, and it’s a law, but it’s not an end and it’s not The Thing.
Maybe if we were “error-reductionists,” we’d call ourselves ducks! I like the term as a fancy spin on Less Wrong, and I think it helps show that we include anything that lets us be less in error, including non-stereotypically “rational” forms of information.
On the other hand, it doesn’t point to action any better than “rationality” or “metacognition.” And it doesn’t suggest what you’d actually do, as a human being, in order to reduce your error more (a flaw in the term “rationality” as well).
Weirdly enough, for seeming like the most passive of the one-word options, “metacognition” is the only one that points to a specific and well-defined set of actionable teaching and learning techniques.
That still doesn’t mean it’s optimal. It might just mean that we’ve failed as a civilization (except at our paradise here on the blog!) to attach a set of actionable strategies to the word “rationality” or “error reduction.” So maybe we just need to correct that.
Some terms I think get at the Thing better:
rationalists
cognitive rationalists / cograts—disambiguates that we’re named after the cognitive-science jargon ‘rationality’, and aren’t e.g. the old philosophy movement
optimizists
epistemists / epistemicists
aspiring Bayesians
Bayesianists
expected utilitarians
error-reductionists
I think referencing Bayes in the name would be a mistake for the same reason as metacognition—it’s a tool, and it’s a law, but it’s not an end and it’s not The Thing.
Maybe if we were “error-reductionists,” we’d call ourselves ducks! I like the term as a fancy spin on Less Wrong, and I think it helps show that we include anything that lets us be less in error, including non-stereotypically “rational” forms of information.
On the other hand, it doesn’t point to action any better than “rationality” or “metacognition.” And it doesn’t suggest what you’d actually do, as a human being, in order to reduce your error more (a flaw in the term “rationality” as well).
Weirdly enough, for seeming like the most passive of the one-word options, “metacognition” is the only one that points to a specific and well-defined set of actionable teaching and learning techniques.
That still doesn’t mean it’s optimal. It might just mean that we’ve failed as a civilization (except at our paradise here on the blog!) to attach a set of actionable strategies to the word “rationality” or “error reduction.” So maybe we just need to correct that.