I’m comfortable calling myself an atheist (though I rarely need to), but only because I believe in zero gods and that qualifies me for the label in the eyes of almost everyone. In other words, I treat “atheist” as a feature of my worldview, not as an identity. Sure, these evangelical atheists people are so concerned over might share that feature with me, but we also share opposable thumbs and a well-developed prefrontal cortex, and I’m not too worried about that.
This seems like a common enough take on the word that I don’t risk misunderstandings unless I’m dealing with people from highly religious subcultures who’ve never met an atheist in the wild. Inadvertent identity pollution might be an issue if the set of atheists was more narrowly defined, but there’s no agenda attached to atheism and precious little in the way of unifying features besides the obvious.
On the other hand, I’m distinctly uncomfortable calling myself a rationalist. Partly because the term has a philosophical meaning which is quite unlike that common here, but mostly because it implies adopting a subcultural identity, and that’s playing with fire: ingroup biases are so pervasive, and so easy to accidentally fall into, that you should generally only do that when you have a positive reason to. Even if that weren’t the case, LW is such a small group, and in many ways such a strong outlier, that dressing up a in LW-specific identity is going to carry far more baggage in the outside world than a term as broad as “atheist” would.
I prefer calling myself an agnostic in public. The social connotations for this seem to be equivalent with a non-militant atheism, and functionally atheism and agnosticism seem to be no different. It also fits in with a more bayesian view of knowledge, where something can be improbable from an epistemic standpoint but you still allow for the possibility that it can be ontologically true. Agnosticism also implies that you’re open to updating your beliefs if you acquire new knowledge, whereas atheism isn’t seen that way to the general public.
I’m comfortable calling myself an atheist (though I rarely need to), but only because I believe in zero gods and that qualifies me for the label in the eyes of almost everyone. In other words, I treat “atheist” as a feature of my worldview, not as an identity. Sure, these evangelical atheists people are so concerned over might share that feature with me, but we also share opposable thumbs and a well-developed prefrontal cortex, and I’m not too worried about that.
This seems like a common enough take on the word that I don’t risk misunderstandings unless I’m dealing with people from highly religious subcultures who’ve never met an atheist in the wild. Inadvertent identity pollution might be an issue if the set of atheists was more narrowly defined, but there’s no agenda attached to atheism and precious little in the way of unifying features besides the obvious.
On the other hand, I’m distinctly uncomfortable calling myself a rationalist. Partly because the term has a philosophical meaning which is quite unlike that common here, but mostly because it implies adopting a subcultural identity, and that’s playing with fire: ingroup biases are so pervasive, and so easy to accidentally fall into, that you should generally only do that when you have a positive reason to. Even if that weren’t the case, LW is such a small group, and in many ways such a strong outlier, that dressing up a in LW-specific identity is going to carry far more baggage in the outside world than a term as broad as “atheist” would.
I prefer calling myself an agnostic in public. The social connotations for this seem to be equivalent with a non-militant atheism, and functionally atheism and agnosticism seem to be no different. It also fits in with a more bayesian view of knowledge, where something can be improbable from an epistemic standpoint but you still allow for the possibility that it can be ontologically true. Agnosticism also implies that you’re open to updating your beliefs if you acquire new knowledge, whereas atheism isn’t seen that way to the general public.