What are you using the word “rationalist” to mean? If you just mean “members of any subculture bearing some line of memetic descent from early Less Wrong” (which I don’t think deserves the pretentious term rationalist, but putting that aside), why is “communication platform” a useful way to chop up that social grouping? A lot of the same people use Less Wrong and Facebook and Twitter and Discord and Google Docs, and a lot of the people who use the same platform wouldn’t be in the same cluster if you were to analyze the graph of what actual conversations people are using these platforms to have.
It’s a natural way to cut it up from one’s own experience. Each platform has different affordances and brings out different aspects of people, and I get pretty different experiences of them on the different platforms mentioned.
My current taxonomy of rationalists is:
LW rationalists (HI!)
Facebook rationalists
Twitter rationalists
Blog rationalists
Internet-invisible rationalists
Are there other types of rationalists? Maybe like group-chat rationalists? or podcast rationalists? google doc rationalists?
Alternative taxonomy:
rationalists belonging to Eliezer
cryopreserved rationalists
rationalists trained by CFAR
aspiring rationalists
rationalists working for MIRI
legendary rationalists
metarationalists
those commenting on this taxonomy
those that tweet as if they were mad
Bayesians
et cetera
Zvi
those that from afar look like paperclips
:)
This made me chuckle. More humor
Rationalists taxonomizing rationalists
Mesa-rationalists (the mesa-optimizers inside rationalists)
carrier pigeon rationalists
proto-rationalists
not-yet-born rationalists
literal rats
frequentists
group-house rationalists
EA forum rationalists
academic rationalists
meme rationalists
:)
I like this one.
I think there is a community of discord rationalists and tumblr rationalists.
I am a google doc rationalist! (Or I would like to be. Google docs are great.)
What are you using the word “rationalist” to mean? If you just mean “members of any subculture bearing some line of memetic descent from early Less Wrong” (which I don’t think deserves the pretentious term rationalist, but putting that aside), why is “communication platform” a useful way to chop up that social grouping? A lot of the same people use Less Wrong and Facebook and Twitter and Discord and Google Docs, and a lot of the people who use the same platform wouldn’t be in the same cluster if you were to analyze the graph of what actual conversations people are using these platforms to have.
It’s a natural way to cut it up from one’s own experience. Each platform has different affordances and brings out different aspects of people, and I get pretty different experiences of them on the different platforms mentioned.