I’ve been using the label “LessWrongian” on occasion with friends. I’ve also been wondering recently if just plain “wisdom” would be a more catch-all label for the type of rationality we’re talking about.
I think “strategy” is better than “wisdom”. I think “wisdom” is associated with cached Truths and signals superiority. This is bad because this will make our audience too hostile. Strategy, on the other hand, is about process, about working towards a goal, and it’s already used in literature in the context of improving one’s decision making process.
You can get away with saying things like “I want to be strategic about life”, meaning that I want to make choices in such a way that I’m unlikely to regret them at a later stage. Or I can say “I want to become a more strategic thinker” and it’s immediately obvious that I care about reaching goals and that I’m not talking about strategy for the sake of strategy (I happen to care about strategy because of the virtue of curiosity, but this too is fine). The list goes on: “we need to reconsider our strategy for education”, “we’re not being strategic enough about health care—too many people die unnecessarily”. None of these statements put our audience on guard or make us look like unnatural weirdos. [1]
The most important thing is that “irrational” is perceived as an insult and way too close to the sexist emotional/hormonal used to dismiss women. Aside from the sexism saying “whatever, you’re just being irrational” is just as bad as saying “whatever, you’re just being hormonal”. It’s the worst possible thing to say, and when you have a habit of using the word “rational” a lot it’s way too easy to slip up.
[1] fun exercise—substitute “strategy” by “rationality” and see how much more Spock-like it all sounds.
From a purely definitional perspective that’s fairly close; but if we’re concerned with signaling, “wisdom” has even more appallingly bad associations than “rational” does. If a friend told me he’d joined a group dedicated to seeking wisdom, I’d at best assume an ashram or something similar, and likewise I’d expect most of the people attracted by the term to lie somewhere along the New Age/NRM spectrum.
I’ve been using the label “LessWrongian” on occasion with friends. I’ve also been wondering recently if just plain “wisdom” would be a more catch-all label for the type of rationality we’re talking about.
I think “strategy” is better than “wisdom”. I think “wisdom” is associated with cached Truths and signals superiority. This is bad because this will make our audience too hostile. Strategy, on the other hand, is about process, about working towards a goal, and it’s already used in literature in the context of improving one’s decision making process.
You can get away with saying things like “I want to be strategic about life”, meaning that I want to make choices in such a way that I’m unlikely to regret them at a later stage. Or I can say “I want to become a more strategic thinker” and it’s immediately obvious that I care about reaching goals and that I’m not talking about strategy for the sake of strategy (I happen to care about strategy because of the virtue of curiosity, but this too is fine). The list goes on: “we need to reconsider our strategy for education”, “we’re not being strategic enough about health care—too many people die unnecessarily”. None of these statements put our audience on guard or make us look like unnatural weirdos. [1]
The most important thing is that “irrational” is perceived as an insult and way too close to the sexist emotional/hormonal used to dismiss women. Aside from the sexism saying “whatever, you’re just being irrational” is just as bad as saying “whatever, you’re just being hormonal”. It’s the worst possible thing to say, and when you have a habit of using the word “rational” a lot it’s way too easy to slip up.
[1] fun exercise—substitute “strategy” by “rationality” and see how much more Spock-like it all sounds.
From a purely definitional perspective that’s fairly close; but if we’re concerned with signaling, “wisdom” has even more appallingly bad associations than “rational” does. If a friend told me he’d joined a group dedicated to seeking wisdom, I’d at best assume an ashram or something similar, and likewise I’d expect most of the people attracted by the term to lie somewhere along the New Age/NRM spectrum.
I suppose you’re right. It turns us from apparent Rand-loving Spocks to Hippie New Agers in the eyes of the public.
Wait, so what would happen if we said “rationality and wisdom” or even “rationality slash wisdom”?
Either they even each-other out, or people think we’re crazy and self-contradictory?
Sounds worth trying!