I’ve been using the word “Luminous” to explicitly refer to “LessWrong rationality” (as opposed to “Spock rationality”). It’s a bit of a kludge, but the concept has always felt central to what I get out of LessWrong. I’m not sure how true this is for others.
Luminosity is already a technical term for a subset of rationality skills. If it’s the subset you usually have cause to talk about, there’s nothing wrong with that, but calling the entire thing that seems just mistaken.
nods I am aware it’s a subset, thus calling it a kludge.
Certainly, I’m open to a better term, but I happen to deal with a lot of “Spock” rationalists, as have many of the people I talk to, so having some way of distinguishing “no I don’t mean that idiocy” is important to me, and this is the best-fit that I’ve found so far.
The chain of thought, if you’re curious: On a non-verbal/intuitive level, I feel like the sub-skill of Luminosity is a lot of what distinguishes “LessWrong” rational from “Spock” rational. Since “LessWrong Rationality” is itself fairly awkward phrase (referring as it does to a single specific community), I substituted “Luminous rationality”, and that eventually got short-handed back to just “Luminous”. English allows for all sorts of weird confusing things where a word refers to both the set and a specific subset (frex, “man” referring to both “humans” and “humans who are male”), so while it’s kludgy, it works for me.
I can completely understand this word not working well for others :)
I’ve been using the word “Luminous” to explicitly refer to “LessWrong rationality” (as opposed to “Spock rationality”). It’s a bit of a kludge, but the concept has always felt central to what I get out of LessWrong. I’m not sure how true this is for others.
Tongue-in-cheek, I’d also suggest “Illuminati” ;)
Luminosity is already a technical term for a subset of rationality skills. If it’s the subset you usually have cause to talk about, there’s nothing wrong with that, but calling the entire thing that seems just mistaken.
nods I am aware it’s a subset, thus calling it a kludge.
Certainly, I’m open to a better term, but I happen to deal with a lot of “Spock” rationalists, as have many of the people I talk to, so having some way of distinguishing “no I don’t mean that idiocy” is important to me, and this is the best-fit that I’ve found so far.
The chain of thought, if you’re curious: On a non-verbal/intuitive level, I feel like the sub-skill of Luminosity is a lot of what distinguishes “LessWrong” rational from “Spock” rational. Since “LessWrong Rationality” is itself fairly awkward phrase (referring as it does to a single specific community), I substituted “Luminous rationality”, and that eventually got short-handed back to just “Luminous”. English allows for all sorts of weird confusing things where a word refers to both the set and a specific subset (frex, “man” referring to both “humans” and “humans who are male”), so while it’s kludgy, it works for me.
I can completely understand this word not working well for others :)