I agree that “aspiring rationalist” captures the desired meaning better than “rationalist”, in most cases, but… I think language has some properties, studied and documented by linguists, which define a set of legal moves, and rationalist->aspiring rationalist is an invalid move. That is: everyone using “aspiring rationalist” is an unstable state from which people will spontaneously drop the word aspiring, and people in a mixed linguistic environemnt will consistently adopt the shorter one. Aspiring Rationalist just doesn’t fit within the syllable-count budget, and if we want to displace the unmodified term Rationalist, we need a different solution.
I don’t know; finding a better solution sounds great, but there aren’t that many people who talk here, and many of us are fairly reflective and ornery, so if a small group keeps repeatedly requesting this and doing it it’d probably be sufficient to keep “aspiring rationalist” as at least a substantial minority of what’s said.
FWIW, I would genuinely use the term ‘aspiring rationalist’ more if it struck me as more technically correct — in my head ‘person aspiring to be rational’ ≈ ‘rationalist’. So I parse aspiring rationalist as ‘person aspiring to be a person aspiring to be rational’.
‘Aspiring rationalist’ makes sense if I equate ‘rationalist’ with ‘rational’, but that’s exactly the thing I don’t want to do.
Maybe we just need a new word here. E.g., -esce is a root meaning “to become” (as in coalesce, acquiesce, evanesce, convalescent, iridescent, effervescent, quiescent). We could coin a new verb “rationalesce” and declare it means “to try to become more rational” or “to pursue rationality”, then refer to ourselves as the rationalescents.
Like adolescents, except for becoming rational rather than for becoming adult. :P
I’m in for coining a new word to refer to exactly what we mean.
I find it kind of annoying that if I talk about “rationality” on say, twitter, I have to wade through a bunch of prior assumptions that people have about what the term means (eg “trying to reason through everything is misguided. Most actual effective deciding is intuitive.”)
I would rather refer to the path of self honesty and aspirational epistemic perfection by some other name that doesn’t have prior associations, in the same way that if a person says “I’m a circler / I’m into Circling”, someone will reply “what’s circling?”.
Autocompletes to asperger-rationalist for me, and I see Valentine reports the same. But maybe this frees up enough syllable-budget to spend one on bypassing that. How about: endevrat, someone who endeavours to be rational.
(This one is much better on the linguistic properties, but note that there’s a subtle meaning shift: it’s no longer inclusive of people who aspire but do not endeavour, ie people who identify-with rationality but can’t quite bring themselves to read or practice. This seems important but I don’t know whether it’s better or worse.)
If “rationalist” is a taken as a success term, then why wouldn’t “effective altruist” be as well? That is to say: if you aren’t really being effective, then in a strong sense, you aren’t really an “effective altruist”. A term that doesn’t presuppose you have already achieved what you are seeking would be “aspiring effective altruist”, which is quite long IMO.
I agree that “aspiring rationalist” captures the desired meaning better than “rationalist”, in most cases, but… I think language has some properties, studied and documented by linguists, which define a set of legal moves, and rationalist->aspiring rationalist is an invalid move. That is: everyone using “aspiring rationalist” is an unstable state from which people will spontaneously drop the word aspiring, and people in a mixed linguistic environemnt will consistently adopt the shorter one. Aspiring Rationalist just doesn’t fit within the syllable-count budget, and if we want to displace the unmodified term Rationalist, we need a different solution.
I don’t know; finding a better solution sounds great, but there aren’t that many people who talk here, and many of us are fairly reflective and ornery, so if a small group keeps repeatedly requesting this and doing it it’d probably be sufficient to keep “aspiring rationalist” as at least a substantial minority of what’s said.
FWIW, I would genuinely use the term ‘aspiring rationalist’ more if it struck me as more technically correct — in my head ‘person aspiring to be rational’ ≈ ‘rationalist’. So I parse aspiring rationalist as ‘person aspiring to be a person aspiring to be rational’.
‘Aspiring rationalist’ makes sense if I equate ‘rationalist’ with ‘rational’, but that’s exactly the thing I don’t want to do.
Maybe we just need a new word here. E.g., -esce is a root meaning “to become” (as in coalesce, acquiesce, evanesce, convalescent, iridescent, effervescent, quiescent). We could coin a new verb “rationalesce” and declare it means “to try to become more rational” or “to pursue rationality”, then refer to ourselves as the rationalescents.
Like adolescents, except for becoming rational rather than for becoming adult. :P
I’m in for coining a new word to refer to exactly what we mean.
I find it kind of annoying that if I talk about “rationality” on say, twitter, I have to wade through a bunch of prior assumptions that people have about what the term means (eg “trying to reason through everything is misguided. Most actual effective deciding is intuitive.”)
I would rather refer to the path of self honesty and aspirational epistemic perfection by some other name that doesn’t have prior associations, in the same way that if a person says “I’m a circler / I’m into Circling”, someone will reply “what’s circling?”.
“Effective Altruist” has six syllables, “Aspiring Rationalist” has seven. Not that different.
I will try using it in my writing more for a while.
Note what people actually say in conversation is “EA” (suggests “AR” as a replacement)
Hm, the “AR scene” already refers to something, but maybe we could fight out our edge in the culture.
There’s also the good ol’ Asp Rat abbreviation.
Autocompletes to asperger-rationalist for me, and I see Valentine reports the same. But maybe this frees up enough syllable-budget to spend one on bypassing that. How about: endevrat, someone who endeavours to be rational.
(This one is much better on the linguistic properties, but note that there’s a subtle meaning shift: it’s no longer inclusive of people who aspire but do not endeavour, ie people who identify-with rationality but can’t quite bring themselves to read or practice. This seems important but I don’t know whether it’s better or worse.)
(this was the intended joke)
OOoooooohhhhhhhhhh.
Alas, my brain autocompletes “Asp Rat” to “Asperger’s-like rationalist”.
That one’s also a little hard to pronounce, so I think we’d have to collapse it to “assrat”.
Could go “aspirat”. (Pronounced /ˈæs.pɪ̯.ɹæt/, not /ˈæsˈpaɪ̯.ɹɪʔ/.)
I find “AR” more difficult to actually say out loud than “EA”.
Just think like a pirate.
If “rationalist” is a taken as a success term, then why wouldn’t “effective altruist” be as well? That is to say: if you aren’t really being effective, then in a strong sense, you aren’t really an “effective altruist”. A term that doesn’t presuppose you have already achieved what you are seeking would be “aspiring effective altruist”, which is quite long IMO.
One man’s modus tollens is another’s modus ponens—I happen to think that the term “effective altruist” is problematic for exactly this reason.