This is a bit off-topic with respect to the OP, but I really wish we’d more often say “aspiring rationalist” rather than “rationalist.” (Thanks to Said for doing this here.) The use of “rationalist” in parts of this comment thread and elsewhere grates on me. I expect most uses of either term are just people using the phrase other people use (which I have no real objection to), but it seems to me that when we say “aspiring rationalist” we at least sometimes remember that to form a map that is a better predictor of the territory requires aspiration, effort, forming one’s beliefs via mental motions that’ll give different results in different worlds. While when we say “rationalist”, it sounds like it’s just a subculture.
TBC, I don’t object to people describing other people as “self-described rationalists” or similar, just to using “rationalist” as a term to identify with on purpose, or as the term for what LW’s goal is. I’m worried that if we intentionally describe ourselves as “rationalists,” we’ll aim to be a subculture (“we hang with the rationalists”; “we do things the way this subculture does them”) instead of actually asking the question of how we can form accurate beliefs.
I non-confidently think “aspiring rationalist” used to be somewhat more common as a term, and its gradual disappearance (if it has been gradually disappearing; I’m not sure) is linked with some LWers and similar having less of an aspirational identity, and more of a “we’re the set of people who tread water while affiliating with certain mental habits or keywords or something” identity.
I dutifully tried to say “aspiring rationalist” for awhile, but in addition to the syllable count thing just being too much of a pain, it… feels like it’s solving the wrong problem.
An argument that persuaded me to stop caring about it as much: communities of guitarists don’t call themselves “aspiring guitarists”. You’re either doing guitaring, or you’re not. (in some sense similar for being a scientist or researcher).
Meanwhile, I know at least some people definitely meet any reasonable bar for “actually a goddamn rationalist”. If you intentionally reflect on and direct your cognitive patterns in ways that are more likely to find true beliefs and accomplish your goals, and you’ve gone off into the world and solved some difficult problems that depended on you being able to do that… I think you’re just plain a rationalist.
I think I myself am right around the threshold where I think it might reasonably make sense to call myself a rationalist. Reasonable people might disagree. I think 10 years ago I was definitely more like “a subculture supporting character.” I think Logan Strohl and Jim Babcock and Eliezer Yudkowsky and Elizabeth van Nostrand and Oliver Habryka each have some clear “actually the sort of rationalist you might want to pay money to do rationality at professional rates” thing going on. It’d feel dumb to me for them to go out of their way to tack-on “aspiring” (even if, of course, there are a ton more skills they could learn or improve at)
I guess you do sometimes have “students” vs “grad students” vs “doctors” of various stripes. You probably don’t call yourself a scientist while you’re still getting your biology degree. But even a 2nd year undergrad biology major is doing something that someone who retweets “I fucking love science” memes is not. A guy who knows 5 chords on guitar and can play a few songs is in some sense straightforwardly a “guitarist”, in a way that a guy who hangs out in the guitar club but doesn’t play is not. Could he be better at guitar? Sure, and so could the professional guitarist who can improvise an entire song.
I agree there’s a problem where rationalism feels prone to “being a subculture”, and there is a need to guard against that somehow. But I don’t think the “aspiring” thing is the way to go about it.
I love your observations here. The quality of grounding in a clear intuition here.
I don’t think you can avoid the subculture thing. The discipline doesn’t exist in a void the way math kind of does. Unless & until you can actually define the practice of rationality, there’s no clear dividing line between the social scene and the set of people who practice the discipline. No clear analogue to “actually playing a guitar”.
Like, I think I follow your intuition, but consider:
Meanwhile, I know at least some people definitely meet any reasonable bar for “actually a goddamn rationalist”. If you intentionally reflect on and direct your cognitive patterns in ways that are more likely to find true beliefs and accomplish your goals, and you’ve gone off into the world and solved some difficult problems that depended on you being able to do that… I think you’re just plain a rationalist.
I’m reasonably sure a lot of people here would consider me a great example of a non-rationalist. Lots of folk told me that to my face while I worked at CFAR. But the above describes me to an utter T. I’m just doing it in a way that the culture here doesn’t approve of and thinks is pretty nutty. Which is fine. I think the culture here is doing its “truth-seeking” in a pretty nutty way too. Y’all are getting great results predicting Covid case numbers, and I’m getting great results guiding people to cure their social anxiety and depression. To each their own.
I think what you’re talking about is way, way more of an aesthetic than you might realize. Like, what are you really using to detect who is and isn’t “actually a goddamn rationalist”? My guess is it’s more of a gut sense that you then try to examine upon reflection.
Is Elon Musk “actually a goddamn rationalist”? He sure seems to care about what’s true and about being effective in the world. But I’m guessing he somehow lands as less of a central example than Oli or Eliezer do. If so, why?
If Elon doesn’t do it for you, insert some other successful smart person who mysteriously doesn’t gut-ping as “actually a goddamn rationalist”.
If I’m way off here, I’d actually be pretty interested in knowing that. Because I’d find that illuminating as to what you mean by rationalism.
But if I’m basically right, then you’re not going to separate the discipline from the social scene with a term. You’ll keep seeing social status and perception of skill conflated. Not exactly overlapping, but muddled nonetheless.
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.
As I see it, “rationalist” already refers to a person who thinks rationality is particularly important, not necessarily a person who is rational, like how “libertarian” refers to a person who thinks freedom is particularly important, not necessarily a person who is free. Then literally speaking “aspiring rationalist” refers to a person who aspires to think rationality is particularly important, not to a person who aspires to be rational. Using “aspiring rationalist” to refer to people who aspire to attain rationality encourages people to misinterpret self-identified rationalists as claiming to have attained rationality. Saying something like “person who aspires to rationality” instead of “aspiring rationalist” is a little more awkward, but it respects the literal meaning of words, and I think that’s important.
I agree that it was not the usage in the Sequences, and that it was therefore not (or at least not always) the usage within the community that coalesced around EY’s blogging. But if “otherwise at the time the Sequences were written” is meant to say more than that—if you’re saying that there was a tendency for “rationalist” to mean something like “person skilled in the art of reason” apart from EY’s preference for using it that way—then I would like to see some evidence. I don’t think I have ever seen the word used in that way in a way that wasn’t clearly causally descended from EY’s usage.
Maybe what you’re actually looking for is something like “aspiring beisutsuka”. Like there’s an ideal you’re aiming for but can maybe approach only asymptotically. Just don’t equate “rationalist” with “beisutsuka” and you’re good.
The same model that says aspiring rationalist will self-replace with rationalist, says aspiring beisutsuka will self-rpeplace with beisutsuka. But beisutsuka is a bit better than rationalist on its own terms; it emphasizes being a practitioner more, and presupposes the skill less. And it avoids punning with a dozen past historical movements that each have their own weird connotations and misconceptions. Unfortunately the phonology and spelling of beisutsuka is 99.9th-percentile tricky and that might mean it’s also a linguistic invalid move.
Unfortunately the phonology and spelling of beisutsuka is 99.9th-percentile tricky and that might mean it’s also a linguistic invalid move.
Some rabbit-hole expansion on this:
First of all, you’re missing an “i” at the end (as attested in “Final Words”), so that’s some direct evidence right there.
The second half is presumably a loan from Japanese 使い “tsukai”, “one who uses/applies”, usable as a suffix. In fiction and pop culture, it shows up prominently in 魔法使い “mahoutsukai”, “magic user” thus “wizard” or “sorcerer”; I infer this may have been a flavor source given Eliezer’s other fandom attachments.
The first half is presumably a transliteration of “Bayes” as ベイス “beisu”, which devoices the last mora for reasons which are not clear to me. Compare to Japanese Wikipedia’s article on Thomas Bayes which retains the ズ (zu) at the end, including in compounds related to Bayesian probability and inference.
This is a bit off-topic with respect to the OP, but I really wish we’d more often say “aspiring rationalist” rather than “rationalist.” (Thanks to Said for doing this here.) The use of “rationalist” in parts of this comment thread and elsewhere grates on me. I expect most uses of either term are just people using the phrase other people use (which I have no real objection to), but it seems to me that when we say “aspiring rationalist” we at least sometimes remember that to form a map that is a better predictor of the territory requires aspiration, effort, forming one’s beliefs via mental motions that’ll give different results in different worlds. While when we say “rationalist”, it sounds like it’s just a subculture.
TBC, I don’t object to people describing other people as “self-described rationalists” or similar, just to using “rationalist” as a term to identify with on purpose, or as the term for what LW’s goal is. I’m worried that if we intentionally describe ourselves as “rationalists,” we’ll aim to be a subculture (“we hang with the rationalists”; “we do things the way this subculture does them”) instead of actually asking the question of how we can form accurate beliefs.
I non-confidently think “aspiring rationalist” used to be somewhat more common as a term, and its gradual disappearance (if it has been gradually disappearing; I’m not sure) is linked with some LWers and similar having less of an aspirational identity, and more of a “we’re the set of people who tread water while affiliating with certain mental habits or keywords or something” identity.
I dutifully tried to say “aspiring rationalist” for awhile, but in addition to the syllable count thing just being too much of a pain, it… feels like it’s solving the wrong problem.
An argument that persuaded me to stop caring about it as much: communities of guitarists don’t call themselves “aspiring guitarists”. You’re either doing guitaring, or you’re not. (in some sense similar for being a scientist or researcher).
Meanwhile, I know at least some people definitely meet any reasonable bar for “actually a goddamn rationalist”. If you intentionally reflect on and direct your cognitive patterns in ways that are more likely to find true beliefs and accomplish your goals, and you’ve gone off into the world and solved some difficult problems that depended on you being able to do that… I think you’re just plain a rationalist.
I think I myself am right around the threshold where I think it might reasonably make sense to call myself a rationalist. Reasonable people might disagree. I think 10 years ago I was definitely more like “a subculture supporting character.” I think Logan Strohl and Jim Babcock and Eliezer Yudkowsky and Elizabeth van Nostrand and Oliver Habryka each have some clear “actually the sort of rationalist you might want to pay money to do rationality at professional rates” thing going on. It’d feel dumb to me for them to go out of their way to tack-on “aspiring” (even if, of course, there are a ton more skills they could learn or improve at)
I guess you do sometimes have “students” vs “grad students” vs “doctors” of various stripes. You probably don’t call yourself a scientist while you’re still getting your biology degree. But even a 2nd year undergrad biology major is doing something that someone who retweets “I fucking love science” memes is not. A guy who knows 5 chords on guitar and can play a few songs is in some sense straightforwardly a “guitarist”, in a way that a guy who hangs out in the guitar club but doesn’t play is not. Could he be better at guitar? Sure, and so could the professional guitarist who can improvise an entire song.
I agree there’s a problem where rationalism feels prone to “being a subculture”, and there is a need to guard against that somehow. But I don’t think the “aspiring” thing is the way to go about it.
I love your observations here. The quality of grounding in a clear intuition here.
I don’t think you can avoid the subculture thing. The discipline doesn’t exist in a void the way math kind of does. Unless & until you can actually define the practice of rationality, there’s no clear dividing line between the social scene and the set of people who practice the discipline. No clear analogue to “actually playing a guitar”.
Like, I think I follow your intuition, but consider:
I’m reasonably sure a lot of people here would consider me a great example of a non-rationalist. Lots of folk told me that to my face while I worked at CFAR. But the above describes me to an utter T. I’m just doing it in a way that the culture here doesn’t approve of and thinks is pretty nutty. Which is fine. I think the culture here is doing its “truth-seeking” in a pretty nutty way too. Y’all are getting great results predicting Covid case numbers, and I’m getting great results guiding people to cure their social anxiety and depression. To each their own.
I think what you’re talking about is way, way more of an aesthetic than you might realize. Like, what are you really using to detect who is and isn’t “actually a goddamn rationalist”? My guess is it’s more of a gut sense that you then try to examine upon reflection.
Is Elon Musk “actually a goddamn rationalist”? He sure seems to care about what’s true and about being effective in the world. But I’m guessing he somehow lands as less of a central example than Oli or Eliezer do. If so, why?
If Elon doesn’t do it for you, insert some other successful smart person who mysteriously doesn’t gut-ping as “actually a goddamn rationalist”.
If I’m way off here, I’d actually be pretty interested in knowing that. Because I’d find that illuminating as to what you mean by rationalism.
But if I’m basically right, then you’re not going to separate the discipline from the social scene with a term. You’ll keep seeing social status and perception of skill conflated. Not exactly overlapping, but muddled nonetheless.
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.
As I see it, “rationalist” already refers to a person who thinks rationality is particularly important, not necessarily a person who is rational, like how “libertarian” refers to a person who thinks freedom is particularly important, not necessarily a person who is free. Then literally speaking “aspiring rationalist” refers to a person who aspires to think rationality is particularly important, not to a person who aspires to be rational. Using “aspiring rationalist” to refer to people who aspire to attain rationality encourages people to misinterpret self-identified rationalists as claiming to have attained rationality. Saying something like “person who aspires to rationality” instead of “aspiring rationalist” is a little more awkward, but it respects the literal meaning of words, and I think that’s important.
This was not the usage in the Sequences, however, and otherwise at the time the Sequences were written.
I agree that it was not the usage in the Sequences, and that it was therefore not (or at least not always) the usage within the community that coalesced around EY’s blogging. But if “otherwise at the time the Sequences were written” is meant to say more than that—if you’re saying that there was a tendency for “rationalist” to mean something like “person skilled in the art of reason” apart from EY’s preference for using it that way—then I would like to see some evidence. I don’t think I have ever seen the word used in that way in a way that wasn’t clearly causally descended from EY’s usage.
I was referring to usage here on Less Wrong (and in adjacent/related communities). In other words—
—nope, it is not meant to say more than that.
Maybe what you’re actually looking for is something like “aspiring beisutsuka”. Like there’s an ideal you’re aiming for but can maybe approach only asymptotically. Just don’t equate “rationalist” with “beisutsuka” and you’re good.
The same model that says aspiring rationalist will self-replace with rationalist, says aspiring beisutsuka will self-rpeplace with beisutsuka. But beisutsuka is a bit better than rationalist on its own terms; it emphasizes being a practitioner more, and presupposes the skill less. And it avoids punning with a dozen past historical movements that each have their own weird connotations and misconceptions. Unfortunately the phonology and spelling of beisutsuka is 99.9th-percentile tricky and that might mean it’s also a linguistic invalid move.
Some rabbit-hole expansion on this:
First of all, you’re missing an “i” at the end (as attested in “Final Words”), so that’s some direct evidence right there.
The second half is presumably a loan from Japanese 使い “tsukai”, “one who uses/applies”, usable as a suffix. In fiction and pop culture, it shows up prominently in 魔法使い “mahoutsukai”, “magic user” thus “wizard” or “sorcerer”; I infer this may have been a flavor source given Eliezer’s other fandom attachments.
The first half is presumably a transliteration of “Bayes” as ベイス “beisu”, which devoices the last mora for reasons which are not clear to me. Compare to Japanese Wikipedia’s article on Thomas Bayes which retains the ズ (zu) at the end, including in compounds related to Bayesian probability and inference.
I kinda like this