I was actually just thinking about bringing that up in the open thread. Is there a preferred term for the philosophy characteristic of LW? “Rationalism” does indeed have too many irrelevant associations, from the old-timey Platonic philosophy that we can get useful information about the universe without studying the universe, to the philosophy termed “Traditional Rationality” around here (not sure exactly what defines that, but I have a general sense), to those people who spend a lot oftime on reversed stupidity.
If making up a new term is okay (assuming there isn’t a preferred term already), I might suggest “neo-rationalism”. That way, people will know right away that it has something to do with rationality, but they will have to ask what the “neo-” signifies instead of jumping to any conclusions about it.
There is definitely a need for such a term, and no suitable options (descriptive terms not already taken by something else) have been presented before, so I’ll support this one (Neo-Rationalism) unless someone presents an obviously-better alternative very soon. Note that googling indicates that there was also an architectural movement called neo-rationalism om the 1970s, but I don’t think there’s much risk of the two getting confused.
Yeah, I did google “neo-rationalism” before posting that, and I found the architectural movement, but plenty of “isms” (“idealism”, “realism”, “structuralism”, and “modernism” for instance, not to mention “rationalism” itself) have very different meanings in different domains, and it’s easy enough to tell what meaning is intended in context.
I was actually just thinking about bringing that up in the open thread. Is there a preferred term for the philosophy characteristic of LW? “Rationalism” does indeed have too many irrelevant associations, from the old-timey Platonic philosophy that we can get useful information about the universe without studying the universe, to the philosophy termed “Traditional Rationality” around here (not sure exactly what defines that, but I have a general sense), to those people who spend a lot of time on reversed stupidity.
If making up a new term is okay (assuming there isn’t a preferred term already), I might suggest “neo-rationalism”. That way, people will know right away that it has something to do with rationality, but they will have to ask what the “neo-” signifies instead of jumping to any conclusions about it.
Maybe we should call it “epistemonomy”, because it’s trying to be to epistemology what astronomy is to astrology, sort of.
Or “likelihoodratiomancy”, because it’s the only divination method that actually works.
There’s Bayesianism.
There is definitely a need for such a term, and no suitable options (descriptive terms not already taken by something else) have been presented before, so I’ll support this one (Neo-Rationalism) unless someone presents an obviously-better alternative very soon. Note that googling indicates that there was also an architectural movement called neo-rationalism om the 1970s, but I don’t think there’s much risk of the two getting confused.
Yeah, I did google “neo-rationalism” before posting that, and I found the architectural movement, but plenty of “isms” (“idealism”, “realism”, “structuralism”, and “modernism” for instance, not to mention “rationalism” itself) have very different meanings in different domains, and it’s easy enough to tell what meaning is intended in context.