Mostly silly alternatives to the word ‘rationalist’

[jsalvatier]

Like many others I don’t care much for the word ‘rationalist’, since it comes with lots of preexisting negative connotations. I think we’re most likely stuck with the term, but to amuse myself, I came up a list of alternative terms. The Seattle LW group enjoyed the word ‘cognomancy’.

I don’t claim any of these are original to me; I know I’ve lifted a couple of them.

• cognomancer

• optimancer

• orthomancer

• ratiomancer

• logimancer

• utilimancer

• mentamancer

• metamancer

• economancer

• psychomancer

• bayesian empiramancer (really you could add ‘bayesian to most of these’)

• mathamancer

• cognitive engineer

• optimization engineer

• neuromancer

• cognologist

• cognician

• optimician

• utilitician

• ratician

• orthocognician

• economician

• mentician

• empirician

I really like the suffix -mancy; it’s really fun to think of yourself as doing any kind of -mancy.

I’d love to hear other funny alternatives to ‘rationalist’ and other related terms.