# I am a rationalist

I am a relatively central instance of what is referred to by the noun 'rationalist', in present-day discussion in the Western world. Not the idealized rationalist who makes perfect bayesian updates on all of their information; but someone from the school of philosophy on LessWrong, who has a strong practical and theoretical interest in human rationality, who knows how to write down Bayes' theorem[^htod4babfd], and is part of an extended network of people for whom this is also true.

To be clear, most of my life I have not identified as this symbol. This is for a few reasons:

1.  I felt people would no longer see me as an individual if I did so; they would see me as a soldier for some larger army. (This is similar to my internal pointer for [keeping your identity small.](https://paulgraham.com/identity.html))
2.  Relatedly, I didn't like the person that was described by that. The person felt too in-their-head, akratic / incompetent, more math-y than I am, a better programmer than me, to feel more like they understood the world than me, and to have a false [belief-in](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/duvzdffTzL3dWJcxn/believing-in-1) the other rationalists as being wise and all-knowing.
3.  The word is itself a conflation between the idealized rationalist and the people on LessWrong interested in rationality, and it is kind of inappropriate to name yourself the same name as something far more accomplished than you.

However in the last 6-12 months, I have felt the pressures here let up.

Regarding the first two; somehow I feel able to act and be seen as an individual even if I say that I am a rationalist. In some regards this is because I am more well-defined—many relevant parties (e.g. EAs, Progress Studies, etc) cannot view me as simply another of a tribe, but as someone that they have a trade relationship with, who they cannot say false things about as easily. Relatedly, I have more status than before, which means that my own character and role shines through more clearly.

I am also less worried about tribalism; a standard temptation is to step up and defend groups you are part of, but I repeatedly find that I care not what people say about my tribe. Just the other night I heard some people at Inkhaven say some things about rationalists that seemed wrong to me, as they were mentioning lots of different groups and criticizing them; I felt no deep impulse to step in and correct them. Nor do I when people further afield on twitter or elsewhere speak of 'rationalists'. I am not that bothered what other people think.

The third one stands as it did before, and it is unfortunate. However, I don't think it makes sense for me to reject the label on principle and sow confusion. This is because nobody chose the label. If the rationality community were a company, or a religion, or a brand owned by someone, then I could refuse to use the name in protest of their poor judgment. But this is not the case! It is a name that has grown significantly due to others wanting a name for this group. Like existentialism, neoliberalism, and New Atheism, a name can come around in the culture for a group that did not themselves claim (or even much use for self-description). It nonetheless is still used to refer to a recognizable group of people and refers to a real phenomena, and it is unhelpful to pretend that it has no referent or you are not a part of it.

So I think it is correct for me to identify myself to others as a rationalist; it translates a lot of relevant information, and would be a lot of effort for me and my readers/listeners to all of that information without using the term.

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**Postscript:** There's a question of whether to stick strictly to 'aspiring rationalist', which many have attempted. 

Firstly, I don't believe there's enough political will to change it hard enough so that outsiders would also change it (e.g. hooligans on twitter/reddit, people from afar)—this would take not merely just using 'aspiring rationalist', but being very annoying about it, refusing to accept the description, correcting it 100% of the time, etc. 

Secondly, a child who has learned the pythagorean theorem may call themselves a mathematician; a man who has to fight someone tomorrow may say some wisdom, like *"A warrior does not second-guess himself on the night of battle".* I think it makes sense for people practicing to be something to use the name of someone who *has* practised.

[^htod4babfd]: Here's a way that I re-derive it. In this image, suppose each point in the square represents a state of the world. The two circles are the two hypotheses, A & B.The circles are the same size but that's just what ChatGPT made for me, they can differ.Notice that, if you randomly pick a point, the probability of being in the orange area can be calculated as follow: \(P(A \cap B) = P(A|B) \times P(B)\). That is, take the probability of being in B, and then multiply that by the conditional probability of being in the orange area once you know you're in B, and you'll get the probability of being in \((A \cap B)\).Next, notice that this is symmetrically true for A. \(P(A \cap B) = P(B|A) \times P(A)\)Now we have two things equal to one another! Both are equal to the probability of the orange area, \(P(A \cap B)\).\[P(A|B) \times P(B) = P(B|A) \times P(A)\]And if you haven't noticed, that's one step from Bayes' Theorem! Divide both sides by \(P(B)\) (or symmetrically by \(P(A)\)) to get the standard equation for conditional probability.\[P(A|B) = \frac{P(B|A) \times P(A)}{P(B)}\]