A minor gripe I have about LW, and EA by extension, is that words with a specific meaning in philosophy are misused and therefore take on a different meaning
The version of “rationalist” you’re talking about is a common usage, but:
The oldest meaning of “rationalist” is about truth, science, inquiry, and good epistemics rather than about “observation matters less than abstract thought”.
Rationalists’ conception of “rationality” isn’t our invention: we’re just using the standard conception from cognitive science.
Lots of groups have called themselves “rationalist” in a LW-like sense prior to LessWrong. It’s one of the more common terms humanists, secularists, atheists, materialists, etc. historically used to distinguish themselves from religionists, purveyors of pseudoscience, and the like.
Also, the rationalist vs. empiricist debate in philosophy is mostly of historical interest; it’s not clear to me that it should matter much to non-historians nowadays.
take “epistemic status”
“Epistemic status” isn’t philosophy jargon, is it?
I took it to be riffing on early LiveJournal posts that began with text like “status: bored” or “current mood: busy”, adding the qualifier “epistemic” as a cute variation.
Epistemic status is 100% philosophy jargon. Hell, the word “epistemic” or the word “epistemology” is itself philosophy jargon. I only ever hear it from LW people/EAs and people in philosophy departments.
The word “epistemic” is philosophy jargon. The phrase “epistemic status” in the link you gave isn’t a separate piece of jargon, it’s just the normal word “status” modified by the word “epistemic”.
The original comment I was replying to said:
“A minor gripe I have about LW, and EA by extension, is that words with a specific meaning in philosophy are misused and therefore take on a different meaning – take “epistemic status”, which has grown out of its original intended meaning of how confident one is in one’s claim and is now used more to describe someone’s background and raise general caveats and flags for where someone might have blind spots.”
If the claim is that rationalists are misusing the word “epistemic”, not some specific unfamiliar-to-me new piece of jargon (“epistemic status”), then the claim is based on a misunderstanding of the word “epistemic”. Epistemic in philosophy means “pertaining to knowledge (belief justification, reliability, accuracy, reasonableness, warrant, etc.)”, not “pertaining to confidence level”.
Someone’s “epistemic status” includes what they believe and how strongly they believe it, but it also includes anything that’s relevant to how justified, reasonable, supported, based-on-reliable-processes, etc. your beliefs are. Like, “epistemic status: I wrote this whole hungry, which often makes people irritable and causes them to have more brain farts, which reduces the expected reliability and justifiedness of the stuff I wrote” is totally legit. And if people have the background knowledge to understand why you might want to flag that you were hungry, it’s completely fine to write “epistemic status: written while hungry” as a shorthand.
(I do think rationalists sometimes put other stuff under “epistemic status” as a joke, but “rationalists joke too much” is a different criticism than “rationalists have their own nonstandard meaning for the word ‘epistemic’”.)
The version of “rationalist” you’re talking about is a common usage, but:
The oldest meaning of “rationalist” is about truth, science, inquiry, and good epistemics rather than about “observation matters less than abstract thought”.
Rationalists’ conception of “rationality” isn’t our invention: we’re just using the standard conception from cognitive science.
Lots of groups have called themselves “rationalist” in a LW-like sense prior to LessWrong. It’s one of the more common terms humanists, secularists, atheists, materialists, etc. historically used to distinguish themselves from religionists, purveyors of pseudoscience, and the like.
Also, the rationalist vs. empiricist debate in philosophy is mostly of historical interest; it’s not clear to me that it should matter much to non-historians nowadays.
“Epistemic status” isn’t philosophy jargon, is it?
I took it to be riffing on early LiveJournal posts that began with text like “status: bored” or “current mood: busy”, adding the qualifier “epistemic” as a cute variation.
Epistemic status is 100% philosophy jargon. Hell, the word “epistemic” or the word “epistemology” is itself philosophy jargon. I only ever hear it from LW people/EAs and people in philosophy departments.
The word “epistemic” is philosophy jargon. The phrase “epistemic status” in the link you gave isn’t a separate piece of jargon, it’s just the normal word “status” modified by the word “epistemic”.
The original comment I was replying to said:
“A minor gripe I have about LW, and EA by extension, is that words with a specific meaning in philosophy are misused and therefore take on a different meaning – take “epistemic status”, which has grown out of its original intended meaning of how confident one is in one’s claim and is now used more to describe someone’s background and raise general caveats and flags for where someone might have blind spots.”
If the claim is that rationalists are misusing the word “epistemic”, not some specific unfamiliar-to-me new piece of jargon (“epistemic status”), then the claim is based on a misunderstanding of the word “epistemic”. Epistemic in philosophy means “pertaining to knowledge (belief justification, reliability, accuracy, reasonableness, warrant, etc.)”, not “pertaining to confidence level”.
Someone’s “epistemic status” includes what they believe and how strongly they believe it, but it also includes anything that’s relevant to how justified, reasonable, supported, based-on-reliable-processes, etc. your beliefs are. Like, “epistemic status: I wrote this whole hungry, which often makes people irritable and causes them to have more brain farts, which reduces the expected reliability and justifiedness of the stuff I wrote” is totally legit. And if people have the background knowledge to understand why you might want to flag that you were hungry, it’s completely fine to write “epistemic status: written while hungry” as a shorthand.
(I do think rationalists sometimes put other stuff under “epistemic status” as a joke, but “rationalists joke too much” is a different criticism than “rationalists have their own nonstandard meaning for the word ‘epistemic’”.)