I wish that people wouldn’t use “rat” as shorthand for “rationalist.”
For people who aren’t already aware of the lingo/jargon it makes things a bit harder to read and understand. Unlike terms like “moral patienthood” or “mesa-optimizers” or “expected value,” a person can’t just search Google to easily find out what is meant by a “rat org” or a “rat house.”[1] This is a rough idea, but I’ll put it out there: the minimum a community needs to do in order to be welcoming to newcomers is to allow newcomers to figure out what you are saying.
Of course, I don’t expect that reality will change to meet my desires, and even writing my thoughts here makes me feel a little silly, like a linguistic prescriptivist tell people to avoid dangling participles.
Try searching Google for what is rat in effective altruism and see how far down you have to go before you find something explaining that rat means rationalist. If you didn’t know it already and a writer didn’t make it clear from context that “rat” means “rationalist”, it would be really hard to figure out what “rat” means.
(I’m writing with a joking, playful, tongue-in-cheek intention) If we are setting the bar at “to join our community you need to be at least as well read at GPT4,” then I think we are setting the bar too high.
More seriously: I agree that it isn’t impossible for someone to figure out what it means, it is just a bit harder than I would like. Like when someone told me to do a “bow tech” and I had no idea what she was talking about, but it turns out she was just using a different name for a Fermi estimate (a BOTEC).
I wish that people wouldn’t use “rat” as shorthand for “rationalist.”
For people who aren’t already aware of the lingo/jargon it makes things a bit harder to read and understand. Unlike terms like “moral patienthood” or “mesa-optimizers” or “expected value,” a person can’t just search Google to easily find out what is meant by a “rat org” or a “rat house.”[1] This is a rough idea, but I’ll put it out there: the minimum a community needs to do in order to be welcoming to newcomers is to allow newcomers to figure out what you are saying.
Of course, I don’t expect that reality will change to meet my desires, and even writing my thoughts here makes me feel a little silly, like a linguistic prescriptivist tell people to avoid dangling participles.
Try searching Google for what is rat in effective altruism and see how far down you have to go before you find something explaining that rat means rationalist. If you didn’t know it already and a writer didn’t make it clear from context that “rat” means “rationalist”, it would be really hard to figure out what “rat” means.
For what it’s worth, gpt4 knows what rat means in this context: https://chat.openai.com/share/bc612fec-eeb8-455e-8893-aa91cc317f7d
(I’m writing with a joking, playful, tongue-in-cheek intention) If we are setting the bar at “to join our community you need to be at least as well read at GPT4,” then I think we are setting the bar too high.
More seriously: I agree that it isn’t impossible for someone to figure out what it means, it is just a bit harder than I would like. Like when someone told me to do a “bow tech” and I had no idea what she was talking about, but it turns out she was just using a different name for a Fermi estimate (a BOTEC).
I agree that we should tolerate people who are less well read than GPT-4 :P
I have the opposite stance,
it is a cool and cute shorthand, so I’d like for it to be the widely accepted meaning of rat.