Don't call yourself a rationalist.

"Critical thinking" is a useful phrase sometimes. It's a real term, and people usually have good associations with it. Saying "we need to teach people better critical thinking skills" usually elicits nods; "we need to teach people to be more rational" is more likely to get them grabbing their guns and heading to the hills.

"Rational" and its cognates are weapon words: rarely used in a descriptive sense, more often to hammer your interlocutor into submission: "but that isn't rational". I suspect this accounts for a large part of the defensiveness.

Here is a good example in my own field: Parnas and Clements' "A rational design process: How and why to fake it" (pdf).

An excerpt:

If we are to be rational designers, we must begin knowing what we must do to succeed. That information should be recorded in a work product known as a requirements document.

Note how the word "rational" is used - to imply that anyone who doesn't assent to the author's otherwise unsupported assertion that "information [about what we must do] should be recorded in a work product known as a requirements document" is to be considered irrational. You're irrational if you prefer to communicate "what we must do" orally; or are comfortable with not starting out knowing everything you must do to succeed.

I always call you all "LessWrongians" or "the people at LessWrong" sometimes also using the word "dudes".

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I don't see why you have to use the same term when talking to different people. Just use whatever term best gets the point across to your listeners. Occasionally this means that you can't use a one or two word label and have to explain what LessWrong is, but from then on you can use a shorter codeword (with that particular audience).

as soon as you assign a name to yourself, that is sufficient to form a group identity.

Sufficient (maybe), but not necessary, and thus possibly irrelevant.

Okay, to summarize the brainstorming so far:

LW-based labels:
LessWrong (ers) / (ians) / (ites) / (irim)

Descriptions:
Critical thinkers, people who will stop misinterpreting you if you explain, hardcore rationalists, rationality geeks, aspiring rationalists, anticipators, mental cartographers

Ranging from other to very other:
Illuminati, L-dubs, fashionalists, rationistas, Bayes-users, Bayesian conspirators, Yudkowskians

They might ask why you need a group in order to be rational, or they might say that they don't believe that people are inherently rational.

Isn't that the point? We aren't inherently and automatically rational, so we're trying to get better at it.

Thinking about evolution has driven it home for me. You can explain evolution to a third grader, but it took all of humanity tens of thousands of years to come up with the theory. We're really pretty damn stupid, for all our airs about being able to push around all the other animals. I've been reading a book:

Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?: 23 Questions from Great Philosophers, Leszek Kolakowski.

Lots of tiny, bite sized chapters, with the "important questions" raised by philosophers over time. Perfect for a bathroom read. But I'm struck by the nonsense and gibberish that has passed for philosophical thought through the centuries. What a load of crap.

On the bright side, when we do figure something out, we can explain it to third graders. Understanding good ideas isn't hard. Coming up with them is. There is huge mileage in applying the most basic of ideas.

If I start getting confused about an inference problem, I just start writing it out in Jaynes notation. Poof. Technical problems evaporate. Apply indexing or think about orders of abstraction per Korzybski, and poof, problems disappear. There are plenty of great ideas that a third grader can understand that I don't know about yet. That's why I'm here.

Some people are already using the term "aspiring rationalist".

My housemates made plans to be elsewhere the night I told them I had invited some rationalists to dinner. My household clearly needs a different term for people I meet at Less Wrong meetups.

... and what people tend to hear is "I'm a superior thinker to you," or maybe "I'm a part of this group, which ascribes the label 'rationalist' to itself, to make ourselves seem higher status than we really are."

[picture of an arrogant asshole]

Was this intentional?

Edit: Because it's awesome.

One of my least popular comments on Less Wrong was that nobody was a "decent rationalist." Perhaps now is the time to explain what I meant by that.

Rationality is an ideal. Whether or not it's a particularly good ideal, it's definitely not a good description of any actually existing people, which proposition is approximately what this entire site is about. To me, being a "decent rationalist" would entail being decently rational: not perfectly rational, but at least mostly rational. It's clear that nobody approaches that state.

When people describe themselves as "rationalists", perhaps some of them mean that they aspire to the ideal of rationality. But it sounds like they believe that they actually practice rationality. At best, this would be dishonest boasting; at worst it would be self-delusion.

So perhaps that's why people react negatively to the label: they hear it as a claim of an implausible achievement, not a belief system or social group.

(It gets worse when you use the term to identify the social club rather than a rather broad set of beliefs, because then you end up saying that someone is not a "rationalist" or an "objectivist" or a "libertarian". It's sort of like how certain academics now use the term "philosopher" to mean "person teaching philosophy at a university" or "person submitting papers to philosophy journals", by which standard Socrates wasn't a philosopher.)

In the years that I've been watching this social group, I've struggled with the question of what to call it when talking about it to other people. "Eliezer's cult" seems unnecessarily derogatory, as does the tongue-in-cheek "Bayesian Conspiracy". "Yudkowskians" is accurate and not derogatory but perhaps unnecessarily limiting, and surely oversimplified. "Less Wrong" is the best label I have, which would make individuals "Lesswrongers".

There's another possible reason people might react negatively: in the 20th century, any number of atrocities were justified on the basis of being "scientific", "modern", or "rational": dialectical materialism, Levittown, indiscriminate use of pesticides, Mutually Assured Destruction, Schelling's losing strategy in the Vietnam war, low-cost housing developments, childbirth under anesthesia, radium water treatments, lobotomies, electroshock, The Projects, razing neighborhoods to run interstate highways through downtown, IMF neoliberal economic policies, eugenics, and so on.

It turns out that conflating your position with knowledge and rationality, and your opponent's position with ignorance and insanity, is such an effective rhetorical strategy that you can use it to ram through all sorts of terrible ideas. Perhaps because of this, a lot of people have developed a sort of memetic allergic reaction to explicit claims of rationality.

Seems to me that the label "rationalist" is one that facilitates a group bias. It lends weight to the view that those who aren't "rationalists" can't be rational.

Seems to me that it is reasonable to be less firm in holding to rationalism than stating... "I am a rationalist". For that's about all that the person is, it demands a total commitment to rational thinking and feeling and thence sets one up for failure. How high must the bar of rationalism be set?

We should be careful in labelling ourselves as "rationalists" rather than just thinking rationally, for even the very wise cannot see all ends.

I say that I hang out with people who are "into hardcore rationality" immediately followed up with "studying reasoning, that sort of thing." I think the nerdishness sound of that balances it out slightly.

If you're worried about the reaction to group labels, then why not:

"I've been hanging out with some interesting people lately," ?

Of course, it's possible that whoever it is you're talking to will decide that you've just said that they're boring...

I meet a few people who apparently wilfully and repeatedly misinterpret what I'm saying, even when told that wasn't what I meant at all and I don't know how to deal with that.

Idea: "mental cartography/cartographer". People will say, "what is that?" and the answer would be "we attempt to make the map in our head match the territory of reality".

Pros: no one will have heard of it (it has about 2000 hits on google), so we get to define it.

Cons: somewhat unwieldly.

I have started referring to myself as a dark wizard, where my powers have to do with learning about the world, interacting with people, and doing mathematics. It is nice in that it is a little too ridiculous to seem like bragging, makes people curious sometimes and doesn't really stick me into a group except for "nerds," and my loyalties there are already so solid I can't do much about it.

I usually refer to LessWrongers as LessWrongians, or to the site as "My little corner of the Internet where there are constructive discussions and citations on everything."

I can attest to a similar reaction.

When I ask myself why I am hanging around you guys, the answer is mostly "to learn more about why people think what they think and do what they do, even when it seems to make no sense" and "How do I avoid being like that?". Not sure how to effectively summarize it into a catchy soundbite.

So, what is it that we do? And please don't say refining the art of human rationality.

I feel like the most apt term for people here (or, more accurately, people who identify themselves as being part of some community inaugurated by this website) would be "Yudkowskian."

Doesn't quite solve the problem, but I'm pondering this as a catchphrase: "Better Decision Making through Science!"

Communicates what we're about, and also distinguishes us from people who just like critical thinking without cognitive science to help them out.

I strongly support the suggestion implied in one thread here of officially adopting the term "Lessath", the lesser folk.

Not really on topic, but, "Women are irrational," is the best way I have found to neg the girlfriend.