Help! Name suggestions needed for Rationality-Inst!

Google has these things to say about naming organizations:

what makes a good organization name, how to name a business: short, sweet, easily pronounced, legal, alliterative if long, not prone to abbreviation, flexible, timeless, fits with other branding, not already in the dictionary with the same definition, contains a sticky consonant, surprising, seldom directly descriptive, melodious, "cool", distinct, fun to say, trademarkable, not redundant, not criminal or shady-sounding, not lurid, at most two words, not desperate, medieval, Spanish-sounding. visual element, positive connotation, associated with what you actually do, not numbered, not named for a person, not geographic, looks good printed, rememberable, no bad connotations, spellable, description of what you do in tagline rather than name, harder consonants.

OnStartups: How To Pick A Company Name:

Customer Survey

Once we narrowed the names to around 10, we did a formal customer survey to give our users the final say. Our customers were a great help with choosing the name. We wanted the survey to be fast and simple.

The questions we asked were:

1. For the proposed company, rate the following names from 1 to 5 (where 1 is 'Hate it' and 5 is 'Love it') (we then listed the finalist names)

2. Without going back to the previous page, please list as many of the names that you just rated as you can remember. (This question was intended to help us measure recall and spelling ease of each name)

3. What do you think of when you see each of the following names? (We wanted candid thought - and we got them!! We also tallied up positive, negative, on topic and off topic answers. We wanted to find a name that people did not think of negatively and that also made them think of helping small businesses manage documents.)

4. If you can think of any names that would be great for us let us know!

One obvious question: when is the name most important? When first heard; Introductions.

Some common names take the form of "[identifier] [word for a group]" or similar, eg: [Rationality] [Institute]

Use online thesauruses to find synonyms for good words, make long lists of words to combine. http://thesaurus.com

Google how to come up with good names, skim chapters in marketing textbooks for meta-ideas.

Don't react fast/naturally (eg: "the name Waterline is a clever meaningful in-group signal and sounds pretty."), ask yourself how your target will react (eg: "what's that, whale environmentalists?").

Who are your targets? Intelligent ambitious young men or their uninterested 45 year old mothers? Academics? From which field? etc.

Common reaction to mention of the group will be to assume their arrogance (suggesting they can teach smartness, that they have smartness), behaving guarded but curious.

Suggestions: Insight House/ Bayesian House

Reaction: "what does bayesian mean?" it's the math (credibility+++) of how to decide (arrogance-) etc. Bring evidence into discussion if target identifies as being "logical" (young smart men).

• Decision Tree

• Decision Tree Foundation.

Less Wrong

The Modern Rationality Institute.

The institute for Bayesian Reasoning

Center for applied rationality.

The Applied Rationality Institute

The Human Rationality Project.

I got a positive reception for "Waterline" in my comment here.

What do current notable-ish think tanks, seminar runners, and organized social groups call themselves? (Following markette's notation)

Think tanks:

[name of notable public figure or thinker] [word for group]
Hoover Institution
Cato Institute

[positive word with coded meaning] [word for group, can come first]
Center for American Progress
Heritage Foundation

[acronym] [not even a whole word]
RAND Corp

[word for group] [thing you do]
Council on Foreign Relations
Center for Strategic and International Studies

Seminar runner names:

[modifier, optional] [thing you do] [word for a group]
National Seminars Group

[related word or phrase, spelling optional]
Career Potential
Construx

[broader group description] [word for group]
American Management Association

Organized social stuff:

[descriptive word or phrase]
Toastmasters

[who you are] [word for a group]
Atheist Foundation

[nice-sounding word, relatedness optional] [word for a group, optional]
Mensa
Lions, Kiwanis, Rotary, etc. Club

[in-group signalling word or phrase]
Penny Arcade

-

If we go for a name template that has a lot of overlap between the three groups, I think the clear favorite is the prosaic [thing you do] [word for a group], bonus points if [thing you do] sounds like [who you are]. If direct description of rationality doesn't test well, a less literal alternative that still has good overlap is [nice-sounding word, relatedness open or coded] [word for a group].

Some top [word for a group] entries: Institute, Association, Foundation, Center, Group, Council.

By the way, hope you are not trying to do branding by discussing it internally only. None of you are typical minds, so you may want to collect top 10 or top 100 best names and run it by your target audience, see what their impression is. Beta-test it, so to speak. (This forum barely counts as alpha-testing.)

Best I've come up with so far:

The Institute for Advanced Sanity

Having "Rationality" in the name would probably be a bad thing. (Straw Vulcan stereotypes and all that.) "Bayesian" is a much better choice IMO.

Why not call it something like BayesWay?

Or how about that old Japanese cliche... "Better than Yesterday"? That would go well with Stabilizer's "Update Yourself" byline.

Why not just call it Less Wrong, or some variation on that?

Wrote a list of 100 ideas, here are the highlights:

• Insight Out
• The Upsight Institute
• Wisdom18
• Level Up
• Thinking Plus
• Reason Out
• Making Sense

Center for Excellence in Thinking and Deciding
Less Wrong Foundation
Institute for the Advancement of Human Rationality

BTW our best current suggestion came from these comments, so keep it up!

It would help if we knew more about what the point of the name is. Most importantly what do you want the name to signal about the organization? Hip and edgy or dignified and respectible? Hardcore or something anyone could be apart of? That sort of thing. Also do you want to embrace or shy away from the fact that you are technically in the self help business.

Not seen anyone suggest this yet, but the simple things are always good:

Rationality Institute

Derive something from Latin? You've got callidus for clever, sapio for wise, subtilis for precise, veri for truth...

So maybe the Callida Council, or Veri Institute, or the Verus Foundation.

The Less Wrong Institution, for the refinement of human rationality.

Sapiet House.

Fuck it, go with BayesCamp.

These aren't very good:

Alliance for Accuracy. Be Right Club. Make No Mistake. Better Believe. Untangle. Second Thought. Judgewell. Sanity Plus.

"Grey Belt" - combines the "we are all aspiring rationalists" notion (white belt, also activates the dojo node) with a significant color word - grey matter.

"Possible Minds" - because that's an Eliezer catchphrase, but also a succinct statement of the intent: to explore the space of possible minds, although only in a tiny region to start with. (You may view the link with SI - exploring the same space much farther out - as a bonus or as a problem.)

"Hedgefox". Not 100% original, but combines a prediction reference (cover of Tetlock's book), references to thinking styles, and the notion of cognitive diversity.

The Center for Better Reasoning

You could name it after a statistician. Laplace is taken, but Bayes, Jaynes, Jeffreys, and others are free.

Applied Insight Institute (or just Insight Institute).

Rationality Dojos

Practical Anticipation (Institute/Project/Center/etc.)

I predict this thread will turn into a bike shed brawl.

The gold standard of such institutions is The Royal Philosophical Society.

Perhaps some form of The __ Philosophical Society.

What goes in the blank I am drawing a blank on. The California or Silicon Valley P.S. would be fine. The opposite of Royal is Commoner so the Common P. S. might be OK. Or Common Sense P.S. Or Real or Reality P. S. I would not use Bayes as a bunch of physical scientists whose attention you might want to attract are nigh-dogmatic frequentists right now but could presumably be weaned from their dogma.

Maybe it would be wise to make sure people do not confuse rationality with Hollywood rationality or rationalism?

Wise Decision Institute.

Thorough Thought.

Thorough Thinking

EDIT: I guess one could add Foundation.

MBlume's analogy (way back) of how we're cartographers has struck me as a cool one. Cartographer to me carries the same kind of weight as Alchemist would. Here are some names based on that trope.

• Mind Charts
• Internal Compass
• Mental Cartography
• Map is Territory

I hope someone does better than I can at using this theme.

I like how SIAI's name references both the event you're working toward and method of achieving it. Is there a single word that describes a watershed event that would indicate the rationality institute's direct success like "Singularity" does an intelligence explosion? That supporters could rally around and label themselves by (singularitarian)? A word for approximating the ideal Bayesian updater, for felling akrasia, for actually changing one's mind? Can we create or annex one?

Exaltation, Transcendence, Apotheosis, Enlightenment, Upload, Elevation, Laudation, Upgrade, Epiphanic, and Ideate come to mind, but what I'm looking for is something more like "the act (event) of becoming your best self" in a word. Too many of these have strong religious connotations for me.

More ideas below. Incidentally, I am not really aiming to win the thread here. I just learned the cool technique of writing lists of 100 ideas, the idea being that quantity leads to quality. Apparently it's most effective to have some people generate ideas, and others critique them. By now I'm firmly in the first camp on this task.

The latest ideas:

• Groundswell (as in logical grounds)
• Enhance Mental
• Inferential Iteration
• Phronesis (or Fronesis)
• Logical Operators
• Mentat Mentors
• Sharp Ratio (a pun on this)

Edit: Fixed links.

The Center for the Advancement of Human Reason

Calibrating Cognition

PhronEasy, with the tagline "Making practical wisdom simple". No, wait, that's terrible.

My brother does some work for a professional naming company. Their prices are high, but they sound very professional (some of the stuff he talks about is a lot like what was mentioned here. If everything else fails, do be aware that such people exist.

Thinkwell

Think to win

Here's a lightly-edited brainstorm:

• Institute for Clearer Thinking
• Foundation for Better Thinking
• Better Thinking Buereau
• Foundation for Critical Thought
• Rationality Foundation
• Center for Sharper Thought
• Center for Reason and its Applications
• Center for Applied Reason
• Guild of Reason
• Center for Reason

Update: The Rationality Institute

or maybe "Update yourself" might be a nice byline for whatever name is chosen.

Looks like the current name is "Center for Modern Rationality". Points to beoShaffer!

• (Centre for) Art of Reason
• Art of Winning
• Act Better
• Right on Target (or Target on Right)
• Evidence Based
• Mindtweak
• Mindhack
• Effective Agency
• Winning Institute
• Inspired Thought
• Achieve
• Decision Training
• Better Model
• Perfect Thought
• Motivated Action

Afterthought

ThinkRight

Are we going for something academic-sounding or something self-improvement sounding?

Not sure if this discussion is still ongoing, but...

It seems to me that something that means "rationality" should be in there, and probably a word that means "institute".

Some words are to be avoided, like 'belief', which carry weird connotations. Weird-sounding is probably bad ("Mensa" sounds too weird to lots of people). English words are probably best. Being tied to a person's name is hardly ever a good idea.

The Institute for Intelligence Utilization
Make Humanity Smarter
Sanity Academy
League of Extraordinary Thinkers
The Brain Society
Lightbringers
Order of Daedalus
Knights Prometheus (EDIT: should probably be "Knights Promethean")
The Bayesian Priory

"The Rationalist Society"

(Possibly its a British thing, but society sounds far better/more benevolent than Institute or similar.)

• Whatever Works
• Dreamshine
• Attainment
• Veridian
• Reasound
• Minds' Arts
• Melodine
• Sunshine Army
• Embrace Sense

1. The Society for Enhanced Reasoning

2. The Institute for Enhanced Reasoning

Thoughtfront.
The Thought Academy.
The Thought Institute.
The Outthink Center.

Either Clarity Workshops (we offer them) or Clarity Workshop (we work on clarity instead of cars). Depends on how much you want to focus on running things-you-can-call-workshops (ie seminars, lectures, group training sessions, and so on).

• Shut Up and Multiply (SUM)
• Society for Methodical Rationality Training (SMRT) (ok, not really)
• Rationality Praxis Institute

Practical Reasoning Institute

Institute for Practical Reasoning

reasonable minds

untypicality*

rationality brigade

reason (insert word for group)

raison d'être

*(yes, I know, it is not technically a word)

• Foundation for Human Sapience (or Foundation for Advanced Sapience)

• Reality Transplantation Center

• Thoughtful Organization

• CORTEX - Center for Organized Rational Thinking and EXperimentation

• OOPS - Organization for Optimal Perception Seekers

• BAYES - Bureau for Advancing Yudkowsky's Experiments in Sanity

How broad of a market are we aiming for? Is this intended to appeal mostly to people who know about and like "traditional rationality," or to random corporations?

Suggestions:

Project Sanity

Center/Institute/Foundation for Applied Epistemology

Center/Institute/Foundation for Applied Sanity

Center/Institute/Foundation for Applied Thinking

Center/Institute/Foundation for Applied Thought

Meta-suggestion: I would really like if the word "Applied" was in there somewhere.

• Human Rationality Institute
• Human Reasoning Institute

The Center for the Advancement of Human Thought

Practical Epistemics Institute.

.

My best tries:

Simple but boring

• Mostly Rational
• Decision Training
• Minding Mind
• Methods that Actually Work (MAW)

Too fancy

• Technical Thinking Institute
• Practical Problem Solving
• Mental Floss / Mental Sharpener
• Whatever Is Necessary (WIN)
• Epistemic Voracity Dance
• The Unfettered, Unwavering Path to Glorious Triumph!

Clarity.

Say it out loud.

Cla-ri-tee.

The Illuminated Reason Institute

The Development of Reason and Rationality (DORR) Institute (it's pleonastic but it sounds nice; could just use one of the Rs)

The Course Corrective Institute

The Moreright Institute

The Better Life Institute

(It'd be so much easier if it could have a German name.)

:: Mind Chess ::

That's the name that I've always called a manner of looking through the mind for routes that one has taken and routes that one may potentially take. We must be able to look ahead to see what all the myriad potentials of outcomes are before we make a decision. And a positively configured move will bring us closer to the position of our goal. It is a puzzle, it is a game, it is the outcome of success we seek. We all can do it! New manners of programming our minds simply and easily is the future, and it is what we need to breed harmonious creations, yeah!

A good first step in optimizing the world according to your wishes is noticing and acknowledging that you've got a problem.

With that in mind, why should the rational community frame its core activities — development of epistemic and acquisition of instrumental rationality, plus public advocacy of sanity — simply as another fun game to engage in, with an added benefit of warm fuzzies and making oneself feel smart?

Wouldn't it be better to provoke a question, or, better yet, an acknowledgement — yes, I am (neurotypical) human, I am fallible (irrational), I wish I could become less wrong.

That's why I'm proposing to have /Ir/rationality in the name. As for the name itself, I am at loss. I don't see the benefit or adhering to some common naming convention as being substantial. How about "We, the Irrational Humans"? Humans, because I don't envision any AGIs, swarms, extraterrestrials, chimps, squids, or dolphins joining us any time soon.

Live to win.

MoreRight i had this thought and apologize

Has anyone tried doing a mind map? They're simple procedures that (specifically graphic) designers use to upstart creative thinking. You start with any word in the center relating to the problem you want solved (and all design is, is problem solving, mind) and then write out every term that you think of without self doubt. Though this link is referring more to the visual design applications of the method, it's still really useful and is how my professor taught me. http://www.logodesignlove.com/images/books/Logo_Design_Love_free_chapter.pdf

On the other hand is the bucket system, which is a grid. You would write a topic above the columns (for example, words that bring to mind rationality) and vertically by the rows you title whatever the other portion of the problem is (in this case, organizations). Then after a set time, you look at where the columns and rows line up to try out the pairs of words together. It can be a little tedious, but it certainly helps narrow things down a bit, eh? I drew up a pic in MS Paint... http://i78.photobucket.com/albums/j102/Kenztastic/Untitled-2.png

I hope this helps out a bit, guys. Personally, I like words such as anticipative, prudence, discerning...

Actually, has anyone said this one? "Center Forethought" ?

• Humanity's Potential
• Sense Trust
• Reach
• Brightness Released
• Grow Beyond
• Coherent Life

• Reflex Rational (or Rational Reflex)
• Praxis Rational
• Accurate Agency
• The Accuracy Agency
• Change Agent
• Improved Metrics
• Practical Measures
• Better Measures
• Measure Mental
• Calibration
• Making Sense
• Percept Action
• Precision Living

Truthward Ho!

Global Winning

Lonely Dissent

Fluidly

Cascade

Paperless

• Subliminal Processing
• Wordless Thought
• Ratikata
• LessWrong Dojo
• Think Academy

(Thomas) Bayes Institute

More Right Institute

Mind The Mind

The Thomas Bayes Institute for Human Thought

Short: The Bayes Institute for Human Thought

Shorter: The Bayes Institute

Smarten Up

Train Your Brain

Think Smarter

Truthseekers United

People for Clear thought

Practical Rationality

Better Decision Making

I came here to post Thought Corrective but as I did I simultaneously wanted to shorten it to just Corrective and also realised that prisons are called corrective institutions, so I guess maybe not.

The Meta Foundation

The Metafoundation

Institute for Applied Meta

Decision Techniques

Edit: Lol, these were all horrible, not just the culty ones. Organization names should be boring, not cute.

Reality Seekers

Looking for Reality

Fountains of Light

The Optimizers

Wisdom

Next idea: take some phrases, translate them into Greek/Latin/both, fiddle around until we find something that sounds good as (all or part of) a name.

It could be worthwhile trying out the matrix of possibilities across languages given by pairing two nouns from the set {art, rationality, virtue, science, knowledge, practice, thinking, etc.}

Poor examples:

• The Sophognosis Institute- "the knowledge of knowledge"
• The Cognopraxis Institute- "the practice of thinking"

I like the concept of "to be rather than to seem" but am having trouble thinking of a name to convey it.

With reservation, here's some suggestions:

Applied Coherence
Tangible Actualization

Decision Making Seminars

The Sanity Institute for Human Intelligence? (Haha, I'm joking.)

"Bayesian Illuminati" would likely pique my interest.

"The Bayes-Jitsu Project"

The Anti-Zombie Conspiracy

From the "Rationalists Dojo" meme:

One Boxing Gym

One Boxing (Has the rationality dojo feel. People can call themselves One Boxers. Tagline can be something like "The Sweeter Science.")

Min, Max, Act. (again MMA has martial arts connection)

Mixed Mental Arts

Judge, Know, Do (JKD, same as Jeet Kune Do. If said fast it sounds a bit like an East Asian word.)

Think, Know, Decide (TKD Taekwondo)

24 Hour Mental Fitness

The Mind Organization (GET IT, GET IT?!)

The Mental Institute

or

The Eliezer Yudkowsky Mental Institute for Criminally Insane Artificial Intelligence Researchers