Comment by strbean
21 hours ago
> Calling yourself a rationalist is just branding. It means that your opponents aren't rationalists. It's dishonest.
It seems like you are equating self-labeling of this sort with claiming to be a paragon of that ideology.
Do you think someone who labels themselves as "Christian" inherently believes they are pure of soul and perfect, and sins less than non-Christians? Certainly there are plenty of self-righteous people out there, but "Christian" does not imply "Christ-like".
The same goes for rationalists - "rationalist" does not imply "rational". I don't know the proportion of self-described rationalists that would consider themselves truly rational, but I think a good portion of them would consider anyone who made that claim to be full of crap. The whole movement is predicated on studying and maintaining awareness of the mountains of cognitive bias humans carry. If you can study that and still think you are ultra-rational, you've got a special kind of hubris.
>Do you think someone who labels themselves as "Christian" inherently believes they are pure of soul and perfect, and sins less than non-Christians?
I have known a lot of Christians. I can answer with an unequivocal yes.
C'mon, that's obviously generalizing and unfair.
Your core stance really just seems to be "people suck and groups of people also suck".