[perching_aix]

We probably understand this word very differently, because as far as I'm concerned, rationality (rational behavior) is essentially an exercise in behaving optimally, one that is thus strictly relative to some particular context. It is not just "facts and logic", and it is most certainly not universal, since universal optimality doesn't exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_theorem

> The entire point of the exercise is to establish that certain things are true, and that this is not because of faith

Taken at face value, that'd mean bridging the analog hole (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole), which is fundamentally impossible. Logic proves consistency, not truth, despite the many related terminologies suggesting otherwise. This is further skipping over how people segment the world different, even relative to themselves over time, which thus forms a coordination problem.

It reminds me to how HTTP is stateless. Yeah, it's stateless - all the state keeping has simply been laundered a layer above. It may sound tantalizing to position certain arguments as simply rational (i.e. correct/optimal), but all that ultimately does is sidestep the actual coordination part, which never really went away. There is still an underlying segmentation model being asserted, it is just now coated in self-righteousness, an illusion of rigor, drawing up a false dichotomy of "either you segment the world like we do, and then you're correct, or you're incorrect, and your segmentation is too".

See this rhetorical landmine in action in a sibling thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48986530

Even if I go out of my way and interpret the word such that it merely means "acting on reason" (as opposed to some sort of nonreason), that doesn't mean much for the same reasons. You can have any arbitrary reason to act or think any particular way; possessing an explainable rationale on its own, even if internally coherent, is not necessarily one way or another.

[zahlman]

> We probably understand this word very differently, because as far as I'm concerned, rationality (rational behavior) is essentially an exercise in behaving optimally, one that is thus strictly relative to some particular context.

No, that's completely consistent with my understanding.

Adopting identity labels doesn't follow from that, however.

[perching_aix]

The parent comment has been talking about exactly people who have been turning this into an identity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalist_community

If this doesn't apply to you, great, but then we're talking past each other.

[zahlman]

And my point is that according to the works that supposedly motivate them, they are explicitly not supposed to do that; furthermore, I'm not actually convinced that they are doing it on anything like the scale that critics allege.

(And no, forming a "community" does not make for an identity. I don't think of myself as a "HN user" and I would certainly never introduce myself that way offline. Similarly for Stack Overflow back when it was relevant, or anything else.)

[perching_aix]

I'd argue it's hard to have a community without something in common, so identity formation is kind of unavoidable (as there is an identifier), even if people resist it.

In some cases, that point of commonality is just the venue (like your HN example). Not the case for this.

That said, I do appreciate the distinction and you may very well be right. Like certainly, one can appreciate logical thinking and quality argumentation without adopting any kind of group identity.