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rationalism: a meaningless word?
Jun. 19th, 2017 10:18 pmI went to a party last weekend, and a guy sat down next to me and introduced himself. One of the first questions he asked me, as a way to get the conversation going was "so, are you a rationalist?". This seemed like a pretty odd question to me, as it was completely out of the blue... I didn't know of any reason why he would have thought that about me, as we had just met. But I was intrigued so I asked him "what do you mean by that?". He dodged the question at first, and instead modified his question "or... maybe you're a post-rationalist?"
I said "yeah, maybe something more like that. For example... I feel embarrassed admitting this, but I used to be really into Ayn Rand, a long time ago." He laughed. "Well, I don't think Ayn Rand was very rational." I agreed. I still had no idea what he meant by the word, but at least now I had one example of what he didn't mean by it. A rationalist to him did not mean a follower of Ayn Rand. Ok, that was a start.
Instead of clarifying more what he meant, he then shifted to a second, seemingly completely unrelated question: "So, are you trans?"
This was an easy question: "yes, I'm trans". I figured it was probably pretty obvious, considering I was wearing a dress and makeup, had no visible body hair other than what's on my head, a female haircut, etc. and yet I have a fairly deep voice still, pretty small breasts, and I'm tall. I appreciated that he asked though, instead of just making assumptions.
He said, "ah ok, well that's a big indicator for being a rationalist".
Really? This was interesting news to me. I had never heard of a correlation before between rationalism and being transgender. So finally, I understood why he had asked me if I was a rationalist--he associated transgender people with rationalism for some reason.
I later asked him again what he meant by rationalism. Before hearing his answer, I explained to him that the reason I asked is because when I hear the word, I usually think of the philosophical school of thought associated with continental philosophers like Descartes and Kant... one that runs directly against my own school of thought (empiricism), founded by British philosophers like Locke and Hume. But I knew that sometimes the term was used in pop culture to mean something more like "skeptic" or "atheist", so by the second definition I could be considered a rationalist.
His answer was very bizarre. He explained to me that his definition of a rationalist was "someone who believes that the value alignment problem in AI is a real problem". I had vaguely heard of the value alignment problem before somewhere, but wasn't sure exactly what it was. "You mean, the problem that if we build a superintelligent superpowerful AI then its values might not align with the values of humanity?" "Yes, exactly" he confirmed. "Well, I guess by that definition I'm a rationalist... since I definitely think that's a real problem and I don't see any easy way to solve it."
I never asked him why he associated the word "rationalist" with that particular seemingly very specific view. But thinking about it later, it seems especially odd to me considering that the only point in my life where I felt like I sort of had semi-positive feelings about rationalism was during my Ayn Rand phase. But her views on rationality were explicitly the exact opposite of that--she believed firmly that "rational minds never disagree". No matter how large or small the conflict, if both parties were rational, Rand believed any disagreement could be settled eventually by sitting down and reasoning out who was right and who was wrong. At the end, either one person would turn out to be irrational, in which case they would never admit they were wrong--or both of them would eventually come into agreement once they had thought through it far enough to see the truth. Rand believed this was true since she saw all value as objective, rather than subjective (hence the name of her philosophy "objectivism"). As a teenager (20 years ago), this seemed plausible to me and fit with my experience. I'd had many disagreements with people, but whenever I had failed to convince them I had always assumed it was either because they were just irrational people unwilling to listen to reason, or because I hadn't invested enough time in explaining it fully to them. As an adult, I now know how much more complex disagreements between rational people can get--so I'm under no illusion that all conflicts can be settled through rational argument.
So interestingly, to some people the word rationalism implies that rational people can never disagree, but to others the very definition of rationalism is believing that rational beings can disagree and can have different values.
Complicating matters further, my days at UC Santa Cruz during graduate school exposed me to a lot of radical feminist perspectives on things. I recall one time when two feminist graduate students were over at my apartment having a discussion about rationality. One of them said to the other "Well, the definition of rationality is having a penis. So it isn't possible for those of us who don't have penises to be rational. No matter what we say, we will never be seen as such." I remember thinking that this was a strange but fascinating definition of rationality. At the time, it seemed absurd, but after having learned a bit more feminism since it makes more sense to me now (aside from the spurious association between men and penises, which I now see as somewhat arbitrary and offensive). Men have ruled society for many centuries, and they are the ones who laid out the rules for what constitutes rationality. To some extent, "rational" tends to mean "someone who agrees with me" and irrational tends to mean "someone who disagrees with me". Since men set the rules, viewpoints of women which disagree with anything that men tend to have a consensus on is deemed "irrational". For example, if a man tells you "sticks and stones can break your bones, but names will never hurt you", and you say "that's not true... actually, emotional scars due to verbal abuse can be more permanent and damaging than physical marks due to physical abuse"... there's a good chance he will tell you that you're being irrational. No matter how much hard psychological data there is to back you up.
One weird thing I'm still puzzling about is what the connection is between trans and rationalism. When I asked him about it, he just said that he knew a lot of trans women who were rationalists. This is intriguing to me. Is that just purely a coincidence about who he happens to know? Or is there something more there? One hypothetical connection I can think of is that, maybe transgender people are more likely to believe that values are subjective as opposed to objective... since they have seen firsthand how some of the supposedly objective universal values of society (female bodied people should behave like x and male bodied people should behave like y) can't possibly be right. And his definition of rationalism seems to boil down to what I'd call "value subjectivity"--the belief that different rational people can disagree about basic values. Is this the connection? Or is there something more there?
I have also heard there is a correlation between transgender and autistic spectrums--so I guess that's another hypothesis I have for a connection, but it's a more indirect one. (And incidentally, Ayn Rand is often hypothesized to have been on the autistic spectrum. And her ideas are far more popular with men than with women, indicating her psychological thought patterns may have been more stereotypically male than female--perhaps she would have also been on the transgender spectrum, if there had been a word for it during her lifetime.)
A third possible connection might be transhumanism. He associates rationalism with a group of people I'd refer to instead as "singularitarians" (basically, AI enthusiasts), which is closely connected to (and possibly a subset of) transhumanism. Transhumanism is a movement aimed at helping humans (and/or animals) transcend their biology through technological augmentation and body modification. On top of the obvious body modification connection, I wouldn't be surprised if transgender people also find it easier to accept a functionalist view of consciousness (which entails the idea that the mind is independent of the physical embodiment in which it is implemented, whether that be flesh or silicon), a cornerstone of singularitarian thought. Many singularitarians are obsessed with uploading their minds onto the internet, to escape their bodies. Transgender people often hate their bodies and feel trapped in them, so it seems quite natural that many would be looking for any means to escape them. (I know at least in my case, any time I've ever logged into an MMORPG or a similar virtual environment like Second Life, I've always just instinctively chosen a female avatar; I never thought about it much, but it's clear to me retrospectively that it's because in the virtual world, you can choose the body that matches your internal identity the closest; you're not limited by biology, you can let everyone see something closer to your internal mental projection of yourself rather than seeing something different.) At one point, I recall James Hughes (co-founder with Nick Bostrom of the World Transhumanist Association) saying to me that "transgender people are the shock troops of the singularity!". This was many years before I came out as trans (2006 I think), but I have to admit that sentence did leave an impact on me--I've always wanted to make a techno remix out of it but never got around to it.
At any rate, I think I've seen enough totally irreconcilable definitions of this word to conclude that it's essentially meaningless. Perhaps the feminists I overheard were the most correct in that... it's a made-up word that helps to serve whatever interests the person using it cares most about. Which quite often, just happens to be patriarchy and capitalism (see, for example, Reason magazine).
I said "yeah, maybe something more like that. For example... I feel embarrassed admitting this, but I used to be really into Ayn Rand, a long time ago." He laughed. "Well, I don't think Ayn Rand was very rational." I agreed. I still had no idea what he meant by the word, but at least now I had one example of what he didn't mean by it. A rationalist to him did not mean a follower of Ayn Rand. Ok, that was a start.
Instead of clarifying more what he meant, he then shifted to a second, seemingly completely unrelated question: "So, are you trans?"
This was an easy question: "yes, I'm trans". I figured it was probably pretty obvious, considering I was wearing a dress and makeup, had no visible body hair other than what's on my head, a female haircut, etc. and yet I have a fairly deep voice still, pretty small breasts, and I'm tall. I appreciated that he asked though, instead of just making assumptions.
He said, "ah ok, well that's a big indicator for being a rationalist".
Really? This was interesting news to me. I had never heard of a correlation before between rationalism and being transgender. So finally, I understood why he had asked me if I was a rationalist--he associated transgender people with rationalism for some reason.
I later asked him again what he meant by rationalism. Before hearing his answer, I explained to him that the reason I asked is because when I hear the word, I usually think of the philosophical school of thought associated with continental philosophers like Descartes and Kant... one that runs directly against my own school of thought (empiricism), founded by British philosophers like Locke and Hume. But I knew that sometimes the term was used in pop culture to mean something more like "skeptic" or "atheist", so by the second definition I could be considered a rationalist.
His answer was very bizarre. He explained to me that his definition of a rationalist was "someone who believes that the value alignment problem in AI is a real problem". I had vaguely heard of the value alignment problem before somewhere, but wasn't sure exactly what it was. "You mean, the problem that if we build a superintelligent superpowerful AI then its values might not align with the values of humanity?" "Yes, exactly" he confirmed. "Well, I guess by that definition I'm a rationalist... since I definitely think that's a real problem and I don't see any easy way to solve it."
I never asked him why he associated the word "rationalist" with that particular seemingly very specific view. But thinking about it later, it seems especially odd to me considering that the only point in my life where I felt like I sort of had semi-positive feelings about rationalism was during my Ayn Rand phase. But her views on rationality were explicitly the exact opposite of that--she believed firmly that "rational minds never disagree". No matter how large or small the conflict, if both parties were rational, Rand believed any disagreement could be settled eventually by sitting down and reasoning out who was right and who was wrong. At the end, either one person would turn out to be irrational, in which case they would never admit they were wrong--or both of them would eventually come into agreement once they had thought through it far enough to see the truth. Rand believed this was true since she saw all value as objective, rather than subjective (hence the name of her philosophy "objectivism"). As a teenager (20 years ago), this seemed plausible to me and fit with my experience. I'd had many disagreements with people, but whenever I had failed to convince them I had always assumed it was either because they were just irrational people unwilling to listen to reason, or because I hadn't invested enough time in explaining it fully to them. As an adult, I now know how much more complex disagreements between rational people can get--so I'm under no illusion that all conflicts can be settled through rational argument.
So interestingly, to some people the word rationalism implies that rational people can never disagree, but to others the very definition of rationalism is believing that rational beings can disagree and can have different values.
Complicating matters further, my days at UC Santa Cruz during graduate school exposed me to a lot of radical feminist perspectives on things. I recall one time when two feminist graduate students were over at my apartment having a discussion about rationality. One of them said to the other "Well, the definition of rationality is having a penis. So it isn't possible for those of us who don't have penises to be rational. No matter what we say, we will never be seen as such." I remember thinking that this was a strange but fascinating definition of rationality. At the time, it seemed absurd, but after having learned a bit more feminism since it makes more sense to me now (aside from the spurious association between men and penises, which I now see as somewhat arbitrary and offensive). Men have ruled society for many centuries, and they are the ones who laid out the rules for what constitutes rationality. To some extent, "rational" tends to mean "someone who agrees with me" and irrational tends to mean "someone who disagrees with me". Since men set the rules, viewpoints of women which disagree with anything that men tend to have a consensus on is deemed "irrational". For example, if a man tells you "sticks and stones can break your bones, but names will never hurt you", and you say "that's not true... actually, emotional scars due to verbal abuse can be more permanent and damaging than physical marks due to physical abuse"... there's a good chance he will tell you that you're being irrational. No matter how much hard psychological data there is to back you up.
One weird thing I'm still puzzling about is what the connection is between trans and rationalism. When I asked him about it, he just said that he knew a lot of trans women who were rationalists. This is intriguing to me. Is that just purely a coincidence about who he happens to know? Or is there something more there? One hypothetical connection I can think of is that, maybe transgender people are more likely to believe that values are subjective as opposed to objective... since they have seen firsthand how some of the supposedly objective universal values of society (female bodied people should behave like x and male bodied people should behave like y) can't possibly be right. And his definition of rationalism seems to boil down to what I'd call "value subjectivity"--the belief that different rational people can disagree about basic values. Is this the connection? Or is there something more there?
I have also heard there is a correlation between transgender and autistic spectrums--so I guess that's another hypothesis I have for a connection, but it's a more indirect one. (And incidentally, Ayn Rand is often hypothesized to have been on the autistic spectrum. And her ideas are far more popular with men than with women, indicating her psychological thought patterns may have been more stereotypically male than female--perhaps she would have also been on the transgender spectrum, if there had been a word for it during her lifetime.)
A third possible connection might be transhumanism. He associates rationalism with a group of people I'd refer to instead as "singularitarians" (basically, AI enthusiasts), which is closely connected to (and possibly a subset of) transhumanism. Transhumanism is a movement aimed at helping humans (and/or animals) transcend their biology through technological augmentation and body modification. On top of the obvious body modification connection, I wouldn't be surprised if transgender people also find it easier to accept a functionalist view of consciousness (which entails the idea that the mind is independent of the physical embodiment in which it is implemented, whether that be flesh or silicon), a cornerstone of singularitarian thought. Many singularitarians are obsessed with uploading their minds onto the internet, to escape their bodies. Transgender people often hate their bodies and feel trapped in them, so it seems quite natural that many would be looking for any means to escape them. (I know at least in my case, any time I've ever logged into an MMORPG or a similar virtual environment like Second Life, I've always just instinctively chosen a female avatar; I never thought about it much, but it's clear to me retrospectively that it's because in the virtual world, you can choose the body that matches your internal identity the closest; you're not limited by biology, you can let everyone see something closer to your internal mental projection of yourself rather than seeing something different.) At one point, I recall James Hughes (co-founder with Nick Bostrom of the World Transhumanist Association) saying to me that "transgender people are the shock troops of the singularity!". This was many years before I came out as trans (2006 I think), but I have to admit that sentence did leave an impact on me--I've always wanted to make a techno remix out of it but never got around to it.
At any rate, I think I've seen enough totally irreconcilable definitions of this word to conclude that it's essentially meaningless. Perhaps the feminists I overheard were the most correct in that... it's a made-up word that helps to serve whatever interests the person using it cares most about. Which quite often, just happens to be patriarchy and capitalism (see, for example, Reason magazine).
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