Caleb Biddulph's Shortform

Caleb Biddulph

This is a special post for quick takes by Caleb Biddulph. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

Consider saying "irrational" instead of "insane"

Rationalists often say "insane" to talk about normie behaviors they don't like, and "sane" to talk about behaviors they like better. This seems unnecessarily confusing and mean to me.

This clearly is very different from how most people use these words. Like, "guy who believes in God" is very different from "resident of a psych ward." It can even cause legitimate confusion when you want to switch back to the traditional definition of "insane". This doesn't seem very rational to me!

Also, the otherizing/dismissive nature of this language bothers me a bit. For those of us who are trying to make the world better for humanity, it seems like it would be nice to try to meet the vast majority of non-rationalist humans where they're at, which could start by not calling them "insane."

What to say instead? Well, "rational" and "irrational" are right there! That's why we call it "rationalism"! Maybe "X is irrational" sounds pretentious, but "X is insane" sounds insulting, so I think it evens out at least. If "irrational" seems too impassive, perhaps try "dangerously irrational?"

Yeah, I think some rationalists, e.g. Eliezer, use it a lot more than the general population, and differently from the popular figurative sense. As in "raising the sanity waterline."

2ChristianKl11mo

I think the key difference between a normal guy who believes in God and someone in a psych ward is often that the person who believes in God does so because it's what other people in authority told him but the person in the psych ward thinks for themselves and came up with their delusion on their own. This often means their beliefs are self-referential in a way that prevents them from updating due to external feedback. If you believe that the word rational is supposed to mean something along the lines of "taking actions that optimize systematically for winning", believing something just because an authority told you can sometimes be irrational and sometimes be rational. If you want to talk well about behavior you don't like, it makes sense to use words that refer to the reason for why the behavior is bad. Credulous or gullible might be words that better describe a lot of normie behavior. The person who believes in god just because his parents and teachers told him is credulous.

8Eli Tyre11mo

I think there's some bad knock-on effects for normalizing the use of "insane" to talk about very common features of the world: I think it makes social-rationalists to willing to disparage people and institutions, as part of a status-signaling game, often without much careful thought. But I think there's also something valuable about eg. calling belief in God "insane". There's a kind of willingness to call a spade a spade, and not back away from how the literal stated beliefs, if they were not pervasive, would in fact be regarded as signs of insanity.

Caleb Biddulph's Shortform

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Caleb Biddulph's Shortform

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Consider saying "irrational" instead of "insane"