EDIT: Lumifer says:
"...when you are talking to someone, presumably you want to communicate some meaning and saying "I'm a rationalist" communicates very little."
This is true. Belief-labels are useful socially; as long as you don't come to internalize them, you should be fine. I would dissuade anyone from actually identifying with a belief-label, but YMMV.
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George is a Perfect Bayesian Rationalist, and has recently come to the conclusion that everything Albert Camus says is correct with a probability of greater than 0.99999. Since his realization, George has called himself an absurdist. Why shouldn’t he, after all? He agrees with all that the absurdists say.
I will henceforth refer to words... (read 828 more words →)
Can anybody point me to some specific examples of this type of evolution? I'm a complete layman when it comes to biology, and this fascinates me. I'm having a bit of a hard time imagining such a process, though.