Pick a name for a rationality non-profit!
April 26, 2012 14 Comments
My new job is basically my dream job: I just moved to the Bay area to help launch a non-profit devoted to teaching rationality.
But we need your help settling on a name. We’ve got it narrowed down to three contenders; click here to vote for your favorite. Thanks!
Not working yet, apparently! I get “Not Found, Error 404
The page you are looking for no longer exists. Perhaps you can return back to the site’s homepage and see if you can find what you are looking for.”
The voting link has two URLs in it.
Applied Rationality Center (ARC) isn’t listed as a favorite option.
the correct link is http://bit.ly/HyAEU2
Until the link is fixed, just hack the url down to bit.ly/HyAEU2.
Looks like you lost the http in front of the link. People trying to vote, copy and paste just the bit.ly part into a new tab and it will work fine.
Ah, sorry all! Without the “http://” in front of my link, WordPress automatically converted it into a WordPress domain. Fixed now.
I voted for CFAR. In case it didn’t take here was my comment:
Hi Julia – I thought CFAR had the best sounding acronym and when pronounced “See-Far” has an allusion to a benefit of Applied Rationality, namely the ability to see further with respect to making good life choices, etc.
My only reservation is to those not aware of the fallacies of straw-rationality all of the names may seem to imply a cold Vulcan-like view of the world.
If only you could work in something suggestive of the grandeur, wonder, emotional well-being and fulfillment that a rational world view can inspire.
“My new job is basically my dream job: I just moved to the Bay area to help launch a non-profit devoted to teaching rationality.”
Wait? What!?
Bay area doesn’t sound like New York and you need to be in New York to do the Rationally Speaking podcast. Who’s going to keep Massimo honest?
If it wasn’t for that, I would offer a well deserved “Congratulations!” But if it means losing you from the podcast and reducing the New York City population by a factor of one excellent spokesperson for rationality, no matter how much good you can accomplish in other venues, well, we just can’t have that.
It’s a good thing you’re not leaving NYC because I won’t have to say “Thank you!” for all of your work so far, nor will I have to wish you “Good luck!” (within the context of rational naturalistic probabilities).
CFAR stands for Constant False Alarm Rate. It’s an algorithm that separates signal from noise.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant_false_alarm_rate
Good luck turning the Bay area into Bayes area.
ARI is the Ayn Rand Institute, hehe.
CFAR is Centers for Apologetics Research, which “brings cultists to Christ.”
ifar.org belongs to the International Foundation for Art Research.
arc.org belongs to the Applied Research Center dealing with racial justice.
All the acronyms are taken.
Now here’s an acronym that’s not taken: Institute for Applied Rationality Teaching (IFART).
Type any short acronym with common letters into Wikipedia or Google, and you’ll get a page of results at least. It’s not really worth worrying, unless some organization already using the acronym was particularly notorious.
Eliezer has been using Center for Modern Rationality – is Applied Rationality your preference, or did everyone change their minds over the past few weeks?
In either case, I like the use of “Center for…”; it’s reminiscent of the CDC, CFI, and so forth.
Welcome to the Bay area, we certainly need your help as much as anyone else. You should make sure to get into some Singularity University events and meet some of the life-extension crowd here – there are plenty of people actively working on interesting technologies that unfortunately get a lot of knee-jerk negative reactions from the world at large. Let me know if you want intros.