AndrewKemendo comments on Scaling Evidence and Faith - Less Wrong

-3 [deleted] 27 December 2009 12:30PM

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Comment author: AndrewKemendo 28 December 2009 07:07:17AM 4 points [-]

Intuition (what you call "faith") is evidence.

If you will, please define intution as you understand it.

From how I understand intuition, it is knowledge for which the origin cannot be determined. I have certainly experienced the "I know I read something about that somewhere but I just can't remember" feeling before and was right about it. However just as equally I have been wrong about conclusions that I have come to through this means.

I think your entire post gives the same visceral description as someone would describe about having "felt the holy spirit "or some other such nonsense.

I honestly think that the issue of intuition is a MAJOR hurdle for rationality. I tend to err on the side of intuition being false evidence - hence why I indicated that our heuristics filled in the blanks. That is why I categorize intuition with faith similarly.

Comment author: wedrifid 28 December 2009 01:35:22PM 2 points [-]

From how I understand intuition, it is knowledge for which the origin cannot be determined.

I still call it intuition once I (believe I) can work out how it originated. Perhaps I would go with "cannot be easily dissected".

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 28 December 2009 05:01:31PM 0 points [-]

Rather, intuition is evidence that can be easily accessed. It's very useful to train one's intuition to work correctly even after you know the answer by other means.