Sarokrae comments on Biases of Intuitive and Logical Thinkers - Less Wrong

27 Post author: pwno 13 August 2013 03:50AM

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Comment author: Swimmer963 13 August 2013 05:58:17PM 4 points [-]

I am not convinced that it's easy, or even really possible, to change from one thinking style to the other.

After four years of nursing school, I changed from an INTJ to an INFJ on the Myers-Briggs. The medical field is somewhere where you're constantly getting bombarded with data, some of it very relevant and some of it not, and you have to react fast. There's value in being able to think logically and systematically through a patient's symptoms to make sure you're not missing something–but it's too slow much of the time, and I've learned to at least notice my quick flash-intuitions. The feeling that "something is wrong even if I don't know why" can be an incredibly valuable indication that you have to check something again, ask someone else to have a look for you, etc. Also, dealing with human beings in the most vulnerable moments of their lives is a great way to develop empathy.

I am having some difficulty understand the "Ignoring your emotions" section, much less seeing the use of "fixing" this "failing".

It's helped me a lot. Anna Salamon recently shared her technique of "when I have a mysterious annoying emotion that I don't endorse, I ask it what it wants." I may not endorse the emotion, but I feel it, and even if I try to ignore it, it'll probably still impact my behaviour, i.e. by making me act less nicely towards a person who irritates me. But I frequently can figure out "what the emotion wants"–for example, it turns out that a large percentage of the time, when quotes from an article annoy me, it's because I implicitly feel like they're attacking me because they criticize or point fun at someone who I identify with.

Example: the movie "The Heat" was hilarious but left me with a bad taste in my mouth, and I was able to track down that it was because one of the main characters, a female cop who was characterized as very smart and capable but nerdy and socially unaware, was poked fun at a lot and eventually changed by becoming less nerdy and more like the other main character, a female cop who broke all the rules with a "git 'er done" attitude (who AFAICT didn't change at all.) I felt more similar to the nerdy character, and part of me felt that the movie was making fun of nerds in general. I was able to convince myself that this wasn't a reason to be cranky.

Comment author: Sarokrae 18 August 2013 10:12:41AM 1 point [-]

As an "INFJ" who has learned to think in an "INTJ" way through doing a maths degree and hanging out with INTJs, I also agree that different ways of problem solving can be learned. What I tend to find is that my intuitive way of thinking gets me a less accurate, faster answer, which is in keeping with what everyone else has suggested.

However, with my intuitive thinking, there is also an unusual quirk that although my strongly intuitive responses are fairly inaccurate (correct about half the time), this is much more accurate than they have any right to be given the precision of the ones that are correct. My intuitive thinking usually applies to people and their emotions, and I frequently get very specific hypotheses about the relationships between a set of people. Learning logical thinking has allowed me to first highlight hypotheses with intuition, then slowly go through and falsify the wrong ones, which leads me to an answer that I think I couldn't possibly get with logic alone, since my intuition uses things like facial expressions and body languages and voice inflections to gather much more data than I could consciously.