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lmm comments on The Hostile Arguer - Less Wrong
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I'm a professional computer programmer, a field founded on logic and reason. I've been doing it for a while, and am, if I say so myself, pretty good at it.
I still find myself frequently hitting places where the best argument I can make for a particular decision is "this feels intuitively like decision x and decision y, and those were the correct choices in those cases, therefore I think this is the correct decision too." And very often that's right.
My understanding of the evidence is that within specific fields, experts in that field develop intuitions that really can yield better decisionmaking than conscious reason. Logically, doesn't it seem like this would be true of living in general?
Mentioning a similarity to past successful decisions seems like it qualifies as "constructing a more contextually specific argument than 'you'll understand when you're older'".
I guess, but the explicit comparison is usually pretty indefensible. "Isn't this actually more like decision w, where the opposite choice was correct?" would be a natural response, and one I wouldn't have any counterargument for.