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lmm comments on The Hostile Arguer - Less Wrong
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It's not that there aren't any people whose unsupported assertion is more trustworthy than an explicit, persuasive-sounding argument for the opposite side, though certainly individuals of such discernment and integrity are rare. The issue is that any person so reliable would also necessarily have enough underlying intelligence to be able to, in any situation not involving implausibly extreme levels of time pressure, construct a better (or at least more contextually specific) argument than "you'll understand when you're older." The only plausible explanation for being so vague is if they not only don't want to tell you, but are further trying not to provide enough keywords for you to look up the real reason yourself.
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.