g_pepper comments on Rationality is about pattern recognition, not reasoning - Less Wrong

25 Post author: JonahSinick 26 May 2015 07:23PM

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Comment author: JonahSinick 27 May 2015 12:22:57AM 0 points [-]

Thanks for your interest :-)

Your observation that is the subject of Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink.

There's certainly overlap, but I'm making a more precise claim: that one can develop powerful intuition not only in particular domains but that one can also develop powerful general predictive models to get very high epistemic rationality across the board.

I suspect that pattern-matching is vastly more efficient than explicit reasoning as you suggest, but that it is subject to bias and can in some cases lead one astray.

Yes, my realization is about relative effect sizes: I used to think that the right balance is 50% intuition and 50% explicit reasoning or something, whereas now I think that it's more like 95% intuition and 5% explicit reasoning. (I'm speaking very vaguely here.)

At least some of the biases discussed in the sequences and elsewhere can be attributed to non-explicit reasoning and the antidote to these biases is to reason explicitly.

Ah, but explicit reasoning isn't the only antidote: you can also use intuition to correct for emotional and cognitive biases :-). I know that it's highly nonobvious how one would go about doing this.

Somewhat tangentially, you might be interested by my post Reason is not the only means of overcoming bias. (The post is 4.5 years old..I've been thinking about these things for a long time :P.)

Comment author: g_pepper 27 May 2015 12:48:04AM *  0 points [-]

Ah, but explicit reasoning isn't the only antidote

Yes, I was just about to edit my post to say "an antidote" rather than "the antidote". As a practical matter, no one is going to explicitly reason through every situation. A more practical antidote is to recognize biases and learn rules of thumb for avoiding them. A classic example is the conjunction fallacy. Explicitly calculating conditional probabilities will obviously correct this fallacy, but most of us are not going to do that most of the time. However, if one is aware of the fallacy, one can develop a rule of thumb that states that less specific hypotheticals are usually more probable than more specific hypotheticals; this rule is sufficient for avoiding the conjunction fallacy most of the time. However, even here, explicit reasoning played a role in avoiding the bias; explicit reasoning was used to learn about and understand the bias, and to develop the rule of thumb.

Is using this sort of rule of thumb what you mean by using intuition to correct for emotional and cognitive biases?

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