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Lumifer comments on Rationality is about pattern recognition, not reasoning - Less Wrong
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Thanks for your interest :-)
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.
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.)
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.)
Why do you think so? Basically, what evidence do you have that you can build strong "intuitions" which will work across diverse domains? My off-the-top-of-my-head reaction is that in dissimilar domains your intuition will mislead you.
It's really hard, that's why almost nobody knows how to do it :P.
Roughly speaking, the solution for me was to develop deep intuition in a lot of different domains, observe the features common to the intuitions in different domains, and abstract the common features out.
Finding the common features was very difficult, as there are a huge number of confounding factors that mask over the underlying commonalities. But it makes sense in hindsight - we wouldn't be able to develop deep intuitions in so many different domains if not for there being subtle underlying commonalities - there weren't evolutionary selective pressures specifically for the ability to develop general relativity and quantum field theory - the fact that it's possible for us means that the relevant pattern recognition abilities are closely related to the ones used in social contexts, etc.
Have you explicitly factored these out? If so, what are some examples?
The question is why do you think it is even possible?
So, do you feel that your intuition will work successfully in the fields of, say, post-modernist literary critique, agriculture, and human biochemistry?
Because I've seen other people do it, I've observed a strong correlation between the ability to do it and overall functionality, and I've recently discovered how to do it myself and have seen huge gains to both my epistemic and instrumental rationality.
I know that I'm not providing enough information for you to find what I'm saying very compelling. Again, it took me 10,000+ hours before I myself started to get it. I might well have been skeptical before doing so.
I don't know – it depends on the relative roles of skill and luck in these fields. If you're talking about those major discoveries from the past that required integrating a diverse collection of sources of information, I believe that the people who made the discoveries were using this style of thinking. For example, I believe that this was probably true of Norman Borlaug.