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Gust comments on Rationality Reading Group: Part G: Against Rationalization - Less Wrong
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Has anyone managed not to Bottom Line in their everyday thinking? I find that it's very difficult. It's so natural and it's a shortcut that I find useful more often than harmful. I wonder if it's best to flag issues where epistemic irrationality would be very bad and primarily focus on avoiding Bottom Lining at times like that. I feel that the things I'm talking about are in a different spirit than those originally intended by the article, where you're not so much emotionally invested in the world being a certain way as you are, say, relying on your intuition as the primary source of evidence for the sake of saving time and avoiding false starts.
The way I see it, having intuitions and trusting them is not necessarily harmful. But you should actually recognize them by what they are: snap judgements made by subconscious heuristics that have little to do with actual arguments you come up with. That way, you can take it as a kind of evidence/argument, instead of a Bottom Line - like an opinion from a supposed expert which tells you the "X is Y", but doesn't have the time to explain. You can then ask: "is this guy really an expert?" and "do other arguments/evidence outweight the expert's opinion?"
Note that both for experts and for your intuition, you should consider that you might end up double-counting the evidence if you treat them as independent of the evidence you have found - if everybody is doing everything correctly (which very rarily happens), you, your intuition and the experts should all know the same arguments, and naive thinking might double/triple-count the arguments.
Good point!