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Gust comments on Rationality Reading Group: Part G: Against Rationalization - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: Gram_Stone 12 August 2015 10:09PM

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Comment author: Gust 13 August 2015 02:43:14PM 2 points [-]

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?"

Comment author: tailcalled 13 August 2015 04:53:06PM 4 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Gust 14 August 2015 12:21:24PM 2 points [-]

Good point!