Firstly, this post is awesome.

Secondly though, this post brushes on the topic of intuition as a useful tool, something I think far too many Logic-Based types throw out without considering the practicality of. It's better not to think of it as being an substitute for logical thinking, but rather as a quick and dirty backup, for when you don't have all the information.

Intuition can occur in up to two seconds, operates almost completely below conscious awareness, and begins effecting your body immediately. Here are some excerpts from Blink, a book by Malcolm Gladwell, in which he researches how intuition works, what abilities and drawbacks it has, and what biases can effect it's overall usefulness.

In front of you are four decks of cards, two of them red and the other two blue. Each card in those four decks either wins you a sum of money or costs you some money, and your job is to turn over cards from any the decks, one at a time, in such a way that maximizes your winnings.*

Ah, a perfect opportunity to be a Logical Thinker, using careful observation and reasoning to find the ideal pattern. What path does intuition take though?

What you don't know at the beginning however, is that the red decks are a minefield. The rewards are high, but when you lose on the red cards, you lose a lot. Actually, you can win only by taking cards from the blue decks, which offer a nice steady diet of $50 payouts and modest penalties. The question is how long will it take you to figure this out? After about fifty cards or so, people start to develop a hunch about what's going on. We don't know why we prefer the blue decks, but we're pretty sure at that point that they are a better bet. After turning about eighty cards, most of us have figured out the game and can explain exactly why the first two decks are a bad idea.

This is all standard enough, but what is more impressive is the fact that people started generating stress responses to the red decks by the tenth card.

That's right, palms began to sweat in reaction to the red decks almost immediately, naturally pushing people towards the blue decks before they could even understand why, or even recognize what they were doing.

In those moments, our brain uses two very different strategies to make sense of the situation. The first is the one we're most familiar with. It's the conscious strategy. We think about what we've learned, and eventually we come up with an answer. This strategy is logical and definitive. But it takes us eighty cards to get there. It's slow, and it needs a lot of information. There's a second strategy, though. It operates a lot more quickly. It starts to kick in after ten cards, and it's really smart, because it picks up the problem with the red decks almost immediately.

There are better examples of applied Intuition in Blink, but I've purposefully only used one of the earlier examples in the Amazon Sampler to respect the book. I'd recommend reading the whole thing though, especially if you're interested in understanding what it does while you're thinking things through.

No, what makes the difference is that you'd be mixing up the normative level with the empirical one, as I explained here (parent of the linked post also relevant).

No no no. I'm not saying "Since sexism and racism are wrong," - I'm saying that those who don't want their arguments to be of the sort that it could analogously justify racism or sexism (even if the person is neither of those), then they would also need to reject speciesism.

That's common practice in ethics.

You need something to work with otherwise ethical reasoning couldn't get off the ground. But it doesn't necessarily imply that people are not being properly rational (irrational would have to be defined according to a goal, and ethics is about goals.)

Many arguments here seem to take the mindkilling form of "If we had to derive our entire system of moral value based on explicitly stated arguments, and follow those arguments ad absurdum, bad thing results."

Since bad thing is bad, and you say it is in some situation justified, clearly you are wrong, with the (reasonably explicit) accusation that if you use this line of reasoning you are (sexist! racist! in favor of killing babies! in favor of genocide! or worse, not being properly rational!)

You pig?

Speciesist language, not cool!

Haha! Anyway, I agree that it promotes mindkilled attitude (I'm often reading terrible arguments by animal rights people), but on the other hand, for those who agree with the arguments, it is a good way to raise awareness. And the parallels to racism or sexism are valid, I think.

I strongly object to the term "speciesism" for this position. I think it promotes a mindkilled attitude to this subject ("Oh, you don't want to be speciesist, do you? Are you also a sexist? You pig?").

It's not obvious to me that anyone at the big companies actually wants the situation where everyone patents everything and there is a perpetual cold war. The big companies want a thriving economy, especially in their sector, and if it was cheaper to get together in an alliance to block all the stupid patents, while the real ones (at least that were backed by big companies) got through, it's possible everyone would be better off.

Even with zero knowledge of the other guy's function, you'd always start with Lie #1: Always represent any outcome that leaves you worse off as having infinite negative utility (or at least more bad than your utopia point is good).

This cuts off any outcome that decreases your utility, and thus is very, very good for you - even if you need to self-modify and make it real. Note that this is how actual negotiations work.

Another easy hack is to limit your goals, and pretend that impossibly good outcomes are no better for you than the best possible outcome, in order to increase the value of utility to you via decreasing your Utopia point.

If both players lie in this way, the standard outcome is the default point

Does that mean choosing whether to lie or not is like a prisoner's dilemma?