The Folly of Intuition

That's not intuition, that's self-delusion. You're defining the term so loosely and broadly as to make it meaningless.

That's where the skill/ level of training comes into it, though.

I actively use my intuition every day. I think it makes sense that it's more honed for that reason, and that I have a better sense of what pans out and what doesn't. (I get real-time feedback on how well my intuition is doing all of the time -- if I understand someone, it worked. If I don't, it didn't.)

And I still think that there are a variety of skill levels or "speeds," which would affect the data.

I definitely think it happens that people do stupid things and put that down to intuition. I also think that there are 80-year-olds in walkers who go about 2 miles an hour.

The fact that some people are bad at it doesn't mean that nobody is good at it.

People are going to be "wrong" a lot of the time, no matter how they process data.

Intuition is a powerful tool; personally I think you go wrong if you go too far in either direction.

Eliminate intuition, and you get so buried in data that you can't analyze anything. Eliminate analysis, and you can never evaluate whether you're making making good choices or not.

I've often encountered situations where something just felt wrong. Sometimes analysis proves me right, sometimes analysis proves me wrong.

I think it was Linkat that said it best for me: We're all statisticians, and we all go through life with too-small sample sizes.

That's a great quote.

I had to look it up, and lookee what I found: http://able2know.org/topic/65501-22#post-2318457

(Turns out, it was Freeduck, not Linkat.)

Heh, I'm certainly consistent. I thought about putting it in that thread (again as it turns out) and didn't mostly because I wasn't sure who to credit.

So Let's propose a definition. Of course I am open to a conscious reasoned discussion of whether this definition is relevant given this discussion.

I propose that intuition is the set of conclusions that we reach without a conscious process of gathering facts, questioning initial conclusions and applying reason.

Self-delusion is an interesting term. It is also a set of conclusions that we reach without being backed by facts or reason. Of course none of us ever claims we are basing our conclusions on self-delusion. Many of us claim that our beliefs are based on intuition.

I think that is the difference between the two. Self-delusion is what we claim people we disagree with are basing their beliefs and decisions on. Intuition is what we claim we (or people we agree with) are basing our beliefs and and decisions on.

It seems to me that when making decisions on things like whether we should take vaccines, we should definitively go the route of gathering evidence and applying reason.

DrewDad,

The obvious advantage of intuition is speed. As I said before I believe that being able to make urgent decisions quickly, without using our higher thinking power, has a clear evolutionary advantage.

You bring up the task of pruning data. This is an interesting idea, but the conscious mind is perfectly able to do this. As an engineer I have been presented with terabytes of data to analyze. I will go through a very deliberate thoughtful process of how to analyze it. Often I am working with other people and I will always be able to articulate why I am making assumptions about the data to simplify it.

In chess an expert will know right away which combinations of moves should be examined further and which aren't worth considering. But again, chess experts will be able to tell you why-- in fact they write books about it.

Of course it takes time, and if you don't have the time for reasoned consideration an intuition is a very nice thing to have. But if you do have the time for reason, the conscious thinking mind is perfectly able to figure out which parts of data are important. And the conscious mind has advantages that you can question it, see and correct your own mistakes and communicate your work to other people.

Another interesting part of this is your brains ability to find patterns. This is something has happens automatically (and probably counts as subconscious) and this is the key for lots of tasks from engineering and math, to social interactions.

The problem is that the brain is so good at finding patterns that it often finds patterns that aren't there. There is a lot of research on this.

This is the key of problem gambling. There is no pattern whatsoever in a slot machine. They are engineered to be completely random and mathematically they are. Yet people who play slot machines often believe quite sincerely that they understand something about the machine and they are sure they know it is about to pay off. This is a flaw in human intuition that casinos have figured out how to make a lot of money from.

I will listen to my intuition when it thinks it has found a pattern. I will use this for a jumping off point of my though process, or a source of new ideas and inspiration.

But I also know that finding false patterns is a human weakness. I always am careful to question and test these assumptions with data and reason before I rely on them for anything important.

How convenient your definition is to the support of your thesis. I would be content with: "intuition is the set of conclusions that we reach without a conscious process." You're on about science all the time, and yet here you are setting up a definition intended to arrive at the conclusion which you want to reach. I'm fine with what i originally offered:



I have no idea why you're so torqued off about intution, unless that incredible emotive post you made a few posts back is the key. However, you must really think i'm an idiot if you think i'm going to blithely agree to a defintion which is the antithesis of the one i had already offered. If you want to make intuition out to be veiled idiocy, you can do it without my help.

That's funny Setanta.

Your definition is almost the same as my definition. Anytime you go through a process where you examine data and weigh it with being aware of it you are reaching a conclusion without a conscious process. It's almost the same thing.

In your version of the definition is the stated assumption that there is, in fact, a process of examining data and weighing it that occurs even though you are not aware of it. Even this doesn't solve the basic problem I raised. If you aren't aware of this process there is no way to be sure it is there. There is still no way to distinguish between your "intuitions" and your "self-delusions".

I have been very clear about my point since the first post of this thread. Intuition is great at letting you make urgent decisions when you don't have time for careful thought. There are times, such as the ones enumerated in this thread, that intuition is crucial. But intuition is often wrong and it is prone to many errors that are part of how the human brains work.

I am suggesting that when there is sufficient time for careful thought people should trust their conscious mind more and their intuition less.

I think the problem is that people use intuition in situations where it is clearly not appropriate. Intuition is not going to help you understand why the economy is tanking, if the bailout was good for the country, if we should be planning to attack Iran, whether immigration is good for the country or who to vote for in the next election. Others have dismissed it but racism is clearly a form of intuition. It is based on a set of subconscious decisions grounded on a set of assumptions, some of which might be valid and some not. Likewise our political handlers are constantly feeding us propaganda to distort our intuition. After all, intuition works off of a set of base assumptions and if you can distort those assumptions you can distort "intuition". Intuition might keep you out of trouble in the short term but it might set you up in the long term.

The only funny thing here is that you would claim that our definitions are "almost" the same. They are not the same at all. In fact, this was your definition:



Now, although you don't explicitly say as much, your definition can easily be read as excluding questioning initial conclusions and applying reason. Were i to agree with your definition, you could easily begin to argue that there is no questioning of conclusions, no application of reason involved in intuition, while saying that i had agreed to that. I'm not a fool, Max, i'm careful about what i agree to.

Furthermore, you continue to beat your drum to the effect that conscious thought is somehow a magincally pure and reliable process of sweet reason. I can think of few things more deluded. Were i to agree to your definition of intuition, you would be in a position to whip out your worship of conscious thougth processes to inform me of how superior such processes are to intuition. People routinely make conscious decisions which do not take into consideration all the data (the source you linked said as much, i've quoted it twice), people routinely make conscious decisions which are informed by their fears, their hopes, their wishes, their cherished delusions.

Were i to agree with your definition, you'd be in a position to allege that the questioning of initial conclusions (a very revealing turn of phrase) and application off reason are only possible with conscious thought. You don't need to tell me what your position has been since the outset, i've been in no doubt of it--and i don't agree with it. It appears that you think i can be bludgeoned into agreement if you just repeat your threadbare litanty often enough.

Conscious thought is no guarantee that the process is rational, nor exhaustively thorough. You make a god of reason, appeal to a vague concept of science, and apparently expect to be taken seriously. I suggest that you know precious little about human nature.

The assumptions of racism can be applied to conscious thought as well as to intuition. That was a truly scurrilous claim on your part, and is redolent of Max's irrational, emotional appeal made earlier. In the days of slavery, preachers told their congregations from the pulpit that blacks were intellectually inferior, that their god had given them dominion over them. It is not clearly a form of intuition at all. I see you as doing nothing more in the way of honest, careful consideration than Max in cobbling together a description of intuition which allows you to dismiss it out of hand. Your method reminds me of the gun nuts who point out that the Nazis banned guns, so that therefore, people who want to ban guns are no better than Nazis. That's the value of your pathetic analogy from racism.

As i've pointed out to Max again and again, people can consciously make bad decisions based on too little information, skewed information, selectively consulted information, invalid asumptions, the consultation of their fears, their wishes and their prejudices. Your argument is no better, and not noticeably different than Max's.

To be clear about this, Engineer, you are saying that racism is a product of intuition without advancing any plausible reason to support the claim. We are to take your statement from authority without any reason to consider it authoritative.

In the First World War, black American troops were not allowed into combat. The French,who had used black troops from the very beginning of the war, asked Pershing to allow them to use the veteran, professional black troops of the American army in their front lines. By your criterion, the French must not have been possessed of any intuition, because they were clearly not racist, at least in regard to the value of front line troops.

Basically, you're talking about non-conscious cogitation.

The chess player considers and discards a lot of low-success moves, without consciously considering each move.

I don't see how that's different from intuition, the way you're using the term.

In these case, it's trained intuition. The chess player intuitively knows which moves have a lower probability of success. You intuitively know how to organize the data.

Personally, I think it's funny that you think you know how your mind works.

They've been working for over a hundred years to understand how the brain works, but consciousness is still "the ghost in the machine."

A huge number of decisions are made below a conscious level. Have you ever had a phone call while driving, hung up, and realized you'd driven two miles and couldn't remember anything about it?

I suggest you read "Predictably Irrational."

Their intuition was not based on the same set of assumptions that those from the US were based on. That's my point, that "intuition" is not universal, it is completely based on a set of assumptions and experiences. Your example is a perfect illustration.

I'm currently in a place where there are huge numbers of stray dogs. When I go out walking and I approach a stray, my radar is on ultrahigh alert. The locals just walk on by completely ignoring the strays. I walk by oh so casually, using my peripheral vision to keep careful track of the dog. The dog ignores me like it does to hundreds of people everyday. My experiences with strays in the US tells me that strays are threats and may become aggressive if I enter their territory. Here that is clearly incorrect here (although I'm sure if I went up and poked it I would be appropriately rewarded). I completely know this and still go on high alert with every dog I pass.

People are not born racists, they are fed a diet of assumptions and experiences that mold their baseline responses. They don't call it "unreasoning hatred" because it is based on reason. The same mechanism that causes me to shy from a dog that clearly can't be bothered to stir from where it flopped by the side of the road causes others to lock their cars when someone of a different race walks by. Given your definition above, I don't know why you would come to a different conclusion.

A complete non sequitur. You have never established that racism is a product of intuition. I see no reason to take your remarks seriously.

Edit: "People are not born racists, they are fed a diet of assumptions and experiences that mold their baseline responses. They don't call it "unreasoning hatred" because it is based on reason." This quote of yours completely undermines your claim that racism is a product of intuition. It's a product of indoctrination--your own quote acknowledges this.