Intuitive Disagreements

Elliot Temple
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My philosophy, Critical Fallibilism (CF), says that we should accept and act on only non-refuted ideas, and should reject refuted ideas. It also says if you have no criticism of accepting an idea (or reaching a conclusion or taking action according to an idea) – if you can see no downside or problem whatsoever – then you should accept it. When hearing this, it’s important to understand that refutation is a broad, accessible concept. Criticism is easy to come by because the requirements for rejecting ideas are low. When dealing with your own life, refutation doesn't require anything like logical proof.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://criticalfallibilism.com/intuitive-disagreements/
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You’ve written a lot of articles and blog posts recently so I just want to say I feel happy each time you upload.

Thanks for responding to:

Consider special emergency contexts with extreme time pressure, with inaction being a clearly bad option. In that context, it’s better to pick something and act on it even if you have intuitive doubts, rather than try to consider more when there’s no time. It’s better to do an action that might work over delaying and therefore guaranteeing failure. However, this isn’t really an exception regarding how to deal with conflicting ideas because you shouldn’t be conflicted about it. You should both intuitively and intellectually/explicitly understand the time pressure and want to pick something even if it’s not perfect. People generally already have an intuitive understanding of time pressure and know that sometimes it’s better to try (even if you’re unsure of the right plan) than to delay enough that you don’t get a chance at all. People may have mental conflicts about time pressure, but at least logically or rationally there isn’t a particularly hard issue there: time pressure isn’t a very challenging scenario for CF to address in the abstract. Note that it’s also fine to just do what you intuitively want to in time pressure; time pressure doesn’t bias things for or against intuitions or explicit ideas; the thing to do differently in time pressure is object less to reaching any conclusion (be less picky and critical when all parts of you agree that all the conclusions you’re considering are better than running out of time without acting).

So there isn’t really a mechanical way to choose, except of being less objectionable to any proposed solution. It depends on the specific explicit idea, intuition and time pressure.

In some situations you won’t even have time to think explicitly, so that’s an easy choice for intuition.

I know you’ve talked about intuition in debate, but I think you covered many different aspects of it in this one. Intuition in debate is what bothered me most at first, but I’m convinced about the explanations you gave here. I can’t remember how you handled this question in the other articles so I’m not comparing them here.

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Thanks for replying to them.

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My Notes taken while reading

Notes on Intuitive Disagreements:

The requirements for rejecting ideas are low. When dealing with your own life, refutations doesn’t require anything like logical proof.

Having intuitive disagreements with an idea is a decisive criticism of you accepting that idea right now. (Which is different than a decisive criticism of the idea - there is a distinction between the issue of the truth of an idea, and the issue whether you should accept the idea.)

We can’t conclude that an idea is true if we have ideas that contradict it that are unaddressed (in this case, intuitive ideas). This unaddressed idea is an unrefuted alternative idea.

Intuitive dislike isn’t a decisive criticism of considering the idea potentially correct, investigating further, thinking it over, reading a book on the topic, or taking other steps to explore the matter. If your intuition objects to all of those too, that’s more unusual and concerning. It being concerning doesn’t mean to ignore your intuition or try harder to override it or suppress it; concerning means that figuring out what’s going on is more important.

I’d wondered how you could tell whether an intuition of yours is irrational or not. Whether your intuition also objects to further investigation etc. seems like a good clue.

Note that you refuting your acceptance of the idea doesn’t mean that other people shouldn’t accept or act on the idea. That is a refutation about you accepting or acting on the idea.

Yeah there is the issue of rationally concluding an idea and the issue of whether an idea is true. I might have intuitive disagreements that someone else doesn’t have, so I shouldn’t rationally conclude it, though the another person could rationally conclude it.

nothing in your mind should be ignored when trying to be rational.

Having an intuitive disagreement with an idea (or not) makes the context in which you evaluate the idea different. You should reach a different conclusion because there is a different IGC. So the idea “accept idea x” has different evaluations depending on the context. If the context includes having intuitive disagreements with idea x then you shouldn’t accept x.

having intuitive doubts refutes the IGC about you accepting the idea now despite those doubts.

Don’t be pressured into accepting contradictions. Keep in mind the distinction between the issue of what you should accept and what is true are different.

If you’re going to bring up intutive objections in debate, you need to be willing to explore them and answer questions about them.

You can explore intuitions by posing hypothetical situations to them, and gather data on what they say. You can vary situations based on theories you come up with for them and try to refute your theories about the intuitions. (Finding ways to practise this starting in small simple ways seems like a really cool idea)

For some issues, your intuition may offer no opinion, in which case it’s not relevant or getting in the way of that issue.

Often the intuition will be reasonably familiar to people in the culture and guessing that it’s similar to common intuitions will often help figure it out faster. Intuitions often come from past interactions with society and messages that society communicates repeatedly, so considering common societal messaging will sometimes be effective at figuring out intuitions faster and easier.

Interesting. What do I find interesting about it? I thought about how people generally get a lot out of talking about their feelings and similar experiences with others, and how that helps them. I realised that probably makes them learn more about understanding their own experiences and feelings too, and its not just about sharing stuff to connect with people.

For learning to understand/articulate intuitions, have you (or anyone else!) thought of any simple ways to practise this skill? It seems like a super awesome skill but starting with something big and scary and complex might be hard (for whatever reason most of the things I can think where this is an issue seems hard or complex life things). Maybe there are some normal day-to-day ways you can engage with day-to-day intuitions to build up the skill before tackling e.g big life things. Maybe debating or discussing is such a way? But it seems like there should be even an even simpler way.

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Sure. For example, lose to a boss a few times in a video game like Elden Ring. You now have some intuitions about the boss’s attacks and how to defend. Some of the intuitions are correct and some are wrong. You could try to articulate the intuitions and ask questions about them.

People form new intuitions all the time when encountering new things. Watch half a movie or read half a novel and you will have intuitions about the rest of the plot that you could introspect about.

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If you play video games or do something you like maybe you can can try to relate articulating intuitions to what you’re trying to do. If the articulating your intuitions a certain way didnt help you achieve ur goals maybe it’s an error? And if it does you can see how useful it is and learn something about it.

In the last five months, I’ve been playing marvel rivals and trying to focus on practicing my intuitions to play better. A way i try to relate philosophy to my gameplay is to think of something i really like about CF like automating a habit and then i try to think of something i could do in game that i can automate. If i get the habit down n im seeing that i could use it during play then thats a win/win for the philosophy part of me n the video game part of me.

Maybe u can do that with understanding/articulating ur intuitions. Like if u see how understanding/articulating your intuitions is possible in ur hobby, maybe you can do it and maybe you can find out u like doing it and it’s helpful.

If you do end up understanding/articulating ur intuitions often when doing ur hobby, you can use it as another tool to help you achieve ur goals.

P.S. Imma try to read the article and @LMD 's reply to get more context

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I played around with understanding intuitions today and learnt a few things.

I noticed that I had an active conflict I could experiment with and while I was thinking of trying something simpler, I thought I’d have a go and see what I learn.

The problem was replying to an offer for some work (I freelance). I want to get back to the person asap, but it’s been about 2 days, which is getting to be too long. It wasn’t obvious straight away but I realised I was conflicted about taking the work because I had a slightly flexible prior commitment on the same day. Usually it’s easy to reply with yes or no.

I started off by just brainstorming my thoughts. This ended up being a mix of pros and cons for and against taking the work. (I’m not going to share details for privacy reasons.) I realised that that wasn’t necessarily going to be that useful, because I wasn’t just trying to see the pros and cons. Like it was kind of useful, but it wasn’t really what I was trying to do.

Then I brainstormed my options. But then I realised that this isn’t what I wanted to know either. What I wanted to know was what the situation was that was causing the conflict, and then I wanted to brainstorm variations of that situation. I’m mainly interested in learning about that process. This seems obvious in hindsight, and silly that I didn’t see it sooner, but I saw it after a few false starts.

So I learnt that being able to articulate the scenario causing the conflict is one skill. That’s the first step I would try next time, not brainstorming options or my thoughts (though I don’t think those would hurt to do). If anything, I’d brainstorm ways to describe the scenario. I had success doing this quickly. I can imagine for some conflicts, it could be harder or easily to describe the scenario.

The next step was to think about ways to vary the situation that seem relevant to the conflict. I had success with this and found 4 key aspects to vary, and 2 of those also had nested variable details. So being able to think of ways to vary a scenario is also another skill.

One of the aspects was the specifics of the work. The place, complexity, and pay. I started of with giving myself 3 options {low, medium, high} for the complexity and pay. I realised this made the amount of scenarios pretty big, and with too much detail. Like if one option was a no for the high complexity, high pay, then it’d also be a no for the high complexity, medium and low pay. Like there were some redundant options. I thought, in this case, reducing the amount of options to just {high, low} was fine and if I wanted more detail I could add it later. So starting off more coarse grained was what I learned.

I’ve realised that I need some more details about the prior commitment I had on the day, so that I can make a decision. Importantly as regards philosophy I think I learned some things about the process in a cool way (like I got to see why to do it a certain way by making some mistakes along the way, not just taking someone’s word for a process.) There is more stuff for me to figure out. But I found some sub-skills that I can think about and work on. That’s breaking the skill down further.

Writing a summary like this of work that I’ve done without sharing details is also something I haven’t done that I’m trying out. I think it’s worked okay for a first try. Usually I combine the working with the sharing, if that makes sense.

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That’s great. It was understandable without needing more details. Yes considering different scenarios is a good strategy. You can evaluate each scenario as yes/no/conflicted to see what changes clearly resolve the conflict each way.

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yeah more coarse grained is often good. not everything needs detailed optimization. getting things down to only 2 options is simplest.

this is related yes/no decision making in general: while degree evaluations are fundamentally broken, having 3 or 4 different evaluations, even 10, is not fundamentally broken like degrees, but keeping it to 2 is simpler and broadly better.

similarly, you can build a computer with trits (0, 1, 2; or probably better as -1, 0, 1) instead of bits (0, 1). it has some advantages but we just do bits. trits are still reasonable but going much larger mostly isn’t, like it’s not going to be a good idea to make the most basic data unit in a computer have 42 possible values. 2 or 3 are the main numbers to consider. 3 has a few advantages: you can have balanced numbers centered around 0 and it’s closer to e (the important math number around 2.7, which tends to be a good amount for a lot of things). i think there are other advantages which i forget offhand. but i think binary was easier/simpler to make physical hardware for than ternary and now it’s so standard and widespread that even if it’s not ideal it wouldn’t be worth changing.

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Oh cool I didn’t actually consider that I could answer ‘still conflicted’. That’s a good point! I thought that I must be able to give just a yes/no answer but it makes perfect sense that that could still be hard for some scenarios. The issue with a conflict after all is trying to land on a yes or no answer and being unable.

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