{"id":2751,"date":"2012-04-16T10:11:19","date_gmt":"2012-04-16T14:11:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/?p=2751"},"modified":"2012-12-30T01:28:40","modified_gmt":"2012-12-30T06:28:40","slug":"when-do-you-reject-your-intuitions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2012\/04\/when-do-you-reject-your-intuitions.html","title":{"rendered":"When Do You Reject Your Intuitions?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

A while ago, a commenter emailed me to ask if I could recommend any books to read on human cognitive bias, and now that I\u2019ve finished Thinking Fast and Slow<\/a><\/em> by Daniel Kahneman, I can, with great enthusiasm. \u00a0When we study flaws in human reasoning, we usually start with glaring ones, and find out that they\u2019re just the most obvious examples of a broader problem (and the subtler errors are the more pernicious ones). \u00a0In the book, Kahneman has a really interesting riff on the M\u00fcller-Lyer illusion<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

All the lines are the same length, but the different orientations of the arrows trick you into thinking the middle one is longest. \u00a0Kahneman writes:<\/p>\n

Now that you have measured the lines, you\u2013your System 2, the conscious being you call \u201cI\u201d\u2013 have a new belief: you know<\/em> that the lines are equally long. But you still see<\/em> the bottom line as longer\u2026 To resist the illusion, there is only one thing you can do: you must learn to mistrust your impression of the length of lines when fins are attached to then. To implement that rule, you must be able to recognize the illusory pattern and recall what you know about it. Of you can do this, you will never again be fooled by the M\u00fcller-Lyer illusion. But you will still see one line as longer than the other.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Learning that we err isn\u2019t enough to fix our flaws. \u00a0It\u2019s a constant struggle against a part of our nature to not get fooled by our heuristics. \u00a0And, as Kahneman points out, sometimes we\u2019re never<\/em> going to beat them, we\u2019re just going to be able to remember we\u2019re wrong in time to not act on them.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I have mild prosopagnosia (face-blindness) and I have a lot of trouble recognizing people. \u00a0My junior year of college, I had a lot of trouble telling my roommate (GirlOne) apart from a different girl who had a leadership position in the debate group I was running (GirlTwo). \u00a0This meant that, about once a week, I\u2019d come back to the suite, or go from my room into the common room, and be convinced that GirlTwo was in my dorm \u2014 and since there was no reason she\u2019d be there casually, this presumably meant the debate group was having some kind of political crisis, and I\u2019d start feeling panicky.<\/p>\n

It was never<\/em> the case that GirlTwo was lying in wait for me in the common room \u2014 it was always just my roommate, GirlOne. \u00a0I couldn\u2019t stop making the visual error, but I got a lot better at remembering that my intuition was pretty much always<\/em> wrong, so I felt less jumpy. \u00a0I had to learn to stop\u00a0privileged\u00a0my flawed reactions and actively practice overriding my senses.<\/p>\n

Eliezer Yudkowsky highlights a different sphere where we have to strive against our intuitions in the introduction to his sequence on quantum mechanics<\/a>. \u00a0He writes:<\/p>\n

I am not going to tell you that quantum mechanics is weird<\/em>, bizarre<\/em>, confusing<\/em>, or alien<\/em>. QM is counterintuitive, but that is a problem with your intuitions, not a problem with quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics has been around for billions of years before the Sun coalesced from interstellar hydrogen. Quantum mechanics was here before you were, and if you have a problem with that, you are the one who needs to change. QM sure won\u2019t. There are no surprising facts<\/em>, only models <\/em>that are surprised by<\/em> facts; and if a model is surprised by the facts, it is no credit to that model\u2026<\/p>\n

In the coming sequence on quantum mechanics, I am going to consistently speak as if quantum mechanics is perfectly normal<\/em>; and when human intuitions depart from quantum mechanics, I am going to make fun of the intuitions<\/em> for being weird and unusual. This may seem odd, but the point is to swing your mind around to a native<\/em> quantum point of view.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The trouble is that, in a lot of cases, it\u2019s not as\u00a0obvious<\/em> that our intuitions are wrong as it is in the optical illusion or my faceblindness or quantum mechanics. \u00a0The challenge is trying to figure out which<\/em> intuitions need to be subverted, and how confident we need to be to override them. \u00a0Because fighting intuitions can sound a lot like brainwashing. \u00a0In my experience with my roommate, I was literally trying to unsee<\/em> what my eyes were telling me I did see.<\/p>\n

\n<\/p>

Heuristics\u00a0and reflexes aren\u2019t bad in themselves, so how do we decide when the errors don\u2019t<\/em> outweigh the\u00a0convenience, or when\u00a0we want to try and subvert them in particular\u00a0circumstances, or when we want to burn them out entirely. \u00a0This kind of problem is going to come up in a more specific way for tomorrow\u2019s post for the Patheos Book Club<\/a>, so I\u2019d be interested in your general principles (and\u00a0intuitions, if you trust them!) today.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A while ago, a commenter emailed me to ask if I could recommend any books to read on human cognitive bias, and now that I\u2019ve finished Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, I can, with great enthusiasm. \u00a0When we study flaws in human reasoning, we usually start with glaring ones, and find out that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68,8],"tags":[26,149,155,154,18],"class_list":["post-2751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-epistemologyphilosophy","category-reviewsrecommendations","tag-burn-off-the-dross","tag-map-and-territory","tag-subverting-intuitions","tag-thinking-fast-and-slow","tag-transhumanism"],"yoast_head":"\nWhen Do You Reject Your Intuitions?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A while ago, a commenter emailed me to ask if I could recommend any books 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