I absolutely hate this phrase and everything it represents.
Re, reasons for polyamory.
One obvious explanation (or at the very least contributing factor) is network effects. Rationality started with a polyamorous founder, which could create a starting condition to seed experimentation with poly. I conjecture that the more of your romantic prospects that are polyamorous, the more likely you are to be poly.
My own experience was that I was poly before finding the rationality community, which points to a common factor that cause both, but on a group level it could just as easily be based on the initial starting conditions.
I’ll add that I also wouldn’t consider that phrase much to do with rationality, and more to do with following orders or something.
In general, I try to understand where intuitions/urges/desires come from, and then often either they dissolve because they’re not actually helping me get what I want, or else they’re strengthened by my realising they’re helping me get what I want, and then there’s nothing to overcome. I don’t say to myself “I don’t understand my desire for X, so let me push it down / bottle it up internally”. ‘Overcoming’ is often not a useful frame for reasoning when you’re confused about your internal processes.
I would think it a bad approach to polyamory to be constantly feeling angry/jealous/threatened by what’s happening in your romantic relationships, but keeping practising ignoring it until you’re numb to that part of yourself. I think the better thing is to practice asking that part of you why it feels that way, see if you can understand its motivation, and practise helping it look at whether the world is really something you should be scared about, or whether it in fact achieves your goals quite well. If you get the practise of dissolving the intuition to a fast speed, then the feelings of anger and being threatened will go away; if you do not, then this is a reason to not be polyamorous.
(My guess is that Jacobian doesn’t feel much of the above emotions, or else that he did but successfully dissolved the feelings enough to no longer feel those emotions. Nonetheless I wanted to explain why ‘overcoming intuitions’ didn’t feel like a good pointer to rationality.)
I used both “questioning intuitions” and “overcoming intuitions” in my own article, and both very much refer to what you wrote: understanding where they come from, dissolving when they’re not useful. I probably should have chosen a better vocabulary. By “questioning” I mostly meant the *inclination* to even doubt one’s intuitions, and by “overcoming” I meant the *ability* or *skill* at behaving in ways that go against your initial reaction (whether because the intuition is dissolved or overridden). I did not mean “overcoming intuition” to mean the normative stance that intuitions should be discarded willy-nilly or numbed, just the ability to do something about them.
Why not? I’m sorry if I’m being dense, but my understanding is that this community’s main focus is fixing the issues that human intuitions have. All it takes is a relabeling of “bias” with the word “intuition” to describe this process as “overcoming intuition”. Is that not what the phrase stands for? Or, a more specific guess, does it stand for a specific variant of rationality in which the whole intuition really is what you try to overcome?
(Or, yet another alternative, do you disagree with this community’s main stated goal? This isn’t my main guess because it looks like you’re a fairly prevalent and popular participant here, neither of which I would expect for somebody with fringe views.)
All it takes is a relabeling of “bias” with the word “intuition” to describe this process as “overcoming intuition”.
Words do not work like that.
The word “bias” has a meaning: patterns of thought that systematically veer away from the path of finding the truth. The word “intuition” has a different meaning: beliefs for which we cannot articulate our reasons. These are different things. All four segments of the Venn diagram are nonempty.
Call a dog’s tail a leg, and it won’t make the dog able to walk on it.
I’m starting to feel frustrated (and confused) by this conversation, because it feels to me like people are responding to something other than what I’m saying. Let me try to clarify what I’m getting at.
As far as I know, this conversation began on Put A Num On It, where Jacob used the phrase “overcoming intuition” as a name for one of his hypotheses about why rationalists are more polygamous than others. He says:
The willingness to entertain the idea that your intuitions about truth may be wrong is a prerequisite for learning Rationality, and Rationality further cultivates that skill.
So it seems to me that he was trying to bind the phrase “overcoming intuition” to the idea of overcoming the tight grip that intuitions hold over most people. Not throwing out all of our intuitions’ conclusions (I completely agree that that would be bad) but rather getting our intuitions under control so that we don’t just automatically obey them at every turn.
Do you agree that this is what Jacob meant by the phrase? Separately, do you agree that this is a reasonable thing to do?
Since I am confused, I will generate some hypotheses about what’s going on:
I have completely misunderstood Jacob’s intent for what the phrase means.
Evidence in favor of this hypothesis: This is going to sound sulky, but I cross my heart that I’m just trying to be a good rationalist: I seem to be the one with the less popular opinion here. Obviously it might just be the case that I really do have an unpopular opinion, but it’s also exactly what you’d expect to see if I was on a different page than everybody else about what we were talking about.
Others are jumping into the conversation late and are not aware of the commentary given about the phrase by the person who wrote it.
Evidence in favor of this hypothesis: The comment at the top of this chain says “I absolutely hate this phrase and everything it represents”, but I don’t see why OP would feel so strongly about “the willingness to entertain the idea that your intuitions about truth may be wrong”, which is what the phrase is being used to represent here. This makes me think that the phrase represents something other than that to OP.
Before I joined the site, there was some divide between people who really did think that we should throw out all of our intuition’s conclusions and people who did not acknowledged that sometimes correct conclusions could have illegible conclusions, and people responding to this comment chain are thinking of that divide when they profess their hatred of the phrase “overcoming intuition”.
Evidence in favor of this hypothesis: Even though I pointed out that Jacob was using the phrase to mean a certain thing, two different people have insisted that the phrase really means something different. That makes me think that the phrase has a history in this community.
The willingness to entertain the idea that your intuitions about truth may be wrong is a prerequisite for learning Rationality, and Rationality further cultivates that skill.
This is true (broadly).
it seems to me that he was trying to bind the phrase “overcoming intuition” to the idea of overcoming the tight grip that intuitions hold over most people
This is true.
Since I am confused, I will generate some hypotheses about what’s going on
Solid attempt, but none of your hypotheses explaining the confusion are correct.
The problem is that Jacob picked a term which has very different connotations than his attempted binding.
As a toy example, if I picked the word “murder” to refer to “saving a life”, then people would rightly object to me going around saying “Murder is the most important thing that we should do. Murder is good!” because the connotation everyone else has is very different.
Similarly, Jacob picked ‘the idea that your intuitions about truth may be wrong’ and called it ‘overcoming intuitions’. If I were to take ‘the idea that your teacher’s beliefs about science may be wrong’ and call it ‘overcoming education’, or if I were to take ‘the idea that your friends’ beliefs about the world may be wrong’ and call it ‘overcoming friendship’, this would be a bit confusing—it’s important to build a more nuanced relationship with these things, learn how to trust them, how to get value out of them, and also how to deal with them when they’re mistaken in a way that doesn’t throw them out entirely—like the phrase ‘overcoming friendship’ would imply, which sounds to me like not having friendships because they might lead you to have false beliefs.
Indeed, I think that ‘overcoming intuitions’ does suggest a much more adversarial relationship with intuitions than seems healthy to me, and is indeed a common relationship people have (“Oh no, the teacher told me the right answer, but I don’t understand it and feel like the other answer is right. I wish I could overcome my intuitions.”)
The disagreement here was sort of at two levels—people were objecting to the connotations of ‘overcoming intuitions’, and weren’t sure whether Jacob agreed with them about the underlying matter but had picked unfortunate words, or disagreed with them about the underlying matter and had picked terms that he definitely intended. And so overall people wanted to say “This phrase is bad and I don’t like what it represents”.
Added: I actually have a sense this is a problem many people get from the phrase “Overcoming Bias”. They label their intuitions as “biased” and then start trying to “overcome their intuitions”, which is counterproductive. The correct way to overcome bias is an increased understanding of intuitions, not throwing them out.
Note that this is exacerbated by the fact that the original questionnaire Jacob used to gather this data further implied the adversarial relationship between cognition and intuition.
I hadn’t read the Putanumonit posting, but now that I have, I think he’s going down the same wrong road. There’s a presumption throughout his opening paragraphs that intuitions are by default wrong, that they are obstacles to reaching the truth that should be dissolved. In his third paragraph he slides between intuitions and biases as if the two are interchangeable, and emotions as well. Jealousy and possessiveness are to be overcome: it’s against the rules of this game to reach the conclusion that they are valuable.
Oh, I see. Reading through his post again, I think I actually agree with you that Jacob was conflating the two. Thanks for clarifying, the whole conversation seems reasonable now.
The field is actually called heuristics and biases. Intuitions represent both. Trying to overcome them rather than understand and use them is a naive and counterproductive view of rationality.
do you disagree with this community’s main stated goal?
The closet thing we have to a stated goal for this community is on the about page: We are a community dedicated to improving our reasoning and decision-making. We seek to hold true beliefs and to be effective at accomplishing our goals. More generally, we work to develop and practice the art of human rationality.
The word bias doesn’t appear in that stated goal and there are reasons for it not appearing in it. There’s a little discussion of bias in the sequences that were written a decade ago but the concept of bias is used relatively little today.
Concepts such as internal double crux that rely on intuition are more central to the cutting edge ideas of this community about how to go about improving our reasoning and decision-making.
I absolutely hate this phrase and everything it represents.
Re, reasons for polyamory.
One obvious explanation (or at the very least contributing factor) is network effects. Rationality started with a polyamorous founder, which could create a starting condition to seed experimentation with poly. I conjecture that the more of your romantic prospects that are polyamorous, the more likely you are to be poly.
My own experience was that I was poly before finding the rationality community, which points to a common factor that cause both, but on a group level it could just as easily be based on the initial starting conditions.
I’ll add that I also wouldn’t consider that phrase much to do with rationality, and more to do with following orders or something.
In general, I try to understand where intuitions/urges/desires come from, and then often either they dissolve because they’re not actually helping me get what I want, or else they’re strengthened by my realising they’re helping me get what I want, and then there’s nothing to overcome. I don’t say to myself “I don’t understand my desire for X, so let me push it down / bottle it up internally”. ‘Overcoming’ is often not a useful frame for reasoning when you’re confused about your internal processes.
I would think it a bad approach to polyamory to be constantly feeling angry/jealous/threatened by what’s happening in your romantic relationships, but keeping practising ignoring it until you’re numb to that part of yourself. I think the better thing is to practice asking that part of you why it feels that way, see if you can understand its motivation, and practise helping it look at whether the world is really something you should be scared about, or whether it in fact achieves your goals quite well. If you get the practise of dissolving the intuition to a fast speed, then the feelings of anger and being threatened will go away; if you do not, then this is a reason to not be polyamorous.
(My guess is that Jacobian doesn’t feel much of the above emotions, or else that he did but successfully dissolved the feelings enough to no longer feel those emotions. Nonetheless I wanted to explain why ‘overcoming intuitions’ didn’t feel like a good pointer to rationality.)
I used both “questioning intuitions” and “overcoming intuitions” in my own article, and both very much refer to what you wrote: understanding where they come from, dissolving when they’re not useful. I probably should have chosen a better vocabulary. By “questioning” I mostly meant the *inclination* to even doubt one’s intuitions, and by “overcoming” I meant the *ability* or *skill* at behaving in ways that go against your initial reaction (whether because the intuition is dissolved or overridden). I did not mean “overcoming intuition” to mean the normative stance that intuitions should be discarded willy-nilly or numbed, just the ability to do something about them.
Very much seconded!
Yeah, I think the data in Jacob’s post supports network effects as a more likely explanation than common factors.
Why?
Intuitions are not something to be overcome.
Why not?
I’m sorry if I’m being dense, but my understanding is that this community’s main focus is fixing the issues that human intuitions have. All it takes is a relabeling of “bias” with the word “intuition” to describe this process as “overcoming intuition”. Is that not what the phrase stands for? Or, a more specific guess, does it stand for a specific variant of rationality in which the whole intuition really is what you try to overcome?
(Or, yet another alternative, do you disagree with this community’s main stated goal? This isn’t my main guess because it looks like you’re a fairly prevalent and popular participant here, neither of which I would expect for somebody with fringe views.)
Words do not work like that.
The word “bias” has a meaning: patterns of thought that systematically veer away from the path of finding the truth. The word “intuition” has a different meaning: beliefs for which we cannot articulate our reasons. These are different things. All four segments of the Venn diagram are nonempty.
Call a dog’s tail a leg, and it won’t make the dog able to walk on it.
I’m starting to feel frustrated (and confused) by this conversation, because it feels to me like people are responding to something other than what I’m saying. Let me try to clarify what I’m getting at.
As far as I know, this conversation began on Put A Num On It, where Jacob used the phrase “overcoming intuition” as a name for one of his hypotheses about why rationalists are more polygamous than others. He says:
So it seems to me that he was trying to bind the phrase “overcoming intuition” to the idea of overcoming the tight grip that intuitions hold over most people. Not throwing out all of our intuitions’ conclusions (I completely agree that that would be bad) but rather getting our intuitions under control so that we don’t just automatically obey them at every turn.
Do you agree that this is what Jacob meant by the phrase? Separately, do you agree that this is a reasonable thing to do?
Since I am confused, I will generate some hypotheses about what’s going on:
I have completely misunderstood Jacob’s intent for what the phrase means.
Evidence in favor of this hypothesis: This is going to sound sulky, but I cross my heart that I’m just trying to be a good rationalist: I seem to be the one with the less popular opinion here. Obviously it might just be the case that I really do have an unpopular opinion, but it’s also exactly what you’d expect to see if I was on a different page than everybody else about what we were talking about.
Others are jumping into the conversation late and are not aware of the commentary given about the phrase by the person who wrote it.
Evidence in favor of this hypothesis: The comment at the top of this chain says “I absolutely hate this phrase and everything it represents”, but I don’t see why OP would feel so strongly about “the willingness to entertain the idea that your intuitions about truth may be wrong”, which is what the phrase is being used to represent here. This makes me think that the phrase represents something other than that to OP.
Before I joined the site, there was some divide between people who really did think that we should throw out all of our intuition’s conclusions and people who did not acknowledged that sometimes correct conclusions could have illegible conclusions, and people responding to this comment chain are thinking of that divide when they profess their hatred of the phrase “overcoming intuition”.
Evidence in favor of this hypothesis: Even though I pointed out that Jacob was using the phrase to mean a certain thing, two different people have insisted that the phrase really means something different. That makes me think that the phrase has a history in this community.
This is true (broadly).
This is true.
Solid attempt, but none of your hypotheses explaining the confusion are correct.
The problem is that Jacob picked a term which has very different connotations than his attempted binding.
As a toy example, if I picked the word “murder” to refer to “saving a life”, then people would rightly object to me going around saying “Murder is the most important thing that we should do. Murder is good!” because the connotation everyone else has is very different.
Similarly, Jacob picked ‘the idea that your intuitions about truth may be wrong’ and called it ‘overcoming intuitions’. If I were to take ‘the idea that your teacher’s beliefs about science may be wrong’ and call it ‘overcoming education’, or if I were to take ‘the idea that your friends’ beliefs about the world may be wrong’ and call it ‘overcoming friendship’, this would be a bit confusing—it’s important to build a more nuanced relationship with these things, learn how to trust them, how to get value out of them, and also how to deal with them when they’re mistaken in a way that doesn’t throw them out entirely—like the phrase ‘overcoming friendship’ would imply, which sounds to me like not having friendships because they might lead you to have false beliefs.
Indeed, I think that ‘overcoming intuitions’ does suggest a much more adversarial relationship with intuitions than seems healthy to me, and is indeed a common relationship people have (“Oh no, the teacher told me the right answer, but I don’t understand it and feel like the other answer is right. I wish I could overcome my intuitions.”)
The disagreement here was sort of at two levels—people were objecting to the connotations of ‘overcoming intuitions’, and weren’t sure whether Jacob agreed with them about the underlying matter but had picked unfortunate words, or disagreed with them about the underlying matter and had picked terms that he definitely intended. And so overall people wanted to say “This phrase is bad and I don’t like what it represents”.
Added: I actually have a sense this is a problem many people get from the phrase “Overcoming Bias”. They label their intuitions as “biased” and then start trying to “overcome their intuitions”, which is counterproductive. The correct way to overcome bias is an increased understanding of intuitions, not throwing them out.
Ahh, I see. Thanks for this analysis, now I see where the posts above mine were coming from.
Note that this is exacerbated by the fact that the original questionnaire Jacob used to gather this data further implied the adversarial relationship between cognition and intuition.
Happy to hear :)
I hadn’t read the Putanumonit posting, but now that I have, I think he’s going down the same wrong road. There’s a presumption throughout his opening paragraphs that intuitions are by default wrong, that they are obstacles to reaching the truth that should be dissolved. In his third paragraph he slides between intuitions and biases as if the two are interchangeable, and emotions as well. Jealousy and possessiveness are to be overcome: it’s against the rules of this game to reach the conclusion that they are valuable.
Oh, I see. Reading through his post again, I think I actually agree with you that Jacob was conflating the two. Thanks for clarifying, the whole conversation seems reasonable now.
Try relabelling intuitions as priors. You can’t reject all intuitions because you can’t have an epistemology that starts from nothing.
The field is actually called heuristics and biases. Intuitions represent both. Trying to overcome them rather than understand and use them is a naive and counterproductive view of rationality.
The closet thing we have to a stated goal for this community is on the about page: We are a community dedicated to improving our reasoning and decision-making. We seek to hold true beliefs and to be effective at accomplishing our goals. More generally, we work to develop and practice the art of human rationality.
The word bias doesn’t appear in that stated goal and there are reasons for it not appearing in it. There’s a little discussion of bias in the sequences that were written a decade ago but the concept of bias is used relatively little today.
Concepts such as internal double crux that rely on intuition are more central to the cutting edge ideas of this community about how to go about improving our reasoning and decision-making.