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.
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.