It doesn’t seem to me that obviousness is proof enough that an intuition is good, but something appearing “obvious” in your brain might be a marker/enrich for beliefs that have been selected for in social environments.
There are certainly times when it’s good to break universal maxims. Yet I don’t think it’s very easy to be a person who is capable of doing that—the divergent individual you’re talking about. Let’s take lying, for example. It is generally good to be honest. There are times when it is really net good and useful to lie. But if you’re someone who becomes very good at lying and habituated to lie, you probably start overriding your instincts to be honest. Maybe a divergent individual who says “fuck off” to all internal signals and logically calculates out the results of every decision could get away with that. But I think those people really run the risk of losing out on information baked into the heuristics.
Similarly, I don’t think those divergent people are really optimal actors, in the long-run. There are certainly times when it’s good to break universal maxims; but even for you, as an individual, it’s probably not good to do it all the time. If you get known as a grandma-pusher, you’re going to be punished, which is probably net good for society, but you also reduced your ability to add resources to the game. Human interaction is an iterated game, and there are no rings of Gyges.
It doesn’t seem to me that obviousness is proof enough that an intuition is good, but something appearing “obvious” in your brain might be a marker/enrich for beliefs that have been selected for in social environments.
There are certainly times when it’s good to break universal maxims. Yet I don’t think it’s very easy to be a person who is capable of doing that—the divergent individual you’re talking about. Let’s take lying, for example. It is generally good to be honest. There are times when it is really net good and useful to lie. But if you’re someone who becomes very good at lying and habituated to lie, you probably start overriding your instincts to be honest. Maybe a divergent individual who says “fuck off” to all internal signals and logically calculates out the results of every decision could get away with that. But I think those people really run the risk of losing out on information baked into the heuristics.
Similarly, I don’t think those divergent people are really optimal actors, in the long-run. There are certainly times when it’s good to break universal maxims; but even for you, as an individual, it’s probably not good to do it all the time. If you get known as a grandma-pusher, you’re going to be punished, which is probably net good for society, but you also reduced your ability to add resources to the game. Human interaction is an iterated game, and there are no rings of Gyges.