Here are my ideological Turing test results of your comment:
People usually use the word intuition to refer to vague impressions that are not amenable to the same sort of justification as deliberative judgments, so these are different from the example that you provided of quickly inventing a deliberative rule and making errors in the process. This makes the purported counterexample less persuasive to me than you seem to expect it to be. Evaluate this comment in the context that we both still anticipate the same experiences, so this is likely a disagreement over word usage, and not likely to be highly significant.
I think this is a very productive criticism. I feel emphasis in italics makes it easier for me to write because it makes it more similar to the way that I speak, so please don’t interpret them as aggressive. The way my mind goes down this path is thus:
I have to make the qualification that I don’t believe that intuitions are vague feelings that cannot be justified, but vague feelings that have not been justified. There is always some fact of the matter as to whether or not it is, in some sense. But once again, probably something we would consider as disagreeing about word usage. But I think it’s an important boundary to draw. From Evans (2006):
If intuition means based on feelings without access to explicit reasoning, then that sounds like a type 1 process. But in some applications it seems to mean naïve judgement, which could be based on explicit rules or heuristics that occur to an untrained judge, in which case they would be type 2.
People often use the phrase ‘intuition’ to refer to confident beliefs retrieved from cached memory, and the idea is that when you go wrong, it’s because intuitions are unreliable. I’m getting at the possibility that that’s what people say, but it’s not the whole picture.
Say that you’re a judge on Pop Idol or something like that, and you have no experience doing it, and you want to quickly come up with a rule, and you retrieved the reliable intuition that pop idols are usually very physically attractive, and then invented a deliberative rule that used your subjective rating of each candidate’s physical attractiveness as a measure for evaluating their general Pop Idol factor, and suppose that physical attractiveness actually does not correlate perfectly with the true general Pop Idol factor. Then you would have begun with a reliable intuition and put it into an unreliable deliberative process and obtained an ‘unreliable’ result in the sense that it does not optimize for the purported normative criterion of Pop Idol judgment panels, which is the selection of the best Pop Idol; you would have picked the most attractive candidate instead, and you would have made a mistake on a higher level than using an unreliable intuition: you would have combined reliable intuitions in a deliberative but unreliable way. This is closely related to the ‘System 1 is fast, System 2 is slow’ distinction. Reasoning that looks like fast, unreliable intuitive reasoning can really just be fast, unreliable deliberative reasoning. So the main point is not about saying that there are a lot of counterexamples to ‘intuitive’ reasoning being System 1, but that if you want to do real work the category ‘intuitive’ won’t cut it, because it’s still a leaky generalization, even if it isn’t that leaky. Does that all make sense?
Here are my ideological Turing test results of your comment:
I think this is a very productive criticism. I feel emphasis in italics makes it easier for me to write because it makes it more similar to the way that I speak, so please don’t interpret them as aggressive. The way my mind goes down this path is thus:
I have to make the qualification that I don’t believe that intuitions are vague feelings that cannot be justified, but vague feelings that have not been justified. There is always some fact of the matter as to whether or not it is, in some sense. But once again, probably something we would consider as disagreeing about word usage. But I think it’s an important boundary to draw. From Evans (2006):
People often use the phrase ‘intuition’ to refer to confident beliefs retrieved from cached memory, and the idea is that when you go wrong, it’s because intuitions are unreliable. I’m getting at the possibility that that’s what people say, but it’s not the whole picture.
Say that you’re a judge on Pop Idol or something like that, and you have no experience doing it, and you want to quickly come up with a rule, and you retrieved the reliable intuition that pop idols are usually very physically attractive, and then invented a deliberative rule that used your subjective rating of each candidate’s physical attractiveness as a measure for evaluating their general Pop Idol factor, and suppose that physical attractiveness actually does not correlate perfectly with the true general Pop Idol factor. Then you would have begun with a reliable intuition and put it into an unreliable deliberative process and obtained an ‘unreliable’ result in the sense that it does not optimize for the purported normative criterion of Pop Idol judgment panels, which is the selection of the best Pop Idol; you would have picked the most attractive candidate instead, and you would have made a mistake on a higher level than using an unreliable intuition: you would have combined reliable intuitions in a deliberative but unreliable way. This is closely related to the ‘System 1 is fast, System 2 is slow’ distinction. Reasoning that looks like fast, unreliable intuitive reasoning can really just be fast, unreliable deliberative reasoning. So the main point is not about saying that there are a lot of counterexamples to ‘intuitive’ reasoning being System 1, but that if you want to do real work the category ‘intuitive’ won’t cut it, because it’s still a leaky generalization, even if it isn’t that leaky. Does that all make sense?
I liked your rephrasing of my comment. :) I felt that it was an accurate summary of what I meant.
I believe that we’re in agreement about everything.