For most questions you can’t really compute the answer. You need to use some combination of intuition and explicit reasoning. However, this combination is indeed more trustworthy than intuition alone, since it allows treating at least some aspects of the question with precision.
I don’t think this is true; intuition + explicit reasoning may have more of a certain kind of inside view trust (if you model intuition as not having gears that can be trustable), but intuition alone can definitely develop more outside-view/reputational trust. Sometimes explicitly reasoning about the thing makes you clearly worse at it, and you can account for this over time.
Finally, it is the explicit reasoning part which allows you to offset the biases that you know your reasoning to have, at least until you trained your intuition to offset these biases automatically (assuming this is possible at all).
I also don’t think this is as clear cut as you’re making it sound; explicit reasoning is also subject to biases, and intuitions can be the things which offset biases. As a quick and dirty example, even if your explicit reasoning takes the form of mathematical proofs which are verifiable, you can have biases about 1. which ontologies you use as your models to write proofs about, 2. which things you focus on proving, and 3. which proofs you decide to give. You can also have intuitions which push to correct some of these biases. It is not the case that intuition → biased, explicit reasoning → unbiased.
Explicit reflection is indeed a powerful tool, but I think there’s a tendency to confuse legibility with ability; someone can illegibly to others or themselves have the capacity to do something (like use an intuition to correct a bias). It is hard to transmit such abilities, and without good external proof of their existence or transmissibility we are right to be skeptical and withhold social credit in any given case, else we be misled or cheated.
I don’t think this is true; intuition + explicit reasoning may have more of a certain kind of inside view trust (if you model intuition as not having gears that can be trustable), but intuition alone can definitely develop more outside-view/reputational trust.
I don’t see it this way. I think that both intuition and explicit reasoning are relevant to both inside view and outside view. It’s just that the input of inside view is the inner structure of question and the input of outside view is the reference category inside which the question resides. People definitely use the outside view in debates by communicating it verbally, which is hard to do with pure intuition. I think that ideally you should use combine intuition with explicit reasoning and also combine inside view with outside view.
I also don’t think this is as clear cut as you’re making it sound; explicit reasoning is also subject to biases, and intuitions can be the things which offset biases. As a quick and dirty example, even if your explicit reasoning takes the form of mathematical proofs which are verifiable, you can have biases about 1. which ontologies you use as your models to write proofs about, 2. which things you focus on proving, and 3. which proofs you decide to give. You can also have intuitions which push to correct some of these biases. It is not the case that intuition → biased, explicit reasoning → unbiased.
You can certainly have biases about these things, but these things can be regarded as coming from your intuition. You can think of it as P vs. NP. Solving problems is hard but verifying solutions is easy. To solve a problem you have to use intuition, but to verify the solution you rely more on explicit reasoning. And since verifying is so much easier, there is much less room for bias.
I don’t think this is true; intuition + explicit reasoning may have more of a certain kind of inside view trust (if you model intuition as not having gears that can be trustable), but intuition alone can definitely develop more outside-view/reputational trust. Sometimes explicitly reasoning about the thing makes you clearly worse at it, and you can account for this over time.
I also don’t think this is as clear cut as you’re making it sound; explicit reasoning is also subject to biases, and intuitions can be the things which offset biases. As a quick and dirty example, even if your explicit reasoning takes the form of mathematical proofs which are verifiable, you can have biases about 1. which ontologies you use as your models to write proofs about, 2. which things you focus on proving, and 3. which proofs you decide to give. You can also have intuitions which push to correct some of these biases. It is not the case that intuition → biased, explicit reasoning → unbiased.
Explicit reflection is indeed a powerful tool, but I think there’s a tendency to confuse legibility with ability; someone can illegibly to others or themselves have the capacity to do something (like use an intuition to correct a bias). It is hard to transmit such abilities, and without good external proof of their existence or transmissibility we are right to be skeptical and withhold social credit in any given case, else we be misled or cheated.
I don’t see it this way. I think that both intuition and explicit reasoning are relevant to both inside view and outside view. It’s just that the input of inside view is the inner structure of question and the input of outside view is the reference category inside which the question resides. People definitely use the outside view in debates by communicating it verbally, which is hard to do with pure intuition. I think that ideally you should use combine intuition with explicit reasoning and also combine inside view with outside view.
You can certainly have biases about these things, but these things can be regarded as coming from your intuition. You can think of it as P vs. NP. Solving problems is hard but verifying solutions is easy. To solve a problem you have to use intuition, but to verify the solution you rely more on explicit reasoning. And since verifying is so much easier, there is much less room for bias.