The way I see it, having intuitions and trusting them is not necessarily harmful. But you should actually recognize them by what they are: snap judgements made by subconscious heuristics that have little to do with actual arguments you come up with.
That way, you can take it as a kind of evidence/argument, instead of a Bottom Line—like an opinion from a supposed expert which tells you the “X is Y”, but doesn’t have the time to explain. You can then ask: “is this guy really an expert?” and “do other arguments/evidence outweight the expert’s opinion?”
That way, you can take it as a kind of evidence/argument, instead of a Bottom Line—like an opinion from a supposed expert which tells you the “X is Y”, but doesn’t have the time to explain. You can then ask: “is this guy really an expert?” and “do other arguments/evidence outweight the expert’s opinion?”
Note that both for experts and for your intuition, you should consider that you might end up double-counting the evidence if you treat them as independent of the evidence you have found—if everybody is doing everything correctly (which very rarily happens), you, your intuition and the experts should all know the same arguments, and naive thinking might double/triple-count the arguments.
The way I see it, having intuitions and trusting them is not necessarily harmful. But you should actually recognize them by what they are: snap judgements made by subconscious heuristics that have little to do with actual arguments you come up with. That way, you can take it as a kind of evidence/argument, instead of a Bottom Line—like an opinion from a supposed expert which tells you the “X is Y”, but doesn’t have the time to explain. You can then ask: “is this guy really an expert?” and “do other arguments/evidence outweight the expert’s opinion?”
Note that both for experts and for your intuition, you should consider that you might end up double-counting the evidence if you treat them as independent of the evidence you have found—if everybody is doing everything correctly (which very rarily happens), you, your intuition and the experts should all know the same arguments, and naive thinking might double/triple-count the arguments.
Good point!