31–40 of 98 posts
Intelligence is about making good decisions. Intellect can aid in that, but it's not the only factor, and after a certain level it wouldn't even be the primary factor.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you suggesting that reason include intuition? I don't believe that would ever be a helpful definition of the word. --- Reason is conscious; intuition is subconscious. Of course, they're related: reason can train intuition, and intuition can catalyze reason. But I disagree that a conversational distinction is inappropriate.
I'm not suggesting it, I outright stated it in my comment. My point is that potentially logical connections can (or must) be made subconsciously and that that is an aspect of how the faculty of reason works. Here is an example you experience every single day and even right now if you type a reply to my comment. If you want to express an idea in words you don't consciously and methodically select words from a dictiona…
> Here is an example you experience every single day and even right now if you type a reply to my comment. If you want to express an idea in words you don't consciously and methodically select words from a dictionary, no. The words come automatically with nary a thought, you just issue the command to summon the words to express your idea.
> Without this ability you (and more specifically reason) could not function at all, ergo, intuition and subconscious processes must be a component of reason, reason being our faculty for processing information.
To claim an equivalence between reason and intuition based on that reasoning would necessarily require that you also include irrational conscious behavior. Which I hope will show you that your position is, in effect, an empty proposition that sheds no light on the matter.
Intutitive thought processes and rational thought processes, in my mind, have the same relationship as music and mathematics. Clearly there is a common ground, but they are distinct.
Less whimsically, one may arrive at a decision based on intution that is subsequently validated by events. However, this arrival does not permit a retracing of steps to permit future decisions. Of course it is possible to extract a general law or principle from the experience, but that is not a given.
Reason, on the other hand, is the application of extant, and formulation of new, systemized understanding. However that should not be taken as a measure of the superiority of reason to intution, for it is equally true that intution can at times give us wings to go where reason can not take us.
The article presents the following experimental premise: “Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.” Then they asked the subjects which was more probable: (A) Linda is a bank teller or (B) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the fe…
Your reaction is exactly the reason the question was constructed that way. A lot of the available information would lead you to conclude that the provided details were important and that they support a specific option being more likely. But if you rationally consider the options, it's apparent that option B can't possibly be more likely than option A, regardless of the information presented, because option B is by de…
https://doc.research-and-analytics.csfb.com/docView?language...
It's based on a confidence calibration test available here confidence.success-equation.com
I have known many clearly intelligent people who held irrational opinions quite strongly. For example, huge believers in specific, concrete stock market predictions based on some fibonacci sequence nonsense, to the point of actively loosing six figures through multiple failed predictions over a decade+ and still believing. So clearly, they're distinct. But the question about the bank teller doesn't seem like the stro…
The question about the bank teller is a parlor trick that exploits normal language processing, specifically the Gricean Maxim of Relevance ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle#Maxim_of... ). The maxim specifies that if somebody takes the trouble to point something out to you (say, that someone you've never met used to be a very politically-active left-winger), what they pointed out must be relevant to the conversation.
It's basically another exercise in https://xkcd.com/169/ -- the experimenters aren't grasping the lesson that "communicating badly and then acting smug when you're misunderstood is not cleverness".
Edit: Not sure why I was downvoted. I referred to this part:
"R.Q. would measure the propensity for reflective thought — stepping back from your own thinking and correcting its faulty tendencies"
That's almost a perfect definition of what critical thinking is - being critical to your own thought.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you suggesting that reason include intuition? I don't believe that would ever be a helpful definition of the word. --- Reason is conscious; intuition is subconscious. Of course, they're related: reason can train intuition, and intuition can catalyze reason. But I disagree that a conversational distinction is inappropriate.
I agree that those are useful words to distinguish. I also think it's worthwhile to have a thing called "rationality" which maybe means "doing the best possible thing with your brain given your goals," which has to include both of what we're calling reason and intuition [1]. But I wanted to say some words here to flesh out the subject in a little more detail. "Reason" and "Intuition" may be separate, incomparable typ…
> I agree that those are useful words to distinguish.
Not "words" but "concepts". Words are just the form of our identifications. You could be writing the same concepts (or more generally; ideas) in French (different words) but the meaning remains the same. The precision with which you use your words is a sign of the precision with which you use your concepts.
> More broadly, I think people are capable of having significantly more access to their "unconscious" than most people realize (hence the scare quotes around the word ;)), and further that those non-logical processes can also be different, and yield better or worse, faster or slower results.
A perfect example of my previous comment. The concept "unconscious" should be reserved for boxers knocked out in the ring or a man in surgery under general anesthesia. I like to use "subconscious" for mental processes that I know are going on but I am not consciously aware of. Some of these mental processes can be brought into conscious awareness and some cannot -- I think this is an important aspect of reason. You keep having to use scare quotes because you are groping for this distinction; the subconscious is alive and active and real whereas the unconscious is inactive, dead.
> How you actually implement "reason" can make it better or worse, faster or slower, and I've found that people can make significant gains by changing the details of what they are doing with their minds.
The most creative and powerful ideas occur subconsciously. I inadvertently discovered the interrupted nap trick.[1] I'd fall asleep with my laptop and when it slipped off my belly I'd wake up with new ideas to attack any problems that I was working on.
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3023078/leadership-now/how-dali-...
The article presents the following experimental premise: “Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.” Then they asked the subjects which was more probable: (A) Linda is a bank teller or (B) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the fe…
Your reaction is exactly the reason the question was constructed that way. A lot of the available information would lead you to conclude that the provided details were important and that they support a specific option being more likely. But if you rationally consider the options, it's apparent that option B can't possibly be more likely than option A, regardless of the information presented, because option B is by de…
The premise of the example only demonstrates a susceptibility to a situation where the individual is not expecting to be judged based on technicalities.
Technically, in a three card monte game, on the street, you have no assurance that the dealer is operating the deck with integrity. Technically, on the street, you have no assurance that other players are not collaborating with the dealer.
Does this prove that humans are often innately irrational? Maybe insofar as any other parlour trick does.
The claim that a bystander should know that their own capacity for estimation of the likelihood that Linda's occupation may be bank teller shall be poor, is masked, in terms of relevance to the rest of the context of the presented scenario. A bystander's estimation of feminist alignment is anticipated and intended.
When the bystander chooses option (B), an assertion that they have no insight into whether Linda was a banker or not, suddenly becomes the defining aspect of the test.
So now we've proven that given an unexpected context, a bystander is surprised by a sudden ambush within that context.
While such nuances may be interesting on a much grander scale, in most cases, the experiment is not framed that way, as a design to misdirect the individual, and certainly, the authors of this op-ed article make the same mistake in pointing at the idea that a bystander should be expected to know that they have no way of knowing whether or not Linda might be a bank teller.
> people tend to make decisions based on intuition rather than reason. I think these types of article have a too-narrow definition of rationality. I think that emotions, feelings and intuition are subconscious processes but still part of the faculty of reason. The mistake is to think that rationality = conscious-logical-deduction but anyone who has solved some complex problem knows the experience of working on a prob…
Are you suggesting that reason include intuition? I don't believe that would ever be a helpful definition of the word. --- Reason is conscious; intuition is subconscious. Of course, they're related: reason can train intuition, and intuition can catalyze reason. But I disagree that a conversational distinction is inappropriate.