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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4408 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 17, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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That's expected because your reactions to criticism here are self-absorbed

Did you actually read my reactions? Because this is what I actually said in reality:

If you want to talk about my style, my tone, or why I wrote that particular sentence, I would gladly discuss that somewhere else.

This clearly shows I am open to criticism (provided the person is open to criticism of their criticism).

You are not entitled to have your stuff liked, or even to have reasons for liking something more than your stuff explained.

Straw man fallacy. I never claimed I'm entitled to that.

This is why criticism itself can and should be criticized: it's often wrong.

It all serves to explain intuition as an imprecise mastery of a domain that is based on talent and experience and sometimes is made obsolete, even net negative with formal methods

But this is obviously false, as my example of chess grand masters clearly show: they rely on intuition.

That's more nuanced than your dismissive summary.

Nuancedly wrong. And it's his essay the one that dismissed intuition without even considering it valuable: it's exactly the other way around.

Your text feels narcissistic

And if it feels narcissistic it has to be narcissistic, right? If it glitters there's no other option: it must be gold. Once again the converse error fallacy.

Put another way, you fail to write for your audience.

If my audience is not interested in the link between intuition and consciousness, that's on them.

Third, people may disagree with your actual argument, or at least find it unpersuasive.

All contestants used variations of the same argument (System-1/2 thinking), which suggests there's some obvious truth to it.

But finally you might be on to something: the reason why this particular essay won is that Mottizens do not like intuition. So any essay giving any value to intuition was immediately dismissed.

Sure, analysis – when possible – might help guide and correct rote learning, but the acquired System-1 «intuitive» judgement is only a product of repetition, trial and error; it both makes predictions the same expert wouldn't necessarily be able to make through explicit reasoning, and fails in a way explicit reasoning does not.

You are ignoring the obvious counterfactual to your notion: what can a person do without System-1 thinking? The answer is nothing. Absolutely nobody is born with all that is necessary to do high-level "explicit reasoning".

Whatever important high-level "explicit reasoning" you have done of late, it would not have been possible without previous training.

You mentioned "mental practice" in this paragraph, why did you think that was related? Pure intuition.

You could have written on any of that

I could not have written about that before thinking about it. I only thought about it after writing my essay.

I could have deleted my essay and wrote a new one as you suggest, and I'll probably write that new essay at some point, but that would be more effort, effort that you yourself did not want to do, as you didn't enter the contest.

I find it rich that you criticize me for not doing something you yourself admitted were unable to do.

Actually now that I think of it, this is a fertile field for investigation.

And you realized that only after thinking about it, didn't you? So you realize it's not possible to think of something before you think of it.

This is one meta conclusion of my essay. And you finally see there's something interesting here, but that wouldn't have been possible without me first sitting down to write about it.

This insight is now going to be part of your future intuitions, whether you accept the value of my essay or not, or even the value of intuition. You cannot unthink what you already thought.

Maybe give up on us, then?

That's obviously the correct decision if you are completely unable to look at arguments objectively, which was the whole selling point of the community, but time and time again isn't realized.

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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