Intuitive Disagreements

My philosophy, Critical Fallibilism (CF), says that we should accept and act on only non-refuted ideas, and should reject refuted ideas. It also says if you have no criticism of accepting an idea (or reaching a conclusion or taking action according to an idea) – if you can see no downside or problem whatsoever – then you should accept it. When hearing this, it’s important to understand that refutation is a broad, accessible concept. Criticism is easy to come by because the requirements for rejecting ideas are low. When dealing with your own life, refutation doesn't require anything like logical proof.

It’s a refutation to say I intuitively dislike that, and your reasoning and my other knowledge are inadequate to understand and address whatever the problem is. You can say that in a debate with another person. It's a rational issue to bring up. You're pointing out that the knowledge the person has presented in the debate is incomplete from your point of view even though you haven't yet put into words exactly where the incompleteness is. If you accepted the conclusion with no further information, you'd have a problematic contradiction in your mind. That is a valid reason not to act on or accept the idea (now, with no further explanation or argument). It’s a decisive criticism of something specific: you accepting the idea, now, given what you know right now.

Intuitive dislike isn't a decisive criticism of considering the idea potentially correct, investigating further, thinking it over, reading a book on the topic, or taking other steps to explore the matter. If your intuition objects to all of those too, that's more unusual and concerning. It being concerning doesn't mean to ignore your intuition or try harder to override it or suppress it; concerning means that figuring out what's going on is more important.

Note: Intuition is a form of subconscious idea which I'll use as a recurring example. More broadly, anything in your subconscious or in your mind but not in clear words could be brought up, such as emotions, not just intuitions.

Note that you refuting your acceptance of the idea doesn't mean that other people shouldn't accept or act on the idea. That is a refutation about you accepting or acting on the idea.

There's a common idea that "gut feelings" are irrational and should be ignored when doing rational debate or analysis. This is incorrect. "Gut feelings" come from your mind, not your gut, and nothing in your mind should be ignored when trying to be rational. Rationality must deal with the whole of reality, including you (you are a relevant part of reality), not ignore parts of it.

In CF, ideas get multiple evaluations because they are evaluated as {idea, goal, context} triples (IGCs). Having intuitive disagreements in your mind, or not, are different contexts. Should David accept an idea that contradicts his intuition? Generally no. Should Sakura accept an idea that contradicts David's intuition? Sure. If David knows something important, he didn't yet share it in a way that Sakura could learn from. Maybe that will happen one day; maybe not; Sakura generally shouldn't put her life on hold waiting around for that possibility. And Sakura, unlike David, can accept the idea without creating internal contradictions in her mind. If Sakura is married to David and acting on the idea would affect both of them, then they better consider it more, but that kind of thing is a special case, not the generic situation.

There are billions of people in the world. In general, each person needs to act based on the information accessible to them and based their own situation. Their own intuition is relevant to them. Other people's intuitions and unshared ideas are generally not relevant to them unless you're trying to do activities involving those other people. David can't worry about the intuitions of every stranger, even within his own country; there are too many people and David has no way to find out what's in all their heads. The intuitions of family, friends, coworkers and people you talk with have more chance to be relevant to you, but that's mostly because you want to get along with those people, not to use their intuitions in deciding what abstract ideas to believe.

If David learns something new and it addresses his intuitive doubts, he can accept the idea. Note that this doesn't change the evaluation of the old IGC. David accepting the idea in that context, where the intuition wasn't addressed, is still refuted. A different IGC about David accepting the idea in his new context is not refuted.

Broadly speaking, refuted IGCs stay refuted forever, because when you learn anything new that changes the evaluation then you're dealing with a new IGC with a different context (or, depending on the details, the new information could change the idea or goal, rather than the context, or multiple parts could change). You can use similar reasoning with non-refuted IGCs: if an idea is false but you didn't know better in an old context, then it can make sense for that idea to still be evaluated as correct for that context: it was the right conclusion to reach at the time given the available information; it wasn't a mistake to reach that conclusion in that context.

When you learn new things, it tends to generate new IGCs with new evaluations rather than change the evaluations of IGCs that you evaluated in the past. This is similar to Objectivism's concepts of contextual knowledge and contextual certainty. It's also related to functional programming's concept of avoiding mutable state and creating new data instead of changing old data (we generally create new IGCs instead of changing old IGCs).

Different contexts can yield different answers about how to deal with intuitive doubts. Consider special emergency contexts with extreme time pressure, with inaction being a clearly bad option. In that context, it’s better to pick something and act on it even if you have intuitive doubts, rather than try to consider more when there’s no time. It’s better to do an action that might work over delaying and therefore guaranteeing failure. However, this isn’t really an exception regarding how to deal with conflicting ideas because you shouldn’t be conflicted about it. You should both intuitively and intellectually/explicitly understand the time pressure and want to pick something even if it’s not perfect. People generally already have an intuitive understanding of time pressure and know that sometimes it’s better to try (even if you’re unsure of the right plan) than to delay enough that you don’t get a chance at all. People may have mental conflicts about time pressure, but at least logically or rationally there isn't a particularly hard issue there: time pressure isn't a very challenging scenario for CF to address in the abstract. Note that it's also fine to just do what you intuitively want to in time pressure; time pressure doesn't bias things for or against intuitions or explicit ideas; the thing to do differently in time pressure is object less to reaching any conclusion (be less picky and critical when all parts of you agree that all the conclusions you're considering are better than running out of time without acting).

In general in life, instead of aiming for perfection, you should aim for the best choices you can make given reasonable, appropriate use of resources like time and energy. A refutation of “I should do X” would be a reason that doing X will fail at your goal of going through life in a non-perfectionist way and trying to achieve your main goals. In general, ignoring your intuition will actually lead to failure because part of you thinks something is a good idea, part thinks it’s a bad idea, and then you aren’t investigating and sorting things out. If it’s not important and there’s nothing at stake, then your intuition should know that and offer no strong or important objection (and also there’s also no real downside to doing what your intuition wants). If your intuition keeps objecting anyway, then it disagrees about something – e.g. it might think the issue actually is important and high stakes for one of your values.

The main point is that, in general, having intuitive doubts refutes the IGC about you accepting the idea now despite those doubts. If you ignore your intuitive disagreements with ideas, then you will fill your mind with contradictions and get more confused over time as you continue doing this. Things won't just naturally get better later; your ideas will become a more complex mess that's harder to untangle.

What you should do in your life – what choices to make, ideas to accept – is a different matter than the abstract truth. You can lose a debate where you can't refute the ideas someone says, but you still shouldn't just accept them as your own beliefs. That's not only possible but pretty common. Even if you can't express your intuitions in the debate, or argue about the abstract truth issue, you can still argue about the issue of what you personally should do, which your intuitions are certainly relevant to. You can do that alone in your own mind without bringing it up with the person you're debating, or you can bring it up, depending on the situation and your skillset.

It's possible to bring up intuitions regarding a debate about abstract truth. That's harder than bringing them up regarding the issue of what you should believe and act on now. But it's doable too. Regardless, keep in mind there are two different things here which can be evaluated separately. The evaluation of what idea won the debate and what you should believe are separate things. You can lose a debate and not change your mind to match the conclusion from the debate because those are different IGCs. That's not automatically irrational. Don't be pressured into accepting contradictions. Instead, work on understanding your intuition more, exploring ideas more thoroughly, and having high standards before you accept ideas. Work on your own personal progress rather than letting debate outcomes control you. Good people you debate with should be nice about that. Some people may not be nice or reasonable, but that's their error, not yours. If they resort to public shaming and bullying, call them out or ignore them, or cope in some other way, but don't give in in your own mind due to those irrational tactics.

Demanding ideas meet high standards is actually an effective debating technique, by the way. If you personally have high standards for ideas before accepting them, and you simply express those in debate, it'll pose a major challenge to people. You can say "That sounds neat but here are a few things I want from ideas. How does your idea provide these things?" Like you want ideas to answer your questions, so before you accept the idea your debate partner is offering, you want him to answer the dozen questions you have, so that you don't have to go read a bunch of books and research it all yourself (and then maybe reach his conclusion, or maybe not, who knows). If he hasn't read a bunch of books and figured it all out in the same way you would have, then maybe that isn't good enough for you to accept because he left holes in his knowledge and his research didn't meet your standards for your own knowledge.

Note that you should only demand ideas meet high standards in honest ways: ask people to meet the standards you actually use for your knowledge; don't ask them to meet an extra high standard as a debating tactic that isn't how you judge other ideas. If you don't read many books, then it's dishonest to reject an idea for not being backed up by research involving reading a bunch of books. If you accept ideas while ignoring a bunch of details that aren't worked out, then don't demand in a debate that all the details be worked out for the other guy's idea. Honesty should make your intuitions and explicit demands match well. If you are fine with not reading books (and papers and other good information sources), then your intuition won't object to a non-book-based idea; if you often do lots of book research, then your intuition will be wary of non-book-based ideas.

To bring up intuitive objections in debate, you need to be willing to explore them and answer questions about them. You may find that's too vulnerable to do in public or with someone who is debating adversarially. It'd be better if more people were nicer, more in touch with their emotions and intuitions, more friendly about such topics, etc., but our society has lots of problems with these issues. Anyway, if you do bring it up and are willing to talk about your intuitions, then you and your debate partner can both come up with questions about the intuitions which you can try to answer in order to understand your intuitive concerns better. Then those concerns can be discussed which can lead to any conclusion (your intuitions could be right or wrong, or right about some points and wrong about others). Many debate partners won't participate in this kind of discussion in a reasonable way and it'd take a lot of skill and confidence to deal with that, so you could withdraw from the debate if there are bad signs about them not being willing to discuss intuitions in a respectful way.

The questions that intuitions can most reliably answer are yes or no questions about what they approve or disapprove of. The primary content of an intuition (or at least of the part you can express) is often that it thinks some things are good and some are bad. So you can start asking about individual things or groups of things to see which ones the intuition says are good or bad. With groups of things, you may get a mixed answer (partly good and partly bad) and have to consider smaller groups or individual things to get clarity. What you thought was an individual thing might even need to be broken into sub-parts or sub-sub-parts to get clarity. For many things, your intuition may offer no opinion, which is fine and means it isn't in the way (has no criticisms) regarding that thing. With many data points about how an intuition views things (and doesn't care about other things), you can figure out patterns and come up with hypotheses about how the intuition works in terms of explanations and concepts. Often the intuition will be reasonably familiar to people in the culture and guessing that it's similar to common intuitions will often help figure it out faster. Intuitions often come from past interactions with society and messages that society communicates repeatedly, so considering common societal messaging will sometimes be effective at figuring out intuitions faster and easier.

A complicating factor is that you may have multiple relevant intuitions and not realize which intuition is answering which question (and mixed answers can be due to multiple intuitions answering at once, rather than due to considering too large a group of things). In that case, the data points you gather with intuitive answers may contain multiple patterns (one per intuition) rather than one pattern, which can make it much harder to analyze. Hopefully you can intuitively tell when you're using a different intuition, or at least keep your answers to a small number of related intuitions rather than using some totally different intuition sometimes without realizing it.

Sometimes you can get more words out of your intuitions than "yes", "no", "good", bad", "unsure", "don't care", etc. But even if you can only express your intuitions with very minimal answers like those, you can still have a whole big discussion about them just by coming up with lots of questions. Many little answers adds up to a lot of information. You don't need complex answers to get complex information as long as there are lots of answers. Computers store complex data in only 1's and 0's: the answer to what data is stored at a single, specific location is always 1 or 0, but there are billions of simple pieces of data in a modern computer which add up to complex results: apps, essays, videos, websites, video games, AI tools, and much more.

If your debate partner can't figure out what your intuition is and how to address it, even though you're willing to talk about it and answer many questions about it, then he doesn't know what you should do. He doesn't know how your intuition works and how to resolve the conflict between the intuition and his claim. He doesn't know which side of this conflict is correct. He should not be pushy; he should not tell you to accept his claim despite your intuition that he can't answer. You gave him access to information about the intuition, and if he can't figure out the puzzle then he doesn't know the answer. He can still claim to have won the debate in the abstract, but he shouldn't claim that you (or anyone else with a similarly unaddressed intuition) should accept his conclusion now. He can simply say that he doesn't have an intuitive doubt, and that you haven't communicated enough about your intuition for him to accept it as his own intuition, so he is free to reach his conclusion even if you aren't. That's fine. If you guys both mutually don't know enough about your intuition to figure everything out, then you can mutually agree that you're in different situations and should take different actions and have different beliefs going forward.

Personally, if I was losing a debate about some interesting topic, that sounds to me like a great opportunity to turn the other guy into my research assistant by asking a ton of questions about everything I'd want to know about the topic if I spent months researching it. To win a debate properly, you have to actually share a lot of relevant knowledge, at least if you're asked to (basically, to win a debate, you have to share enough knowledge that reaching your conclusion is correct). Either the person I'm debating will have all the answers (great!) or he won't (so I might partially lose the debate, but it won't be a decisive win for him, so it'll make sense that I don't just accept his claim). I think it's only fair and honest to do this if you're asking for your actual, pre-existing knowledge-quality standards to be met; be congruent about it with how you treat other topics; don't temporarily raise your standards just for the debate; don't be biased with double standards.

Hopefully this has provided some useful clarifications and thoughts about debate, intuition and CF. If you remember one key point, try to remember this way of viewing intuitions. Intuitions are ideas, they can be discussed explicitly, and they shouldn't be suppressed. Overall, they aren't really better or worse than explicit ideas, just different. Suppressing intuitions is about as bad as suppressing your explicit ideas (which should be refuted, answered, addressed, accepted, etc., to resolve the conflicts they're involved in; don't just refuse to listen to them and try not to think about them while acting against them). Having an intuitive disagreement with an idea is a refutation of you accepting it right now because that would involve suppressing your intuition. Refutations about what conclusions you should reach now and what actions you should take now are much easier to come by than abstract refutations about impersonal issues. And what I've said about intuitions also applies to emotions and some other ideas or pieces of your subconscious that you don't know how to express in words well.