Comment by asdfman123
5 days ago
Rationalists seem to believe that their ability to convince themselves of anything given enough evidence is a sign of intelligence. It's not. It's a sign of being disconnected from yourself and your true values. There is a great amount of wisdom and intelligence in properly honed intuition.
Rational thought should help you understand yourself, not disappear.
What you're really saying is that intelligence is multi-modal, what we'd call an "ensemble" in machine learning terminology. Intuition is another mode, a cognitive process that doesn't look or feel like symbolic reason but has evolved to do something that fills in symbolic reasoning's blind spots or serve some other evolutionary function.
I agree.
I might be wrong, of course, but I would argue that general intelligence -- meaning intelligence reducible to a single scalar 'g' -- does not exist. All intelligence is a hybrid ensemble and an adaptation to a particular niche or set of niches. I'm a reasonably smart human but I'd make a really dumb tree or dolphin.
To get started, look up the no free lunch theorem.
There's room for debate here though. I think our technological journey with AI is going to help answer some of these questions.
With the Rationalists, I get the sense that 'g' is a faith, a prior they won't examine.
I have never seen a room get colder than when I told a bunch of rationalists that intuition has value.