Tldr: Write an effortpost on the subject of human intuition by February 10th, we will pick the winner by poll, I will donate $200 dollars to a charity mutually agreed upon with the winner
I've been thinking a lot about the subject of intuition lately, due to some life events. What do we know without knowing we know it, what can we communicate without knowing we communicate it. When I'm thinking a lot about something what do I want to do? Read a bunch of Mottizens thinking about it too! So, on a whim while thinking about the fact that great works like the Oresteia, Frankenstein, and Rousseau's best work were the result of competitions; I've decided to launch my own little essay competition and see if anyone bites.
The basic rules are thus:
-- Write an effortpost on the topic of Intuition. Standalone or in the CW or side threads; only rule is effort. Intuition can be as broadly or as narrowly defined as you like. Effortpost we define informally, but I'd say it must be at minimum 2000-4000 characters that is substantially your own original work. No ripping off another post, of your own or someone else's. An original summary/condensation or retelling of someone else's thesis is fine. How will we be able to tell? I'm kinda counting on the crowd here, especially if we get a little competitive fire going. I wouldn't count on slipping anything by the peanut gallery here.
-- On February 12th, as long as we have at least three entries, I will publish a poll, and we will select a winner. If anyone has a suggestion for a better method of picking a winner, I'm open to it. I'm thinking a poll would be better than just raw upvotes, but I'm open to other possibilities.
-- Once a winner is selected, I will work with the winner to select a charity, and I will donate $200 to that charity. I say I will work with the winner, I'm not donating $200 to NAMBLA or Mermaids UK or the StormFront Charity Fund just because somebody wins a poll. I will do my best to be reasonable, but there are some lines I'm not gonna cross here, and IDK there might be legal issues in some countries. I will post some kind of digital receipt in all likelihood, unless it's something like give the $200 in cash into the collection bin at church or to a homeless man or something. I'm sure for most here, the bigger thing will be winning, and being acknowledged as the winner.
So why? The mood just sort of struck me. And how do you know it will really happen? You don't, except that I spend way too much time hanging around here so you can figure I'll probably stick to my word. And anyway, you'll get even more motte street cred for being the guy who got welched on than you would for being the guy who got $200 donated to mosquito nets or whatever.
I'm curious to see what a bit of direction and effort could bring out, or maybe we need chaos. We'll see if we get three.
Please bring up any questions, or rules I haven't considered.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I’d never heard of intuition in mathematics - that’s a fascinating perspective.
As I said to @felipec elsewhere, I wonder if rationality or conscious thought can be seen as a sort of overarching myth which we use to coordinate. Every human mind has its own tangled threads, and rationality is a sort of weave we use to impose order on them, similar to religion or social customs, just more defined.
I know the left often decries capitalism as a religion - but what if mathematics, physics, and economics really are a new iteration of these classic religious myths?
They bind people together, coordinate action at a large scale, loosely get people to share some moral valence (albeit worse morals than religion did imo). The main difference to my mind is that there is an inherent logical structure behind them.
Perhaps this logical structure prevents the sort of fervent, faith based belief that older religions engendered. Then again, maybe we simply need to wait until we can find the synthesis between the vehicles of religion and rational structures.
Intuitionism is a massive topic in mathematics that I will not be able to do justice to – I suggest you check out Intuition/Proof/Certainty section in Reuben Hersh's «What is mathematics» that Borovik references, and Hardy on Ramanujan (@FiveHourMarathon you too could look intot that) and Grothendieck's «Reaping and sowing». But that's only scratching the surface.
Mathematics is obviously (I suppose) the pinnacle of rigorous human analytical reasoning, yet it's also where we most clearly see the raw dominance of intuitive, illegible thought. We still cannot formalize insight, because it comes from intuition that precedes all our formalisms, from the darkness that comes before.
Voevodsky, in a typically Russian Messianic attempt, strived to close the domain, and died trying.
A useful thought. It reminds me: there's a theory that our self-consciousness is just an encoding procedure for building efficient and densely connected episodic memory that enables adaptive behavior (that still arises not from narratives but from statistical inferences that narratives we tell about ourselves merely give form to). Yours is a model for the societal level.
Well they do provide a consensus reality, and pretty clearly a more accurate and adaptive one. (Not so much consensus morality). The question is whether the common «atheist, rational, empiricist» worldview is substantially informed by mathematics etc. as such, as opposed to journalistic and educationist narratives weaponising their prestige. See pic.
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Ahh a fellow Bakker fan eh?
And again fascinating points here. I’m not sure I grasp the theory about densely connected episodic memory, but it sure does sound smart.
In terms of your image, I’d say that science started off more in tune with object level reality/mathematics, and has been bastardized after we destroyed the elite class. It’s like a religion that has thrown open the gates to its priesthood.
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I see the same fervent faith-based beliefs among self-described rationalists. The only difference is that it's harder to prove them wrong, precisely because more often than not the beliefs are correct.
It's a sort of hot-hand fallacy: if rationality has gotten these 99 things right, what are the chances than the next is going to be wrong? Has to be zero. Right?
Of course, most people are not going to agree, because most people don't see anything wrong with the prevalent orthodoxy of their time.
But logic itself is not set in stone, there's many. See One Right Logic. If you based your entire epistemology on "logic", but turns out many beliefs rest on a feature that other logics don't share, well... You may very well be believing false things that are impossible to prove in your logic.
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