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naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
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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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Notes -
INTUITION ESSAY FINAL
My Intuition Essay contest, is concluded. Thank you to everyone who participated, I really enjoyed reading every entry! Voting is concluded. The winner is: @Pitt19802 with This Untitled Piece Comparing Statistical and Intuitive Approaches in Baseball and Politics. Mr. Pitt selected Stage Right Greensburg, a small local theater company in my home state of PA, to receive the $300 in prize money (I tossed in a little to cover fees). Mr. Pitt only threw his work in at the last moment, so let that be a lesson: never be discouraged, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take, shoot for the moon even if you miss you'll land among the stars, man in the arena, every dog has his day, gods stand up for bastards, even a blind squirrel finds a nut, etc. etc. ditto ditto.
Thank you to all of our participants, and I want to take one more opportunity to highlight their excellent work.
@TheDag entered Intuition in a Scientific Age
@f3zinker entered A Case For/Against Education, Intuition
@felipec entered My Intuition About Intuition
@Gaashk on a Jungian View of Intuition
and
@ryandv on Forming Connections via Similarity of Mental Models
@DaseindustriesLtd also wrote this piece on the topic but explicitly asked to be excluded from the competition, hoping to leave the field to the rest of us.
Can anybody who voted explain to me how the winner entry is superior to mine?
From what I can see this is what it said about intuition:
Grady Little may have made a decision based on intuition, Joe Maddon didn't
To improve intuition one must train
LBJ was intuitive, Obama wasn't
That's basically it.
This is what it didn't say:
What is intuition
What is the opposite of intuition
When is intuition helpful
When is intuition unhelpful
How complex intuition is
What intuition is comprised of
My essay at least attempted to answer these.
To me this is clear evidence of bias in this community.
And because Mottizens are very prone to commit converse error fallacies, I shall point out that this is not something specific to my essay, I also don't see how the winner is superior to this entry: Intuition in a Scientific Age, which also does attempt to answer some of the important questions, such was: what is intuition? I also would be interested in hearing why somebody who voted for the winner considered it superior to that one.
You say in your submission you've been writing for over 20 years. I'm not sure how one could count that. I've started writing before my self-awareness kicked in, probably was 5, it was a fanfic for a book. But I guess you mean some professional capacity, in which case my career is shorter and my feedback will probably be deemed low-quality.
That's expected because your reactions to criticism here are self-absorbed – and not really conductive to high-effort feedback, which you ostensibly solicit. This post, too, opens with a combative, accusatory and embittered manner – or at least such is the impression it gives off – thus I am not very enthusiastic about reading on (having finished it: yep, no change). It's strongly reminiscent of JB/EB, who was so sure of his intelligence that yawns could only be evidence of the audience's inferiority, and who attempted putdowns of people getting warmer reception than himself.
You are not entitled to have your stuff liked, or even to have reasons for liking something more than your stuff explained. If you want to be liked, you should write for your audience, and if you want constructive criticism, it's also on you to make your readers find it worth their while. This is a bit tragic, no doubt – it makes improvement harder. To be fair, criticism does come with a cost. When @… huh, [deleted] now – criticized me, when people call me out on lazy errors or ignorance, I recognize those as minor (or not quite…) hits to reputation; but I am always very thankful, precisely because it's not easy to get tips for improvement. And flattered, because it means someone engages with my output enough to do more than downvote and move on. In the world that's drowning in content, where filtering trash and meh time-wasters on intuitive autopilot is a life-critical skill, that's a big deal: it means you have a credit of trust, for whatever reason, and should use it well.
In this friendly spirit of a fellow auteur, I submit some feedback. Don't get pissed if you can.
@Pitt19802's piece was, first things first, better written on a purely technical level. Not exactly New Yorker material, in fact I find its baseball section a bit too thick with typical journo tactics, almost a pastiche of DFW's Roger Federer as Religious Experience. But close: casual yet slick language; hooking with an apparent intrigue; developing the theme from multiple angles, talking a lot about mundane matters, yet every section being to the point. 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 developing the meta-level intuition that you should fall back on formalisms when they are available could be perilous, for there are high-value domains where the real meat is still not captured by any statistics; we as a society may have been too impressed with the progress of statistics and committed that error. That's more nuanced than your dismissive summary.
His finish is kinda weak, but then again that allows the reader to draw one's own conclusion, like me and you both did.
Second, it is just more human. Your text feels narcissistic, basically all about intricacies of your conscious experience of writing a post and thinking a thought – meta, self-referential, savoring tangents. In the span of 1179 words and less than 10k symbols, you say «I» and «me» like 100 times total – a 10% of your words directly refer to yourself (count precisely if you want, since you argue that metrics help improve over using raw experience; and admittedly, my texts also suffer from self-absorbtion). Do you know what I-talk is believed to indicate? (Here's a less trustworthy source, but more grounded in common perceptions). It takes you 338 words to get to say «But at this point I haven't said much about intuition, have I?». No, you haven't. You are not Jonathan Goldsmith (or if you are, you haven't made that apparent). I hate hate hate baseball, but some dude's shower thoughts are even less enticing, and it is very much not obvious how your process of random-walking through free associations would help us learn anything about intuitions we don't yet know from having done the same when doing the dishes or falling asleep or whatever. I recommend reading the reddit link above – many of my persistent failings indicated there also apply to your submission! Always prefer external examples to your own mental constructs if you want to make a point for anyone else.
Put another way, you fail to write for your audience. This is an extremely male-dominated space, both demographically and «spiritually». Women care about people, they like sharing experiences, reading each other's dreams and such. Men are crude beings who care about things and processes, most are are proud to scoff at psychology until they get sent to
gulagsensitivity training and/or find estrogen patches in their son's closet; most mottizens are not even here because they like to discuss Culture War, they just feel the heat. Look how this place livens up when someone spergs out on a technical, real-life issue! Only questions of sex and dating, and maybe wokes shitting up muh games/hobbies, are hotter. I contend that the very topic of «intuition» is already on the verge of what the community intuitively finds not worth discussing, and is mostly saved by its relevance to the metis/episteme debate and the technocratic aspect of the culture war – matters of external reality.Third, people may disagree with your actual argument, or at least find it unpersuasive. I know I do: if intuition is «encoded analytical thought», that's only true for very loose definitions of all words used, and maybe it says more about your own philosophy than about the general case – both people's usage of the word and their relationships with their own intuition. Practitioners acquire intuition in highly atheoretical domains as well, and it's not clear how this encoding can happen if not through experience. 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. Since you talked about chess; consider such phenomena as Polgar memorizing the chess board only when it has a legal position. Even mental practice is still repetitive object-level experience! What are concrete examples in favor of your model? You provide loose associations that do not allow to distinguish a better model.
There is that theory about four stages of mastery, that progresses from conscious incompetence to unconscious competence (leaving aside the complete ignorance, which is mainly added for symmetry, I think). You could cite that in support of your vision. Also, since you bring up ChatGPT: this was a good place to talk of the difference between expert systems, which really were all about analysis encoded into if-then statements, and neural networks which acquire imprecise and uninterpretable skills through training. Actually now that I think of it, this is a fertile field for investigation. We could discuss the neuroscience here: intuition-as-random-walk powered by default mode network (which you devote like a 1000 words to), intuition-as-encoded-experience (mainstream view) and intuition-as-encoded-analysis; and the difference between slow and deliberate and expressly analytical thinking, i.e. one using some explicit scaffold of abstractions. You could have written on any of that, instead of your introverted musings about being able to write a whole book and reflections on how your submission be received by mottizens, but ironically those very reflections spoiled the dish.
And finally, there's the boring detail that the winner managed to secure the contest declarer's (what's the general word? AIs fail me) endorsement before the voting was over. Such things bias the outcome and are bad practice.
But it's fair that your piece was ranked below that of Pitt's. I won't go into comparing him with TheDag, but for what it's worth, that would be a tougher call.
P.S. Regarding your reception of criticism, I must say it's incredibly rich of you to defend your work with «my writing style works: it attacks the right people, and repels the wrong people» yet accuse the Motte of bias. Do you mean we are biased relative to «the right people»? Maybe give up on us, then?
I voted for TheDag, but, yes, this. It was very difficult to get through the shower thoughts introduction, it took me a few tries.
Mild disagree on this specific instance being gender coded in the way you imply. I like dreams and experiences posts as much as the next person, but the post in question did not hit any of the right beats for that. Descartes style exposition on how the writer was thinking some thoughts, and then had a few drinks, and thought some other thoughts, but then deleted them, and now is thinking some different thoughts isn't necessarily a bad essay (I enjoy Descartes), but doesn't describe any actual experiences or elicit any care. A feminine Connection themed intuition post would recount times the writer had used (or failed to use, despite an inner knowing) their intuition to make decisions and take actions that were important to them, and convey a sense of that importance through personal narrative.
Fair!
To clarify. I don't mean it's feminine – rather, it's not strongly masculine in the way that talking of baseball statistics and political baseball (or heat pumps) is. Men do consistently care more about data, facts, processes, things; cue Damore's memo. (And women are more interested in dreaming, which is perhaps why they remember dreams better). If you've ever been on a group therapy session, you know how awkward, terse and inarticulate a typical man is when pressed to «open up about his inner experiences». Girls are naturally enthusiastic, and take this failure to be cute or cringe (depending on attractiveness). I posit that you can do that inner monologue stuff better, but it still wouldn't be as well-received here as an essay about civil engineering.
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