Has anyone managed not to Bottom Line in their everyday thinking? I find that it’s very difficult. It’s so natural and it’s a shortcut that I find useful more often than harmful. I wonder if it’s best to flag issues where epistemic irrationality would be very bad and primarily focus on avoiding Bottom Lining at times like that. I feel that the things I’m talking about are in a different spirit than those originally intended by the article, where you’re not so much emotionally invested in the world being a certain way as you are, say, relying on your intuition as the primary source of evidence for the sake of saving time and avoiding false starts.
Well, that Bottom Line is generated by your intuition, and your intuition is probably pretty good at weighing evidence to find a good Bottom Line (with the caveat that your intuition probably does a lot more signalling than truth-seeking). In principle, though, that means that you don’t have to justify that bottom line, at least not as much; instead, it would be more productive to search for flaws. The most likely flaw is that your subconcious figured “My friends like this conclusion” rather than “This conclusion is true”.
This, and more. Statements don’t come pre-labeled as premise or conclusion. All evidential relations are bidirectional. For example, if two statements are inconsistent, logic tells you not to accept both. But it doesn’t tell you which one (s) to reject.
The way I see it, having intuitions and trusting them is not necessarily harmful. But you should actually recognize them by what they are: snap judgements made by subconscious heuristics that have little to do with actual arguments you come up with.
That way, you can take it as a kind of evidence/argument, instead of a Bottom Line—like an opinion from a supposed expert which tells you the “X is Y”, but doesn’t have the time to explain. You can then ask: “is this guy really an expert?” and “do other arguments/evidence outweight the expert’s opinion?”
That way, you can take it as a kind of evidence/argument, instead of a Bottom Line—like an opinion from a supposed expert which tells you the “X is Y”, but doesn’t have the time to explain. You can then ask: “is this guy really an expert?” and “do other arguments/evidence outweight the expert’s opinion?”
Note that both for experts and for your intuition, you should consider that you might end up double-counting the evidence if you treat them as independent of the evidence you have found—if everybody is doing everything correctly (which very rarily happens), you, your intuition and the experts should all know the same arguments, and naive thinking might double/triple-count the arguments.
Has anyone managed not to Bottom Line in their everyday thinking? I find that it’s very difficult. It’s so natural and it’s a shortcut that I find useful more often than harmful. I wonder if it’s best to flag issues where epistemic irrationality would be very bad and primarily focus on avoiding Bottom Lining at times like that. I feel that the things I’m talking about are in a different spirit than those originally intended by the article, where you’re not so much emotionally invested in the world being a certain way as you are, say, relying on your intuition as the primary source of evidence for the sake of saving time and avoiding false starts.
Well, that Bottom Line is generated by your intuition, and your intuition is probably pretty good at weighing evidence to find a good Bottom Line (with the caveat that your intuition probably does a lot more signalling than truth-seeking). In principle, though, that means that you don’t have to justify that bottom line, at least not as much; instead, it would be more productive to search for flaws. The most likely flaw is that your subconcious figured “My friends like this conclusion” rather than “This conclusion is true”.
This, and more. Statements don’t come pre-labeled as premise or conclusion. All evidential relations are bidirectional. For example, if two statements are inconsistent, logic tells you not to accept both. But it doesn’t tell you which one (s) to reject.
The way I see it, having intuitions and trusting them is not necessarily harmful. But you should actually recognize them by what they are: snap judgements made by subconscious heuristics that have little to do with actual arguments you come up with. That way, you can take it as a kind of evidence/argument, instead of a Bottom Line—like an opinion from a supposed expert which tells you the “X is Y”, but doesn’t have the time to explain. You can then ask: “is this guy really an expert?” and “do other arguments/evidence outweight the expert’s opinion?”
Note that both for experts and for your intuition, you should consider that you might end up double-counting the evidence if you treat them as independent of the evidence you have found—if everybody is doing everything correctly (which very rarily happens), you, your intuition and the experts should all know the same arguments, and naive thinking might double/triple-count the arguments.
Good point!