michael-dean-k/

People assume that the rationalists in the LessWrong forums are logic worshippers that only think in Bayesian statistics. I'm sure many of them do. But actually, their genesis book Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, by Yudkowsky, is a cautionary tale about the extremes of rationalism. Yes, Harry is able to run circles around wizards with his command of statistics, but Voldermort is an evil master logician, symbolizing the danger of deploying rationalism without morals. So in the end, it’s more like a philosophy of “meta-rationalism,” on the discernment to know when the mode of rationality makes sense. Still though, I imagine that nuance is lost on many in and out of the community..

Intuition is romanticized, as if all thinking is too controlling, and all the answers we need are simply waiting inside us. I think this is wrong. I mean, of course, intuition could be the secret sauce, if it’s well-trained. Your intuition lets you think and do without thinking; this covers gut decisions, but also fears, procrastinations, biases, etc. 

So how do you train it? (1) Practice, repetition, mantras; (2) Metacognition: the ability to know when reason or intuition serves/betrays you; (3) Journal analysis: dumping thoughts is the beginning of the process, but I don’t believe getting it out is enough. The point is to look at your feelings and make sense of them.

What these 3 have in common is that they all require thought. By analyzing and running experiments on yourself, you train your intuition so that you don’t have to think in the moment.

If you want better intuition (a state of non-thinking), you will have to first do a lot of hard, deliberate thinking.