I had a fantastic Theology professor, Mont Smith, who knew all the sides of all the theological arguments that would occur in his class every year. He could hear two sentences from any student, identify the presuppositions behind them, and deduce 98% of their other beliefs. If you vote for increasing Medicare benefits, then you probably believe that inequality is a bad thing in general, and will also vote for tax schemes that more aggressively target the rich. We make decisions based on intuition, and then apply reason to justify them both after the fact. As Jonathan Haidt has patiently explained in The Righteous Mind, "the rider (rationality) evolved to serve the elephant (intuition)".
I've spent a good deal of my life deliberately trying to use reason to improve my judgment and intuitions, mostly because I found them so unreliable. This is a place for me to write down some of those and improve them over time. If you'd like to comment here, tough. Go use an appropriate medium like Twitter or Facebook to share your hot intuitive take, which will probably take one of the following forms:
- You say the grammatical inverse of what I said because you think it sounds clever. Just don't.
- You say "but what about...". Trust me, I already knew you were going to say that and chose not to address it because it's not important.
- You advocate a more extreme position because nuance doesn't accomplish your goals.
- You use a bad analogy to justify your opposite intuition.
All of these are boringly predictable. Don't waste your time.