Intuitive differences: when to agree to disagree

It's too damn hard to be a tapper.

In 1990, Elizabeth Newton earned a Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford by studying a simple game in which she assigned people to one of two roles: "tappers" or "listeners." Tappers received a list of twenty-five well-known songs, such as "Happy Birthday to You" and "The Star-Spangled Banner." Each tapper was asked to pick a song and tap out the rhythm to a listener (by knocking on a table). The listener's job was to guess the song, based on the rhythm being tapped.

The tappers got their message across 1 time in 40, but they thought they were getting their message across 1 time in 2. Why?

Because it's hard to be a tapper. The tapper is humming the song in her head while tapping, she is seeing the whole picture, it's so clear! Putting yourself in the listener's shoes and pretending to be someone who doesn't know what you do and do know lots of stuff that you don't is extremely difficult.

In my experience, being aware of this, alone, is a powerful piece of information to improve the dialogue. For the tapper, to explore being clear and explicit in what is said and take the other person's knowledge into account. For the listener — well, to shut up, listen, and ask exploratory questions.

This experiment is cited in the excellent book Made to Stick.

Nice article Kaj -- this is a phenomena I've come up against myself several times, so it's really nice to see a carefully worked analysis of this situation. In a probabilistic sense, perhaps intuitive differences are priors that arise from evidence that a person no longer recalls directly, so although the the person may have rationally based their belief on evidence, they are unable to convince another person since they do not have the original evidence at hand. I'm particularly thinking of cases where "evidence" comprises many small experiences over a prolonged period, making it particularly difficult to replay to another person. A carpenter's intuition about the strength of a piece arises from their experiences working with wood, but no single piece of evidence could be easily recalled to transfer that intuition to someone else.

A while back I read that a great many political and religious debates of our time arise out of these two competing axioms:

There's nothing more important than children and family.

There's nothing more important than personal autonomy and choice.

These competing intuitions are responsible for arguments about abortion, gay rights, birth control, feminism, religion, and so many other things. It stands to reason that competing axioms are why no one ever wins these arguments.

Well, empiricism should work. What are your relative track records when you disagree? In predictions in general? If nothing else, there's Aumann, though not under the assumptions of irrationality that could lead to you both being confirmed in your opinions by the same evidence. For that, there's only practice in being VERY explicit about thinking about conservation of expected evidence in order to reduce your susceptibiliity to confirmation biases.

The important thing to realize is that neither intuition rests on any particular piece of evidence. Instead, each one is a general outlook that has been formed over many years and countless pieces of evidence, most of which have already been forgotten.

This seems an overly rosy view of intuition that assumes it's largely forged of admissible evidence and competent updating. Is there much reason to believe that we tend to form worthwhile intuitions from sporadic bits of evidence?

I tend to be pretty wary of beliefs that have no easily accessed or communicated justification. What of epistemic hygiene? This looks like a time to confess your ignorance and move on.

Original reasons for adopting a belief may be tangled and forgotten, but if your differing beliefs lead to differing concrete predictions, you should be able to test them without diving into the original justifications.

If you can't recall the evidence that lead to your intuition, how can you verify whether your past self updated correctly? Or even whether your friend's past self updated correctly!

Seems like you should put more weight to the intuition of the person you believe to be more rational in the present and past.

When you encounter a road block, you don't need to give up. You can simply emulate each other's intuitions and proceed with as a provisional argument (assuming your world view is true...).

The mathematicians have pretty much answered this question. Point to Friend, and Kaj needs to read up on chaos theory. Chaos theory describes the types of systems that can't be well modeled if the model system deviates even very slightly from the system of interest.

For what it's worth, I strongly side with your Friend's intuitions, and I'm greatly annoyed by people using obviously faulty models and responding to criticism with "so what other model do you propose instead?", as if not having a pretty model wasn't an option.

Kaj, you should really put a link to Aumann and prior in here. Robin and Tyler's paper perhaps.

This seems like the conflict between two deep seated heuristics, hence it would be difficult at best to argue for the right one.

Instead, I suggest a synthetic approach. Stop treating the two intuitions as a false dichotomy, and consider the continuum between them (or even beyond them).

Note that your intuition takes the form of a universal statement ("all phenomena can be modeled well, with sufficient effort") while your friend's takes the form of an existential statement ("some phenomena cannot be modeled well"). This makes your friend's view more plausible, a priori.

It's not a question of having different evidence: theoretically, you might both even have exactly the same evidence, but gathered in a different order. The question is one of differing interpretations, not raw data as such.

Disappointing, but true. If humans were perfect Bayesians the order of presentation wouldn't matter, but instead our biases kick in and skew the evidence as it arrives.

Edit: Ah, I see you already mentioned confirmation bias versus competent updating.

theoretically, you might both even have exactly the same evidence, but gathered in a different order. The question is one of differing interpretations, not raw data as such.

I happen to be studying conflicts in a completely different domain, in which I claim the solution is to ensure the events shape identical result no matter in which order they are applied. I briefly wondered whether my result could be useful in other domains, and I thought of lesswrong: perhaps we should advocate update strategies which don't depend on the order in which the evidence is encountered.

And then your post came up! Nice timing.

Models lead us through reality, as long as the intuitions giving rise to them, trust, expectations, suspicions, predictions, belief and intentions, are confirmed independently enough. Reality will fill the voids in our dreams, providing us a way out of inconvenient adaptations in full societal view. Unless, of course, our mistakes keep being expanded by circling within the safety of our circles of friends and nephews (nepotism). Then, one way or another, sooner or later, reality will adapt our collective intuitions hard handedly, e.g. by war. Therefore, PoV exchanges and letting time fill in the terra incognita so that we are all on the same page again, will not work as long as reality is too rich and mysterial for us, not accepting memetics creeping up on us. We should accept the fact that we all have our intuitive models and reality being, apart from experience in general, the other in particular, to independently confirm or deny those intuitions, indicating that our models are not perfect, we are not accountable and not fit to deal with reality then and there precisely. This can bring us to develop our model if not to rethink it, and not to worry about the status and power of our intuitive models and how we behave in society. There is no carefree zone as there should not be, for anyone in his right mind.