Why do I think intuition jousting is bad? Because it doesn’t achieve anything, it erodes community relations and it makes people much less inclined to share their views, which in turn reduces the quality of future discussions and the collective pursuit of knowledge. And frankly, it’s rude to do and unpleasant to receive.
and through this mechanism, which you correctly point out:
The implication is nearly always that the target of the joust has the ‘wrong’ intuitions.
The above two considerations combine extremely poorly with the following:
I’ve noticed IJing happens much more among effective altruists than academic philosophers.
Another consequence of this tendency, when it emerges, is that communicating a felt sense of something is much harder to do, and less rewarding to do, when there’s some level of social expectation that arguments from intuition will be attacked. Note that the felt senses of experts often do contain information that’s not otherwise available when said experts work in fields with short feedback loops. (This is more broadly true: norms of rudeness, verbal domination, using microaggressions, and nitpicking impede communication more generally, and your more specific concept of IJ does occur disproportionately often in EA).
Note also that development of a social expectation whereby people believe on a gut level that they’ll receive about as much criticism, verbal aggression, and so on regardless of how correct or useful their statements are may be especially harmful (See especially the second paragraph of p.2).
This is a problem, both for the reasons you give:
and through this mechanism, which you correctly point out:
The above two considerations combine extremely poorly with the following:
Another consequence of this tendency, when it emerges, is that communicating a felt sense of something is much harder to do, and less rewarding to do, when there’s some level of social expectation that arguments from intuition will be attacked. Note that the felt senses of experts often do contain information that’s not otherwise available when said experts work in fields with short feedback loops. (This is more broadly true: norms of rudeness, verbal domination, using microaggressions, and nitpicking impede communication more generally, and your more specific concept of IJ does occur disproportionately often in EA).
Note also that development of a social expectation whereby people believe on a gut level that they’ll receive about as much criticism, verbal aggression, and so on regardless of how correct or useful their statements are may be especially harmful (See especially the second paragraph of p.2).