Intuitions Have Context - by Robin Hanson - Overcoming Bias

By living in our world, we collect intuitions on how the physical stuff around us behaves, and on the most practical ways to do particular things. Like fry an egg, bounce a basketball, carry a couch, stay level on bouncing platform, or get a door unstuck. These intuitions come with a sense of their generality, and many of them you feel pretty confident that your intuitions are pretty general. They feel like the best way to do a thing in 99%+ of relevant situations in which humans today find themselves. But of course our universe is vast, and the physical context in most of that universe is quite different from our usual human contexts in terms of temperature, pressure, acidity, vibrations, radiation, etc. Thus many of these 99%+ reliable general ways to do physical things among humans today likely also fail in 99%+ of the physical environments out there in the universe. Which is to say that our physical intuitions are context dependent; they were developed in a context, and may be reli

By living in our world, we collect intuitions on how the physical stuff around us behaves, and on the most practical ways to do particular things. Like fry an egg, bounce a basketball, carry a couch, stay level on bouncing platform, or get a door unstuck. These intuitions come with a sense of their generality, and many of them you feel pretty confident that your intuitions are pretty general. They feel like the best way to do a thing in 99%+ of relevant situations in which humans today find themselves. But of course our universe is vast, and the physical context in most of that universe is qui