Derren Lie Detection Part Two: Intuition

Okay, now I'll watch the one on intuition...

"Some people like to talk of intuition as a way of knowing truth."

Ha, already we know he disagrees.

"That gut reactions are as valid as evidenced-based facts."

Double mind-trick. First, what is a 'gut reaction' exactly? There's a lot of finesse in telling the difference between actual subconscious intuitions and unrelated brain chatter.

The way I tested it was I'd make an intuitive prediction, and a 'rational prediction,' and then I'd go with the rational prediction and evaluate what would have happened with the intuition in hindsight. Not once has a rational prediction been better than my intuitive prediction. Never. It has always been better to go with my gut instinct, sometimes freakishly better. I have made mistakes in interpretation, though, as tested against future situations - in a sense and ironically, the intuition can be rationally interpreted, by algorithm and rule. For example, I'm still a bit shaky on interpreting the intuition in situations like car salesman number two above, but the rule is that the time he's lying is associated with me thinking of lying, and/or that jarring interruptions are associated with lying.

This can be supercharged by using my intuition to suss out the correct associations to make. They're not guaranteed to be right but they're guaranteed to be better than trying to do it rationally. They also come with an uncertainty flag in cases where they're not all but guaranteed to be right.

So, a lot things that aren't gut reactions get called gut reactions by untrained intuitionists.

Second mind-trick, calling the second 'facts.' Priming anyone? Prejudice, anybody? For contrast, a neutral statement of Brown's opinion is that, "Intuitive hypotheses are less likely to be replicable than consciously deliberated hypotheses."

Oh hey, I found a third sophist mind-trick. "Evidence based." Where the hell do you think intuitions come from? If they weren't somehow causally linked to the situation, they'd be literally random. The question is simply whether their epistemology on the sensory evidence is better than what they intentionally teach in graduate school about interpreting evidence.


All this is intuitively obvious. Of course it is who...whom and Brown is part of a prospiracy with a particular agenda. Or possibly a dupe of powerful interests that don't know how to defend their power bases against intuition-based criticisms.

"It's a really silly way of thinking."

Empirically incorrect. You might try doing fact based experiments on that. I did experiments almost daily for over a decade, every single time my intuition had an opinion on my course of action.

Point: why would anyone evolve an intuition in the first place? You just going to throw out all that adaptive learning by the genome? Counterpoint: it is a bit weird that the intuition is not instinctively usable, it does take some practice and training. Luckily at least the activation trigger is instinctive, so you can turn it on at will without training.

You can't actually stop. You can only fool yourself, as Brown apparently has, into thinking you've stopped.

This is extremely useful for the kind of people who fund schools. Just a coincidence, I'm sure. Also extremely useful for people like me when they want to prey on people like Brown, as it makes it dead simple. Turning the table, I could do a whole post on the incidents where I got preyed upon while I was testing this idea, assuming I could recall the details, anyway.


Alrighty, that is it for exact quotes. I'm paraphrasing from now on. I seriously misremember his words - and when I correct them, they mean exactly what I thought they did. Only it takes five times as long to write.

"Did you ever play that game where you hold up a card and try to psychically intuit it? So what's this card."

Facepalm. Headdesk.

Because I only throw out hypotheses on evidence, I have tested this myself. Even trying to intuit it was immediately painful. Hmm, why is that?

"Hey intuition, what's on that card?"

The intuition is really smart. To whit, "What's on the card doesn't matter. At all, I'm not even going to pretend to try to work it out." Makes sense: the consciousness commands something like 0.5% of available neurons, the rest can't help but be smarter.

Even if, as per Brown's model, I thought intuition simply pulls information from the ether, does a database call on the operating system of physics, I still wouldn't be able to tell what the card says.

This is similar to one of the serious problems with parapsychological research. They don't test models. Their hypotheses barely rate as such. It would appear that's all who...whom too, just all a social game. Come to think, yes. I have to call politics on parapsych research. Maybe spooky stuff happens, maybe not, but there are no experiments on the subject, only masquerades. My own experiments cannot distinguish between spooky and not-spooky, so I'm agnostic. (And indifferent, as independent lines pin down how spookiness can be spooky, and it is boring.)


The interviewee opines,

"He's controlling my mind!"

If the subconscious can hear cues, it can also tell it is being told cues. I'm extremely skeptical this would work outside special circumstances. It won't work on things you actually care deeply about.

Though, I seem to have possibly noticed that sometimes, humans realize they don't care about a thing, and will look for something to care deeply about. It will work on this transition; these cues are as good as anything else to latch onto.