That’s not my experience. People with reason are.. reasonable.
You mention X and that’s not where the reasoners are. That’s where the (wanna be) politicians are. Rhetoric is not all of reasoning.
I can agree that rationalizing snap judgements is one of our capabilities but I am totally unconvinced that it is the totality of our reasoning capabilities. Perhaps I misunderstood.
But I think this is ego getting in the way, and our reluctance to change our minds.
We like to point to artificial intelligence and explain how it works differently and then say therefore it's not "true reasoning". I'm not sure that's a good conclusion. We should look at the output and decide. As flawed as it is, I think it's rather impressive
That thing which was in fact identified thousands of years ago as the evil to ditch.
> reluctance to change our minds
That is clumsiness in a general drive that makes sense and is recognized part of the Belief Change Theory: epistemic change is conservative. I.e., when you revise a body of knowledge you do not want to lose valid notions. But conversely, you do not want to be unable to see change or errors, so there is a balance.
> it's not "true reasoning"
If it shows not to explicitly check its "spontaneous" ideas, then it is a correct formula to say 'it's not "true reasoning"'.
why is that point fundamental?
Probably: other details may be missing, but checking one's ideas is a requirement. The sought engine must have critical thinking.
I have expressed very many times in the past two years, some times at length, always rephrasing it on the spot: the Intelligent entity refines a world model iteratively by assessing its contents.
My observation is that the models are better at evaluating than they are generating, this is the technique used in the o1 models. They will use unaligned hidden tokens as "thinking" steps that will include evaluation of previous attempts.
I thought that was a good approach to vetting bad ideas.
This is very good (a very good thing that you see that the out-loud reasoning is working well as judgement),
but we at this stage face an architectural problem. The "model, exemplary" entities will iteratively judge and both * approximate the world model towards progressive truthfulness and completeness, and * refine their judgement abilities and general intellectual proficiency in the process. That (in a way) requires that the main body of knowledge (including "functioning", proficiency over the better processes) is updated. The current architectures I know are static... Instead, we want them to learn: to understand (not memorize) e.g. that Copernicus is better than Ptolemy and to use the gained intellectual keys in subsequent relevant processes.
The main body of knowledge - notions, judgements and abilities - should be affected in a permanent way, to make it grow (like natural minds can).
But, it can learn, albeit in a limited way, using the context. Though to my knowledge that doesn't scale well.
I think some prominent people on X who are good at reasoning from First Principles will double down on things rather than admit their mistake.
The other very prominent psychological phenomenon I have observed in the world is "Projection", i.e. the phenomenon of seeing qualities in other people that we have ourselves. I guess it is because we think others would do what we would do ourselves. Trump is a clear example of this - whatever he accuses someone else off, you know he is doing. Point here being that this doubling down on bad reasons in order to not admit my mistakes is something I've observed in myself. Reason does indeed help me to try and overcome it when I recognise it but the tricky part is being able to recognise it.