by vinceguidry | 2025-06-14 15:25:13+00:00
> Care to define your terms or use different ones so I can tell what you're talking about?

Rationalist: someone who only values positivistic reasoning. Someone like this does not have a useful guide to truth and typically deigns to fill the role themselves.

Intuitionist: someone who is comfortable dealing in vague, messy, imprecision. The kind of stuff the real world is based on.

> I do not care how popular a wrong idea is.

I do not care whether you care or not or whether you think it's wrong or not. This is that 'not having a useful guide to truth so you deign to fill the role yourself'. If you had a useful guide to truth in this instance, your argument that it's wrong would be based on that, not just on your feelings.

I'll give an example so as to not leave you completely lost. If I told you 1+1=3, then you could prove it to me that I'm wrong. All you'd need is a few apples. This would be a positivistic approach to reasoning and since you're a rationalist, this is the kind of reasoning you value.

If you tried to convince me Naziism was the best political theory, I would have two fundamentally different ways to respond. I could try the rationalist way, to attempt to construct a convincing argument through the history of political movements, perhaps grounding my argument in the idea of best for most.

But intuitionist me knows that's a dumb plan, and would just solve it by having the bartender throw you out of the bar, no nazis allowed.

The reason the rationalist approach to the Nazi question doesn't work is because positivistic logic must flow from something and that something must be a settled place of knowledge, the justified true belief. Political philosophy isn't a positivistic domain. You can't prove Naziism isn't the best political philosophy because politics is one group of people having power over others. Nazis are immune to reason. That's why no nazis in bars.

When rationalists try to operate in non-positivistic domains, they get out of their element quickly, because rationalists tend to discount the humanities as useful fields to study, and so they have to substitute something other than knowledge to form positivistic arguments.

An intuitionist very much values the humanities and realizes, over time, the limitations of positivism. If you study enough of the humanities, you will form an intuitive view of the world that can survive being challenged, proof isn't as useful as the rationalist thinks it is. A rationalist's view of reality is thus brittle, while intuitionist understanding is flexible.

And so when you said I was buying into some sigma grindset bullshit, that's an example of rationalist reduction of someone's understanding as similar. In reality I was just intuitively wandering around the space of what different folks in and around business care about, using my experience in corporate America as a guide. I identified this idea of 'hustle' as separating two different mindsets and was trying to sketch a loose picture of what this was.

An fellow intuitionist would see exactly what I was trying to do, and would help with his own intuitive understandings of business. A rationalist is only interested in reductive determination, so you reductively deduced me to 'sigma grindset' guy.

Anyway, that was fun to write, even though I'm pretty sure you aren't going to follow.