[shshshshs]

People who are good at reasoning find it hard to admit that they were wrong?

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.

[Hedepig]

This is not totally my experience, I've debated a successful engineer who by all accounts has good reasoning skills, but he will absolutely double down on unreasonable ideas he's made on the fly he if can find what he considers a coherent argument behind them. Sometimes if I absolutely can prove him wrong he'll change his mind.

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

[mdp2021]

> ego getting in the way

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"'.

[Hedepig]

> then it is a correct formula to say 'it's not "true reasoning"'

why is that point fundamental?

[mdp2021]

Because the same way you do not want a human interlocutor to speak out of its dreams, uttering the first ideas that come to mind unvetted, and you want him to instead have thought hard and long and properly and diligently and well, equally you'll want the same from an automation.

[Hedepig]

If we do figure out how to vet these thoughts, would you call it reasoning?

[mdp2021]

> vet these thoughts, would you call it reasoning

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.

[fragmede]

The smarter a person is, the better they are at rationalizing their decisions. Especially the really stupid decisions.

[snthpy]

People with reason ... sound reasonable.

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.