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Comment by makerdiety | Hacker News Reader

A preference for level two is what got us a general theory of relativity and, subsequently, working global positioning satellite technology. Having a cognitive bias toward visual presentations of planes in 3D and higher space leads to techno-scientific stagnation.

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I think you have this exactly backwards. Einstein applied his intuition to find gaps in special relativity. He had built an intuition for how light works and asked what happened in corner cases so he could rapidly understand the boundaries of. Then after finding those cases busted out the math to create a rigorous solution.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/story/how-albert-einstein-develop...

"Level two" ? As if there is a single best way to think and we should all climb towards it? There are advantages and disadvantages to every approach. Find what works in a domain and keep experimenting.

Karl Marx said something along the lines of "Each man does a job according to his abilities." Something like that.

I take it, then, this modern society and civilization wants to specialize in low level technician style work and wait for aliens or angels to come and do the hard work of inventing faster than light travel? You know, intuition is the best scientists and engineers can do and all.

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"

I feel that you can't or aren't being serious. We just covered the go to example of a smart person doing the go to example of smart thing advancing advancing humanity's knowledge using intuition and other modes of thought.

No one is saying we shouldn't also have other kinds of intelligence. You just started bashing one kind of intelligence, and provided quite possibly the absolute worst possible example.

Thought, in the general sense, isn't a solved problem or even all that clearly understood yet. We don't yet have a working mathematical model of it and aren't even sure that will be a thing. At present we know of many kinds of intelligence and we can see then work differently on different problems.

Since you insist in human intuition being a "required step in the process of knowledge discovery," I can safely say that your time preference you have is what led to the segmentation of the human species into categories such as races. When, really, any human baby born on Earth, absolutely any human child or man, that is, has the same genetics as a high level athlete like the famous Lebron James basketball player. There's no real difference between the races or types of humans. And, similarly, there's no difference between the "types" of intelligences that human intuition can help grab hold of.

Quantum mechanics is a magical system, to you, only because you're limited and guided by your human biases and preferences. Dumping intuition is the way to go for seeing past the toys and child's play that is modern science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

The general relativity theory was not about gaps or corner cases of special relativity. It was about extending the theory outside its domain of applicability.

The theory of special relativity showed how to transform the physical quantities between inertial reference systems, i.e. systems where Newton's law of inertia is true. The relative velocity between the origins of such systems must be constant and there must be no relative rotational movement between them.

The theory of special relativity was not applicable to non-inertial reference systems, like one that has an accelerated motion relative to an inertial system.

Einstein's quest has been to find the transformation relations for this more general case. Together with the theory of the stimulated emission of radiation (1917), this has been the most original part of Einstein's work, because the previous transformations of the special relativity had been discovered before Einstein, he had just given a new explanation for them.

The only intuition related to general relativity was the guiding principle that whatever transformations will be found they must lead to indistinguishable local behavior of the forces of gravity vs. the forces of inertia.

Intuition is just a starting point — and one that changes with experience gained. Two students can start to learn piano either “intuitively” or mathematically and both end up at the same level of skill 30 years later. There isn’t some linear path of progression based off where you start — that’s what’s amazing about the human brain, it’s incredibly parallel and mesh based.

The problem is that learning to play the piano isn't innovative. (So, technically, a monkey could eventually do it.) Because innovation is stifled by intuition. Particularly intuition meant to serve human ends.

It's a simple equation: take away intuition and you're left with revolutions in technology and science.

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