Intuiton

In popular culture "human intuition" is exalted. Intuition is what helps the clever police detective to catch the evil doer. Intuition is what helps the scientist discover flubber. Intuition gets the job done.

In reality, however, intuition probably causes more problems than it actually solves.

Let me explain.

I remember the day, many many years ago, when I first learned about the gravity experiments which claim that it doesn't matter how heavy an object is, everything is pulled to earth at the same speed. This means that if you have two iron balls of equal size and shape, but one is hollow and the other is solid, they will still hit the earth at the same time if dropped from an equal distance. Of course, there is the problem of terminal velocity, which is the maximum speed attainable by an object due to environmental drag (basically, as you fall through the air, there is wind resistance. Depending on your mass and shape, there is a critical speed at which you can no longer accelerate toward the ground due to the friction). But if you eliminate wind resistance a feather and a hammer, dropped from anywhere in the sky will fall with the exact same (incrasing) velocity and hit the ground together.

But this goes well against our intuition. I know this because I was blown away when I first learned this. I remember thinking "why is my teacher lying to us?". Then I saw the video of a tube containing a feather and a coin. Air is removed from this tube, the tube is then quickly flipped and, sure enough, the feather and the coin fall at the exact same speed and hit the other end of the tube together.

My intuition about falling objects was wrong. It was based on faulty assumptions which ignored things like friction of the air or faulty assumptions which didn't take into account what 'mass' or 'weight' actually meant or what gravity really referred to.

Throughout my life I've repeatedly learned how our human intuition is continuously wrong.

Other examples of human intution or faulty logic getting things wrong:

1. When you are hit by a bullet, your body does not fly backward. The bullet has high velocity but low mass. So the force (and momentum) is not large enough to displace your much more massive body (thanks for filming the proof, Mythbusters!)
2. The reason you shouldn't go swimming after eating is because of the exertion on your muscle tissue can cause cramps which could cause you to drown. It has nothing to do with the water making contact with your body. So it's perfectly fine to eat in the shower.
3. You can divide any finite line, say a one inch long line drawn on piece of paper, into an infinite number of segments.
4. If you give your baby up for adoption and a couple from Germany adopts her, the child will grow up speaking German. And when they start learning English in school, she will not have some kind of benefit, or advantage, learning English just because English is the native language of her parents.

Now, that last one might seem obvious, but it really isn't obvious to people who don't think through their intuition logically. In his interesting book "Mr China" Tim Clissold recounts an anecdote where he is speaking to a large community of older Chinese folks. He asks them how they feel about so many westerners adopting Chinese babies. All of the folks are actually happy that people are adopting the children. Tim is surprised by this answer and asks "well, aren't you sad that the child will grow up not knowing the culture, not speaking the language?" and the people respond with incredulity. They say "of course they'll learn the language. They're Chinese! How can they not speak Chinese?"

The people Tim was talking to had an intuition that the Chinese language was a inextricable component of the Chinese person, that it didn't matter where a Chinese person was raised, they would always be able to speak Chinese because it was in their blood (I'm not sure that they would have assumed it was genetic since I'm not sure how sophisticated their knowledge of genetics actually is).

Our human intuitions (accompanied by unexamination or faulty logic) leads us to make some pretty stupid decisions.

I believe that it is this faulty intuition that passed Proposition 8 in California. People have this intuition that the institution of marriage is inextricably linked to religion and it thusly falls under a moral rubric. Supporters of prop 8 did not see this as a proposition to take away people's right to marry. They saw this as a proposition which would redefine what marriage is. Many people who voted yes on prop 8 did so with the assumption that they weren't taking anything away since homosexual couples could still get civil unions. They just felt that marriage was a covenant of God and God does not want two men or two women entering that covenant.

There are two main failures of intuition here (probably more):

The first is that marriage acutally holds a place in our society that goes beyond the bounds of religion. It is a social institution. The feeling that marriage is religiusly bounded and therefore applicable to redefinition in a constitution is faulty intuition.

The second is that homosexuality is not a choice. If a gay person wants to get married now they can't just choose to fall in love with a person of the opposite sex. The idea that homosexuality is unnatural is faulty intuition. (God is not testing or punishing gay people either, so if you think that, you need to re-examine your logic)

These two faulty intuitions come together to trump Californian's aversion to "taking rights away". The argument that Proposition 8 is akin to the "seperate but equal," J.Crow laws is absolutely accurate. But a person who is holding the two faulty intutions above can refute this by saying:

"Marriage is a religius institution, it isn't a water fountain. You need the public service of a water fountain, but you don't need to get married. After all, you can still get a civil union! Also being black and being gay are not the same. Being black is genetic, being gay is a choice."

So prop 8 passed.

I don't think it will be long before prop 8, and all the other constitutional amendments made accross the country's states will be talked about in history classes as the Jim Crow laws are talked about now: A relic of our ignorant past.

But there are even more pressing issues, like in Arkansas.
There, the faulty intution is that kids growing up in a home with a mother and a father are better off than kids growing up in a home with a mother and a mother. This intuition is so faulty that it isn't only NOT backed up by any data, but it is actually REFUTED by the data.

I'm happy that our country was able to elect a black president but we still have a long way to go.