Comment by clay_the_ripper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by clay_the_ripper | Hacker News Reader

clay_the_ripper

I think it’s important to establish different kinds of intuition. Intuition =/ stastistics. While I like Khaneman and his books are interesting, his arguments around intuition show a fundamental misunderstanding of intuition as I understand it and apply it.

If you try to use intuition for things which are better suited to statistical analysis, then yes he is correct. But what about all the other kinds of intuion? The intuition of an author knowing how to put together a sentence. A painter intuiting colors. A businessperson intuiting a good hire.

So many times in business, we have to rely on intuition because we simply do not have the time or resources to make decisions mathematically.

For example, I work in an industry (marketing) that is increasingly dominated by a school of thought of A/B testing.

The typical approach is create hundreds of combinations of different ads, copy, and creative and then see which one converts the best. I take an entirely different approach that I find much more successful and efficient that relys almost completely on intuition.

I simply create the ad that I “know” will do the best and run that one. Of course if it doesn’t work, I make changes, I look at data and results as part of it, but the majority of the time I run my business on intuition. Could I squeeze out a few percent here or there? Probably. But the time and money it would cost to come up with statistically significant data-driven decisions is far higher than having an ad up and running for an extra 2 weeks.

I created a campaign this week with one offer, one landing page, one version of an ad. The landing page converts on day one at 77%. No testing. No looking at data. Getting it right the first time is a culmination of all my experience, all my knowledge. That’s what people pay me for. I could spend weeks A/B testing data, but intuition of what allows me to run my business successfully, and is the reason people hire me.

So, what you're saying is that K's three conditions are met in your specific case.

Re-reading the article, yes you are correct. Although I still feel it’s important to distinguish different types of intuion. The intuition he is referring to here, and the 3 conditions, doesn’t apply well when we are talking about my other examples, like a painter intuiting colors or an author picking one word/sentence over another. There’s no immediate feedback on those. With a book you have to make all the decisions, publish the book, and then people either like it or not. In the case of art it seems to me, there is a different kind of intuion at work. Ideas and creativity are subject to intuiton, but not the kind that the author is taking about here.

> doesn’t apply well when we are talking about my other examples, like a painter intuiting colors or an author picking one word/sentence over another. There’s no immediate feedback on those.

This is most definitely false. Painters constantly look at how the colors they pick work in the larger composition. Very very few painters could produce anything tolerable with the lights off.

Likewise, good authors are constantly re-reading and editing their own work. It's a truism in writing that "first drafts are shit". The experience of reading a sentence you read is very different from what you experienced while selecting the words, and you do get immediate feedback when you do it.

Right, I suppose I was thinking of the fact that a painting success or lack of success is not an opinion of the artist, but rather the critical reception of the work. I’m sure everyone who writes a book or does a painting (for the purposes of public consumption anyway) thinks that on some level it is “good”. But an artist creating a painting that is new or innovative is by definition doing something someone has never done before. Good art must be both original in some way AND “good” (subjectively). What drives an artist to create something new, and combine elements in a novel way is a form of intuition, and my argument is that form of intuition is as seperate from the type of intuion the author is referring to.

Where do an artists ideas come from? No one knows, really. But forming them into a concrete work is a type of intuition, which I think is quite different from what the author is taking about. Hence, how you define “intuition” is important. I believe there are several ways to interpret the concept, and it’s important to distinguish between the types.

Artist's ideas are just other ideas combined in yet-unseen ways. The originality (the reason they are unseen yet) is a side-effect of combinatorial explosion. Your intuition will generate novel configurations within a narrow domain, while someone else's will generate different novelties just by operating on different material and under different assumptions.

It's pretty easy to generate numbers that nobody has ever thought about before, for instance. It's easy because there are a lot of numbers.

There are a couple levels to this.

1) How a painter learns to get the image onto the canvas that they have in their mind. This requires a ton of intuition. You're literally using your hand muscles, so it's not like you can get out pen and paper and calculate how many Newtons of force to apply to the brush. This intuition very much lines up with the three rules of the article.

2) How a painter learns how the audience will respond to their work. This definitely has a slower feedback loop, since they have to complete a work and show it to people. But otherwise, all three components are there. Almost every successful artist has a long history of making work and showing them to people. Art school is all about critiquing each other's work to train exactly this intuition.

Beg to differ. Color in picture versus mental image is immediate feedback; color A against color B “looking good” is immediate; and sentiment analysis of the result of the stroke is one step backwards and seconds away for feeling introspection (this introspection is not a philosophical reflexion that takes days, normally).

In Kahnemanns book, using “System 1” (deferring to intuition, not following a slow, rational analysis) is that gut feeling that you use a lot for art. Your other example, literature, might be better, as a book can span more that a year and lots of reflection goes into that.

Your examples meet the criteria perfectly. There is a stable fixed palette of colour a to choose from, a lot of practice on the part of the painter and immediate feedback when the paint hits the canvas.

Re: your points about business and not having the time to deliberate on every choice needed to be made. I agree, there isn’t time. Your business would fail long before you complete. However I think what K is saying is that the choices you make may or may not be intuition. And if they’re not, you might be way off, like people guessing the GPA average, you’d do better (maybe not wildly so) by taking the base rate

"So many times in business, we have to rely on intuition because we simply do not have the time or resources to make decisions mathematically."

It can be really easy to forget if one gets on too much of a "science!" kick, but there's plenty of decisions we have to make in life without "science" backing it up; arguably the majority. It's a poor choice to then just throw your hands up and say "well, if I can't use this most reliable decision mechanism, I just won't decide!", which is, both superficially amusingly and profoundly, a decision anyhow.

I know, it sounds obvious when I say it. And it's the sort of error only a particularly sort of educated person could even make, so it's not the world's most common error. But it's definitely an error. And it's not always as blatant as all that; one you can see with some frequency on HN are people insisting that we have to do our programming with more attention paid to science, when in fact there basically isn't any. Maybe that's a problem. Maybe that's something "we" should spend more money on solving. But in the meantime, that's not a reason to throw our hands up and give up; we just have to do our best, and I think the evidence supports the idea that we can learn a lot about our field and get better over the course of decades, even if there isn't a "scientifically-grounded course" for doing so and all we have to go on is modestly-trained intuition (that definitely fails Khaneman's standards here, so the sloppier, conventional "intuition" not his precise one).

About the business person intuitive hiring, from what I’ve learned from my friend in HR that is the most classic mistake people who don’t work in HR do. There is from what I understand no evidence that hiring that way works. CV and intelligence tests have evidence though.

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