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Comment by thrav | Hacker News Reader

At the same time, in a big enough forum, there will always be many people who have already intuited what most psychological scientific studies are about, and had it confirmed by their own experience many times over.

I’m equally irritated when people label an idea invalid until it’s been scientifically confirmed and peer reviewed. Science is often about confirmation, not about creation. Many people are likely to have realized something long before a team of scientists got funded, figured out how to test the idea, analyzed results, wrote papers, published, and officially confirmed it.

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You're right, for some things people will have already intuited it, and in a large enough group someone will have intuited pretty much everything. But many people will also have the wrong intuition.

The danger here is if we find data that goes against our common sense, we have to really consider that data, not reject it and rely on our common sense only. Sometimes it's right, sometimes it's wrong. Having a study prove something by no means makes it definitive, but it does provide better evidence and lets us better know if our intuition aligns with reality.

Often people will learn something and then that thing will become intuitive even though it wasn't before. As an example, we've all had that calculus teacher that thought everything was obvious and students were dumb (or programming). Most of us struggle and THEN it becomes obvious. In fact, on a forum like this you might see people respond that they didn't struggle and it was intuitive and we won't know if that's real or if they struggled and just forgot (which our brain does a lot).

Sure. But it's often that people "know" something that is false. The expression "like pulling a band-aid" is a great example. It's what doctors and nurses believe to the degree that they willingly torture their patients because they believe honestly they are reducing total suffering. But they are wrong.

Source: the work of Dan Ariely. His Ted talk is a good introduction.

Sure. But you won’t see anyone commenting about that. I’m only saying some people will in fact intuit a thing and be right, and we should hardly admonish them for doing so.

The higher rated their comment is, the more other people likely intuited the same.

It’s almost a decent measure of how obvious the thing being proven actually was — assuming you could baseline it and compare it to others in a meaningful way.

Some people who accumulated various good intuitions over decades created a bow, an iron plow and knew planets from stars.

Some people who started validating their intuitions with real measurements gave us steel ships, cantilever bridges and moon rockets.

These achievements were not a result of majority of people having the same intuition.

>Many people are likely to have realized something long before a team of scientists got funded, figured out how to test the idea, analyzed results, wrote papers, published, and officially confirmed it.

Can you expand on that? Who are these many people? Any examples? Lay people who have nothing to do with the field, simply intuiting results without doing the work to carefully rule out external factors? Or people without scientific training performing science without realizing that what they're doing is science ?

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