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Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

All these articles proposing "intuition" as secret magic dust is quite funny. This is culturally amplified by movies and media ("May the force be with you", "follow your feelings").

In reality, intuition is simply a pattern recognition mechanism that sometimes work. Entire science is basically testimony of how our intuition lead us astray and why we need to be disciplined about looking at data, evidence and crafting experiments. Our intuition has always said Earth is flat, Sun rotates around us, time is constant... Virtually every single thing in science is how our intuition (aka the primitive pattern recognition) was so magnificently wrong.

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I think you have to distinguish here between your intuition, and the currently reigning common sense, which you just take for granted and which is not based on your own intuition.

> Entire science is basically testimony of how our intuition lead us astray and why we need to be disciplined about looking at data, evidence and crafting experiments.

This is not really the case. If you look into how a lot of great science is done it often starts with intuition followed by testing / experimenting in order to validate.

More often than not, that spark of intuition is tested by experiment, and turns out to be wrong.

99 attempts at creating a lightbulb... and counting.

I suspect the scientists intuition is less reliable because the scientists are acting at the limits of our understanding. Even then it is still a critical component.

For those of us writing glue code to connect services for the 100th time or a manager dealing with our 20th PIP is our intuition likely to be as faulty?

> If you look into how a lot of great science is done it often starts with intuition followed by testing / experimenting in order to validate.

Has turned into

> scientists intuition is less reliable because the scientists are acting at the limits of our understanding

Is that your gut telling you that?

Another way to put what I think they were trying to say -

If you have a lack of knowledge, the ‘rational’ set of things to try can be so large that it’s overwhelming/impossible to actually try them. You have to pick something.

Intuition can help there (and is commonly found in almost all major discoveries), even if it isn’t necessarily right. Since it’s still more right than not listening to it.

But then you need to pay attention and do some rational analysis to verify, and then iterate.

I have a lack of knowledge about the winning lottery numbers.

My intuition has never been any help on picking them.

Not listening to it, and just not buying the tickets would be more profitable.

Honestly, you're trying to claim that intuition is the foundation, when it's almost as bad as blind luck.

The most exciting phrase ever uttered in science is "Huh, that's not right" or "Woops"

> Honestly, you're trying to claim that intuition is the foundation, when it's almost as bad as blind luck.

Why do you think this?

You got me, I'm a closet genius that always knows without a shadow of a doubt what people are thinking.

It sounds like your intuition was just to not play, correct?

Or, after playing 10 times and not winning, to stop.

No, I'm still playing, in the vain hope I will win enough to get someone else to tell me what the winning numbers will be

Oh, that just sounds like you’re unwilling to learn from experience.

I prefer the term "persistent" although people around me have translated that to "stubborn" somehow :)

You misunderstand.

I'm saying intuition in a complex space we don't understand is less reliable than intuition in a simple well understood space.

Recognising that someone is angry is simpler than discovering how gravity works.

Science has a high failure rate and scientists heavily lean on their intuition.

This does not imply that it is intuition that causes the high failure rate.

I missed this - body language experts the world over will tell you that body language is culturally and individually unique.

Some people share similar body language for displaying certain emotions, but they are not universal.

Further you may be able to tell what some people are feeling by their body language, but there will be many many more examples where you miss the emotion.

Worse, the ones that you can get an idea of, it's very VERY rare for you to know the reason that people are in that emotive state.

edit:

This even applies to people close to you, who you think that you know.

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