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Daniel Kahneman on when to trust intuitive judgment

261 points by yarapavan 8y ago

mattnewton 8y ago
I can’t figure out how to actually read the article. There is a button to continue that does nothing when I tap it.
forgotmypw 8y ago
This gross oversimplification and attempt to quantify intuition is kind of laughable. Intuition is the effect of all the different types of knowledge you have coming together in one converging lighting up of your nervous system. This is basically ancient genetic knowledge, combined with all the previously recognized experience traits that are connected to the current experience, combined with whatever other information that you are receiving. Trying to estimate a student's GPA is not a good example of how intuition works.
- forgotmypw 8y ago
  Daniel Kahneman: Your Intuition Is Wrong, Unless These 3 Conditions Are Met At the World Business Forum, Kahneman explained when people can trust their intuitive judgment and when they shouldn't. By Emily Zulz | November 16, 2018 at 01:18 PM Daniel Kahneman. (Photo: Bloomberg) Daniel Kahneman. (Photo: Bloomberg) Can intuition play a role in investing? According to Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Memorial Prize-winning behavioral economist, no. During a speech given at the World Business Forum in New York City, Kahneman explained when people can trust their intuitive judgement and when they should be wary of it. “Intuition is defined as knowing without knowing how you know,” he explained. “That’s the wrong definition. Because by that definition, you cannot have the wrong intuition. It presupposes that we know, and there is really a prejudice in favor of intuition. We like intuitions to be right.” According to Kahneman, a better definition — or a more precise one — would be that “intuition is thinking that you know without knowing why you do.” By this definition, the intuition could be right or it could be wrong, he added. Because, according to Kahneman, intuition can often be wrong. To show an example of this, Kahneman had the crowd guess the GPA of a college senior he called Julie. He told the crowd one fact about Julie — that she read fluently at a young age — and then asked them to judge how good of a student she had been. From research, Kahneman, who wrote The New York Times bestseller “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” said that most people guess that Julie has around a 3.7 GPA. “You might think that this is a good answer,” he said. “It’s a terrible answer. It’s an intuition, and it’s absolutely wrong. If you were to do it statistically, you would do it completely differently. Actually, the age that people read is very little information about what student they will be 20 years later.” According to Kahneman, this is an example of an intuition that is generated automatically with high confidence, and it’s wrong statistically. “In general, confidence is a very poor cue to accuracy. Because intuitions come to your mind with considerable confidence and there is no guarantee they’re right.” There are certain times when intuition can be correct. For instance, Kahneman explained, chess players and married couples generally have accurate intuition. “Intuitions of master chess players when they look at the board [and make a move], they’re accurate,” he said. “Everybody who’s been married could guess their wife’s or their husband’s mood by one word on the telephone. That’s an intuition and it’s generally very good, and very accurate.” According to Kahneman, who’s studied when one can trust intuition and when one cannot, there are three conditions that need to be met in order to trust one’s intuition. The first is that there has to be some regularity in the world that someone can pick up and learn. “So, chess players certainly have it. Married people certainly have it,” Kahnemen explained. However, he added, people who pick stocks in the stock market do not have it. “Because, the stock market is not sufficiently regular to support developing that kind of expert intuition,” he explained. The second condition for accurate intuition is “a lot of practice,” according to Kahneman. And the third condition is immediate feedback. Kahneman said that “you have to know almost immediately whether you got it right or got it wrong.” When those three kinds of conditions are satisfied, people develop expert intuition. “But unless those three conditions are satisfied, the mere fact that you have an idea and nothing else comes to mind and you feel a great deal of confidence — absolutely does not guarantee accuracy,” he added. — Related on ThinkAdvisor: Daniel Kahneman’s Solution for Minimizing Investors’ Regrets Michael Lewis: A Warning for Index Investors From the Oakland A’s Emily Zulz Emily Zulz Emily joined the ThinkAdvisor team as a reporter in the summer of 2014. She previously worked as a reporter for The Daily Journal in Kankakee, Illinois for a year and as a reporter and editor for The Daily Eastern News in Charleston, Illinois for two and a half years. Prior to joining ThinkAdvisor, Emily worked on Groupon’s editorial team in Chicago as a fact checker for three years. She graduated cum laude with a BA in journalism from Eastern Illinois University, and she has been the recipient of two journalism awards for her news reporting at daily newspapers.
  - zwieback 8y ago
    Seems pretty reasonable to me - he gives a definition of what most people probably think of as intuition and then goes on to improve that definition. A hostile interpretation could say it's a strawman but with the additional context I think it's a pretty good article
- jonknee 8y ago
  It was so laughable he got a Nobel prize for it. That's not to say Kahneman is always right, but he is always worth listening to.
  - unmole 8y ago
    Citing someone's Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel is probably the worst kind of an appeal to authority.
    - beat 8y ago
      Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Most of us trust the Nobel Prize to be a mostly-neutral arbiter of excellence in various fields. That means it is not the worst kind of appeal to authority, but rather the best - referencing a well-known and widely trusted source. Can you give us a reason we shouldn't trust it in the general case, since your claim extends to the general, not the specific?
      - 77pt77 8y ago
        > Most of us trust the Nobel Prize to be a mostly-neutral arbiter of excellence in various fields. Even if that were true, there is no Nobel Prize in Economics. It's a completely different prize, given by a different institution, that was associated much later with the Noble prizes.
- beat 8y ago
  Estimating a student's GPA may not be a good example of how intuition works, but it's an excellent example of how people try to use it.
paulsutter 8y ago
> in order to develop expert intuition (1) some regularity in the world that someone can pick up and learn (2) a lot of practice, and (3) you have to know almost immediately whether you got it right or got it wrong > “So, chess players certainly have it. Married people certainly have it [about each other]. People who pick stocks in the stock market do not have it. Because, the stock market is not sufficiently regular to support developing that kind of expert intuition,” he explained
- lunchables 8y ago
  After reading the article, this is a perfect summary.
  - davidp93 8y ago
    The rest of the article adds very little
- myth_buster 8y ago
  This I believe is also hammered on in Thinking fast and slow which is an excellent book. It condenses the major findings on behavioral psychology from 21st century into an accessible paperback.
  - beat 8y ago
    Adding this to my reading list, thanks!
- derefr 8y ago
  > the stock market is not sufficiently regular Stock markets are a lot more than just "not sufficiently regular"; they actively remove all regularity from themselves (that being the byproduct of how markets calibrate prices of things—regularity is the signal that makes people money, and so it gets exploited away.) Or, to put that in more precise words: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/h24JGbmweNpWZfBkM/markets-are-anti-inductive https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/h24JGbmweNpWZfBkM/markets-ar...
- 8y ago
branweb 8y ago
I wonder how those three conditions apply to intuition in software development. The only condition that seems to regularly be unmet is "immediate feedback."
- mpweiher 8y ago
  ...which is why REPLs, fast test suites (1-5 seconds), etc. are so important. It's not just a quantitative thing, you get a qualitatively very very different process happening. People have known this, er, intuitively for some time. Kahneman gives us an handle on why it is: it lets us develop an intuition for the software we are working on.
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  They do apply reasonably well as long as you're solving similar problems. Even if programming language differs... It is similar with mathematicians. A mathematician may smell a rat in a proof like a programmer a bad pattern in code, but you can only really trust their intuition in their specialty field. E.g. web frontend programmer intuition won't do in backend, desktop UI, mobile, HPC, video game coding, embedded programming, real time applications or safety critical software. This does not preclude polyglots and polymaths or generalists.
- tunesmith 8y ago
  I think intuition goes downhill as your system increases in complexity. It's harder to develop deep experience or regularity in distributed systems than it is in your monolith that you know inside and out. Feedback can get less immediate, too.
  - zwieback 8y ago
    So true. I spent the bulk of my early SW development career in distributed systems that were complex enough that they felt like they had a mind of their own. What I learned back then is that my intuition was worthless. Maybe that's just me but the key to success was always to set aside your expectation of what your code does and instead spend more time instrumenting and collecting data on what was actually going on. This is especially true for completely asynchronous systems like networks or systems that integrate multiple independent subsystems. Things just don't happen in the order you expected when timeouts, aborted operations and retries bubble up and down your OS and application stack. After 30 years I consider myself pretty capable in debugging such systems but one thing I never use is "intuition" as defined in the beginning of the article.
the_cat_kittles 8y ago
those three conditions are needed to learn anything.
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autokad 8y ago
how many are peeved they didn't get Julie's GPA? How can I accept its a terrible answer with 0 data provided. How much merit can I give to someone giving advice about investing when they gave me no data to indicate they are good at it.
meditativeape 8y ago
My intuition tells me that these three conditions are correct. Should I trust it? While these conditions intuitively make sense, the example that he used to support his conclusions feels very weak. If the only information I know about this person is she read fluently at a young age, I don't think I can make a good guess of her GPA in college at all. There's no "right intuition" in this case, because so many other variables are in play.
- projectramo 8y ago
  I think what you are missing is "base rate neglect." Let's say the overall average GPA is 3 (or 3.1 for women): https://blog.prepscholar.com/whats-the-average-high-school-gpa https://blog.prepscholar.com/whats-the-average-high-school-g... Then you would expect that to swamp the information that this person was an early reader. You might let the early reader have a slight effect.
- gronne 8y ago
  I think that was his point.
clay_the_ripper 8y ago
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.
- zwieback 8y ago
  So, what you're saying is that K's three conditions are met in your specific case.
  - clay_the_ripper 8y ago
    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.
MKais 8y ago
Based on his three conditions, intuition looks like machine learning
- tw1010 8y ago
  That's because all it is is (unconsious) learning.
- mrfredward 8y ago
  Well, intuition is an output of a neural network, it's just that the neural net is implemented in meat instead of silicon.
- deleted 8y ago
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lordnacho 8y ago
This makes total sense. What's he's basically saying is if you've collected a lot of evidence, you can quickly classify a new data point. (And if feedback is not immediate or very noisy, you're not collecting as much evidence as you think.) If that sounds like a lesson for machine learning, it's because it is. For the same reason, as a quantitative trader, I look at stuff that has a lot of repetitions historically. And over short time periods, because that both gives you faster feedback and more non-overlapping reps. Which addresses the point he makes about the financial markets. The other takeaway is that you don't have nearly as much evidence as you think. I mean who wouldn't think that kids who learn to speak early have high GPAs? Often I get into a discussion with people who pull out something similar, with no specific source. Everyone else is convinced that not only is the hypothesis true, but that there's so much evidence that I'm just being difficult when I ask for it. There's a lot of traps like this in the social sciences. I'm not saying these are all wrong, just that your intuition is seductive if you don't ask for the evidence: - "People descended from the cold regions are smarter, because they had to be smart to survive" - "CEOs who have share options perform better, because they have better incentives" - "Without patents nobody would bother to invent anything" - "Reading to your kids is good for them" Lastly, some things are unlearnable for one person. If you're going to learn, you'd need to aggregate somehow: - How many times has someone sold their company? Probably not more than a handful. Even people who have n>0 are quite rare. So what does this say about how highly you should weight this person's experience? - How should I coach the team for the big final? Again, how many finals are there in a year in any given sport? Can you learn any lesson at all that's separate from just increasing the n of the number of games coached (which probably is meaningful)?
- PKop 8y ago
  Like people's anecdotal perception of recent weather (extremely small sample size, for one) gives them intuition to extrapolate large scale climate trends. "We never had storms like this 5 years ago, or when I was a kid. Things are getting really bad"
  - rdiddly 8y ago
    It's not today's weather that gives them that, it's the lifetime of weather experience. If you're talking to someone at least 40 years old then it meets the 3 conditions.
robbrown451 8y ago
"intuition is thinking that you know without knowing why you do." That is not a precise definition at all, in fact it is an orthogonal concept. "Thinking that you know" may be happening during intuition, but to claim that that is what intuition actually IS is just wrong. Intuition is the thought, not the thought about the thought. A more precise definition might be something like "knowing -- rightly or wrongly -- without knowing how you know."
apo 8y ago
However, he added, people who pick stocks in the stock market do not have it. “Because, the stock market is not sufficiently regular to support developing that kind of expert intuition,” he explained. In the short term, definitely. In the long term, however, I disagree. Stock markets follow highly-regular multi-year cycles. The problem seems to be that people forget this during the peak or trough of the moment. Interestingly, this intersects with the third requirement: And the third condition is immediate feedback. Kahneman said that “you have to know almost immediately whether you got it right or got it wrong.” Given the long intervals over which stock market cycles operate, there's little chance to get immediate feedback. So according to this analysis, most stock pickers can't gain intuition - but not for the reason stated in the article. It takes someone with: (a) a really good memory; and (b) a very long time to play.
- pnw_hazor 8y ago
  In one his other books DK discussed being hired by a major investment bank to research decision making processes used by their leading investment managers so they could train incoming bankers. DK discovered that the successful outcomes of the senior bankers were random rather than based on skill or experience. His report was not well received.
wolco 8y ago
I believe he is confusing intuition woth deductive logic. My intuituion tells me that the gpa is lower then what the group would accept or he wouldn't use it as an example. Is that intuition, no.
- ska 8y ago
  Is that intuition, no. Correct, that does not meet the definition of intuition he has proposed.
beat 8y ago
This reminds me of one of my little sayings... "Common sense is just a first approximation of reality". So yeah, common sense is more likely right than not, but it is not reliable. If you need a reliable answer, you need to go deeper than common sense. Of course, intuition is somewhat different, in that intuition can be wrong more often than right. See Hans Rosling's findings in Factfulness to grok that, and start to understand just how dumb you actually are.
tw1010 8y ago
What does regularity mean, more formally? The phenomenon needs to have a probability distribution that looks something other than (uniform?) random?
pilooch 8y ago
Sounds much like conditions to a successful solving of a problem when modeled with machine learning. Have enough data, immediate (as opposed to delayed) feedback, and enough structure in the data. That neural networks in our brains might be learning an embedding or two :)
projectramo 8y ago
Daniel Kahneman claims that (1) regularity, (2) practice and (3) immediate feedback are the keys to trusting intuition. If this is true, I should be able to intuit when I get a lot of upvotes on Hacker news. This comment will do okay, I predict. (1-5 votes) But if I had added a joke, it would have done very well. (10+ votes) Now that I added that last insight, it will do even better than okay. (3-7 votes). I'll report back in a day.
- ssambros 8y ago
  So, what's the joke? I want to see you succeed.
  - projectramo 8y ago
    Sorry to mislead you. I hadn't thought of a joke, but if I had thought of a joke and put it in, my posts get a lot more upvotes. It might be my natural humor, or it might be people reading HN like a laugh however corny. I don't get feedback on why people vote, and am not allowed to ask.
- projectramo 8y ago
  I will just edit this comment to report on the number of votes: original vote plus: 6 upvotes - 15 minutes edit: 7 upvotes - 1 hour
- projectramo 8y ago
  3 days, 7 points (6 votes)! Kahneman is right!
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- deleted 8y ago
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Benjammer 8y ago
Elizer Yudkowski extrapolates quite a bit on these ideas in his book Inadequate Equilibria[0]. [0]https://equilibriabook.com/toc/ https://equilibriabook.com/toc/
blahblah3 8y ago
The third criteria of immediate feedback seems too stringent. In chess, feedback is often not immediate. If one were to run a reinforcement learning algorithm on chess with no human coded rewards, the only objective feedback would come at the end of the game (win, loss, draw). Certainly the more immediate the feedback the better though.
- Benjammer 8y ago
  I think it's more important that the input produces an immediate and readily observable change to the state of the world, not necessarily that you must have perfect information in the feedback as well that shows the exact utility of your previous action. For example, in the stock market it's not even clear to me what the total scope of effects is, immediate or not, that any single action I take as a private investor will have on the market. Before I even can start to learn about the effectiveness of the changes that my actions produce, I am hamstrung by an inability to see an immediate, comprehensive effect to each action.
placebo 8y ago
Those are very reasonable points to explain the way correct subconscious prediction of success works. I wonder though whether this definition doesn't run the risk of creating a closed system of thought, i.e one where you can always refute opposing evidence from within the system without being aware that the system is making you incapable of seeing something else. Specifically, any genuine cases of intuition not due to Kahneman's reasoning (if such exist), would never be seen and always attributed to survivor bias (as long as they don't become a statistical anomaly). It's probably difficult to build a case against this reasoning, as it seems quite logical - my first thought as a candidate for a counterexample was claims of "love at first sight". Sure, many of those might end in divorce but does that mean that all the successes are just due to being on the right side of statistics or is there something more going on?
gesman 8y ago
http://www.presentlove.com/using-intuition-for-trading-stock-options-markets/ http://www.presentlove.com/using-intuition-for-trading-stock...
mrxd 8y ago
Maybe it's just me, but I find Kahneman frustrating to read and this article really demonstrates the problem: he defines a concept and then gives examples which don't meet the definition. He defines intuition as thinking you know without knowing how you know. OK, great. Now the example: guessing someone's GPA based on the fact that they started reading early. Like most people, I guessed it would be on the high side. Kahneman calls this "intuition that is generated automatically with high confidence." And that's… just wrong. I have very little confidence in my guess, and it certainly isn't generated automatically. It's based on a belief—which turns out to be wrong—that early reading has some relationship with college GPA. So maybe in this example, he is using the dictionary definition of "intuition", which is basically non-conscious reasoning. He thinks this shows the problem with intuition, but again, that's just wrong. I didn't get the answer wrong because I failed to reason consciously. It's because my belief about the relationship between early reading and GPA was wrong. If I take his advice and don't trust my intuition, and carefully and logically reason my way to the answer, guess what? I'm still wrong because my information is wrong. His explanation of when to trust your intuition is similarly flawed. He basically says you can trust your intuition when you have good information. Well yeah. That's a generic statement that goes for almost any method of drawing conclusions about the world, and doesn't help us understand when intuition is useful or not useful.
- Shank 8y ago
  I think at least some of it comes from the fact that Kahneman didn't write the article. The article is composed from both his speech that was referenced and from the book that he wrote, and kind of marries them together in a weird way. I find articles like this extremely thin because they usually synthesize points with very thin lines. Original authors will have hundreds of repeated examples and data sets, of which Kahneman is one of them. He certainly didn't win the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for nothing -- he has serious data to back up his research. If I had to summarize Thinking, Fast & Slow up in one sentence: human intuition shouldn't be trusted when it comes to statistics problems, because humans aren't naturally statistical thinkers. All of the research in the behavioral economics category shows this pattern very well. GPA distribution among populations is statistically quantifiable. Due to human cognitive biases, however, it appears to be a problem that has an obvious answer by intuition, and that answer is wrong. The specific three qualities that are outlined as giving way to intuition boil down to having a large body of evidence and a very tight feedback loop, which statistics does not have but things like emotion reading do have. If you get the emotions of your significant other wrong you'll immediately see the repercussions. Casually misjudging someone on the street because of statistics will never see you being corrected. But really, I think you should just read the book. This article doesn't even come close to doing behavioral economics justice.
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throwaway487549 8y ago
Intuition is, so to speak, an attempt to match against evolved brain structures which reflects some constraints of the environment in which it has been evolved. Babies could read faces. This is exactly what I am talking about. Just this.

261 points by yarapavan 8y ago

I can’t figure out how to actually read the article. There is a button to continue that does nothing when I tap it.

This gross oversimplification and attempt to quantify intuition is kind of laughable. Intuition is the effect of all the different types of knowledge you have coming together in one converging lighting up of your nervous system. This is basically ancient genetic knowledge, combined with all the previously recognized experience traits that are connected to the current experience, combined with whatever other information that you are receiving. Trying to estimate a student's GPA is not a good example of how intuition works.

forgotmypw 8y ago
Daniel Kahneman: Your Intuition Is Wrong, Unless These 3 Conditions Are Met At the World Business Forum, Kahneman explained when people can trust their intuitive judgment and when they shouldn't. By Emily Zulz | November 16, 2018 at 01:18 PM Daniel Kahneman. (Photo: Bloomberg) Daniel Kahneman. (Photo: Bloomberg) Can intuition play a role in investing? According to Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Memorial Prize-winning behavioral economist, no. During a speech given at the World Business Forum in New York City, Kahneman explained when people can trust their intuitive judgement and when they should be wary of it. “Intuition is defined as knowing without knowing how you know,” he explained. “That’s the wrong definition. Because by that definition, you cannot have the wrong intuition. It presupposes that we know, and there is really a prejudice in favor of intuition. We like intuitions to be right.” According to Kahneman, a better definition — or a more precise one — would be that “intuition is thinking that you know without knowing why you do.” By this definition, the intuition could be right or it could be wrong, he added. Because, according to Kahneman, intuition can often be wrong. To show an example of this, Kahneman had the crowd guess the GPA of a college senior he called Julie. He told the crowd one fact about Julie — that she read fluently at a young age — and then asked them to judge how good of a student she had been. From research, Kahneman, who wrote The New York Times bestseller “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” said that most people guess that Julie has around a 3.7 GPA. “You might think that this is a good answer,” he said. “It’s a terrible answer. It’s an intuition, and it’s absolutely wrong. If you were to do it statistically, you would do it completely differently. Actually, the age that people read is very little information about what student they will be 20 years later.” According to Kahneman, this is an example of an intuition that is generated automatically with high confidence, and it’s wrong statistically. “In general, confidence is a very poor cue to accuracy. Because intuitions come to your mind with considerable confidence and there is no guarantee they’re right.” There are certain times when intuition can be correct. For instance, Kahneman explained, chess players and married couples generally have accurate intuition. “Intuitions of master chess players when they look at the board [and make a move], they’re accurate,” he said. “Everybody who’s been married could guess their wife’s or their husband’s mood by one word on the telephone. That’s an intuition and it’s generally very good, and very accurate.” According to Kahneman, who’s studied when one can trust intuition and when one cannot, there are three conditions that need to be met in order to trust one’s intuition. The first is that there has to be some regularity in the world that someone can pick up and learn. “So, chess players certainly have it. Married people certainly have it,” Kahnemen explained. However, he added, people who pick stocks in the stock market do not have it. “Because, the stock market is not sufficiently regular to support developing that kind of expert intuition,” he explained. The second condition for accurate intuition is “a lot of practice,” according to Kahneman. And the third condition is immediate feedback. Kahneman said that “you have to know almost immediately whether you got it right or got it wrong.” When those three kinds of conditions are satisfied, people develop expert intuition. “But unless those three conditions are satisfied, the mere fact that you have an idea and nothing else comes to mind and you feel a great deal of confidence — absolutely does not guarantee accuracy,” he added. — Related on ThinkAdvisor: Daniel Kahneman’s Solution for Minimizing Investors’ Regrets Michael Lewis: A Warning for Index Investors From the Oakland A’s Emily Zulz Emily Zulz Emily joined the ThinkAdvisor team as a reporter in the summer of 2014. She previously worked as a reporter for The Daily Journal in Kankakee, Illinois for a year and as a reporter and editor for The Daily Eastern News in Charleston, Illinois for two and a half years. Prior to joining ThinkAdvisor, Emily worked on Groupon’s editorial team in Chicago as a fact checker for three years. She graduated cum laude with a BA in journalism from Eastern Illinois University, and she has been the recipient of two journalism awards for her news reporting at daily newspapers.
- zwieback 8y ago
  Seems pretty reasonable to me - he gives a definition of what most people probably think of as intuition and then goes on to improve that definition. A hostile interpretation could say it's a strawman but with the additional context I think it's a pretty good article
jonknee 8y ago
It was so laughable he got a Nobel prize for it. That's not to say Kahneman is always right, but he is always worth listening to.
- unmole 8y ago
  Citing someone's Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel is probably the worst kind of an appeal to authority.
  - beat 8y ago
    Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Most of us trust the Nobel Prize to be a mostly-neutral arbiter of excellence in various fields. That means it is not the worst kind of appeal to authority, but rather the best - referencing a well-known and widely trusted source. Can you give us a reason we shouldn't trust it in the general case, since your claim extends to the general, not the specific?
    - 77pt77 8y ago
      > Most of us trust the Nobel Prize to be a mostly-neutral arbiter of excellence in various fields. Even if that were true, there is no Nobel Prize in Economics. It's a completely different prize, given by a different institution, that was associated much later with the Noble prizes.
beat 8y ago
Estimating a student's GPA may not be a good example of how intuition works, but it's an excellent example of how people try to use it.

paulsutter 8y ago

> in order to develop expert intuition (1) some regularity in the world that someone can pick up and learn (2) a lot of practice, and (3) you have to know almost immediately whether you got it right or got it wrong > “So, chess players certainly have it. Married people certainly have it [about each other]. People who pick stocks in the stock market do not have it. Because, the stock market is not sufficiently regular to support developing that kind of expert intuition,” he explained

lunchables 8y ago
After reading the article, this is a perfect summary.
- davidp93 8y ago
  The rest of the article adds very little
myth_buster 8y ago
This I believe is also hammered on in Thinking fast and slow which is an excellent book. It condenses the major findings on behavioral psychology from 21st century into an accessible paperback.
- beat 8y ago
  Adding this to my reading list, thanks!
derefr 8y ago
> the stock market is not sufficiently regular Stock markets are a lot more than just "not sufficiently regular"; they actively remove all regularity from themselves (that being the byproduct of how markets calibrate prices of things—regularity is the signal that makes people money, and so it gets exploited away.) Or, to put that in more precise words: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/h24JGbmweNpWZfBkM/markets-are-anti-inductive https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/h24JGbmweNpWZfBkM/markets-ar...
8y ago

branweb 8y ago

I wonder how those three conditions apply to intuition in software development. The only condition that seems to regularly be unmet is "immediate feedback."

mpweiher 8y ago
...which is why REPLs, fast test suites (1-5 seconds), etc. are so important. It's not just a quantitative thing, you get a qualitatively very very different process happening. People have known this, er, intuitively for some time. Kahneman gives us an handle on why it is: it lets us develop an intuition for the software we are working on.
AstralStorm 8y ago
They do apply reasonably well as long as you're solving similar problems. Even if programming language differs... It is similar with mathematicians. A mathematician may smell a rat in a proof like a programmer a bad pattern in code, but you can only really trust their intuition in their specialty field. E.g. web frontend programmer intuition won't do in backend, desktop UI, mobile, HPC, video game coding, embedded programming, real time applications or safety critical software. This does not preclude polyglots and polymaths or generalists.
tunesmith 8y ago
I think intuition goes downhill as your system increases in complexity. It's harder to develop deep experience or regularity in distributed systems than it is in your monolith that you know inside and out. Feedback can get less immediate, too.
- zwieback 8y ago
  So true. I spent the bulk of my early SW development career in distributed systems that were complex enough that they felt like they had a mind of their own. What I learned back then is that my intuition was worthless. Maybe that's just me but the key to success was always to set aside your expectation of what your code does and instead spend more time instrumenting and collecting data on what was actually going on. This is especially true for completely asynchronous systems like networks or systems that integrate multiple independent subsystems. Things just don't happen in the order you expected when timeouts, aborted operations and retries bubble up and down your OS and application stack. After 30 years I consider myself pretty capable in debugging such systems but one thing I never use is "intuition" as defined in the beginning of the article.

the_cat_kittles 8y ago

those three conditions are needed to learn anything.

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autokad 8y ago

how many are peeved they didn't get Julie's GPA? How can I accept its a terrible answer with 0 data provided. How much merit can I give to someone giving advice about investing when they gave me no data to indicate they are good at it.

meditativeape 8y ago

My intuition tells me that these three conditions are correct. Should I trust it? While these conditions intuitively make sense, the example that he used to support his conclusions feels very weak. If the only information I know about this person is she read fluently at a young age, I don't think I can make a good guess of her GPA in college at all. There's no "right intuition" in this case, because so many other variables are in play.

projectramo 8y ago
I think what you are missing is "base rate neglect." Let's say the overall average GPA is 3 (or 3.1 for women): https://blog.prepscholar.com/whats-the-average-high-school-gpa https://blog.prepscholar.com/whats-the-average-high-school-g... Then you would expect that to swamp the information that this person was an early reader. You might let the early reader have a slight effect.
gronne 8y ago
I think that was his point.

clay_the_ripper 8y ago

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.

zwieback 8y ago
So, what you're saying is that K's three conditions are met in your specific case.
- clay_the_ripper 8y ago
  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.

MKais 8y ago

Based on his three conditions, intuition looks like machine learning

tw1010 8y ago
That's because all it is is (unconsious) learning.
mrfredward 8y ago
Well, intuition is an output of a neural network, it's just that the neural net is implemented in meat instead of silicon.
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lordnacho 8y ago

This makes total sense. What's he's basically saying is if you've collected a lot of evidence, you can quickly classify a new data point. (And if feedback is not immediate or very noisy, you're not collecting as much evidence as you think.) If that sounds like a lesson for machine learning, it's because it is. For the same reason, as a quantitative trader, I look at stuff that has a lot of repetitions historically. And over short time periods, because that both gives you faster feedback and more non-overlapping reps. Which addresses the point he makes about the financial markets. The other takeaway is that you don't have nearly as much evidence as you think. I mean who wouldn't think that kids who learn to speak early have high GPAs? Often I get into a discussion with people who pull out something similar, with no specific source. Everyone else is convinced that not only is the hypothesis true, but that there's so much evidence that I'm just being difficult when I ask for it. There's a lot of traps like this in the social sciences. I'm not saying these are all wrong, just that your intuition is seductive if you don't ask for the evidence: - "People descended from the cold regions are smarter, because they had to be smart to survive" - "CEOs who have share options perform better, because they have better incentives" - "Without patents nobody would bother to invent anything" - "Reading to your kids is good for them" Lastly, some things are unlearnable for one person. If you're going to learn, you'd need to aggregate somehow: - How many times has someone sold their company? Probably not more than a handful. Even people who have n>0 are quite rare. So what does this say about how highly you should weight this person's experience? - How should I coach the team for the big final? Again, how many finals are there in a year in any given sport? Can you learn any lesson at all that's separate from just increasing the n of the number of games coached (which probably is meaningful)?

PKop 8y ago
Like people's anecdotal perception of recent weather (extremely small sample size, for one) gives them intuition to extrapolate large scale climate trends. "We never had storms like this 5 years ago, or when I was a kid. Things are getting really bad"
- rdiddly 8y ago
  It's not today's weather that gives them that, it's the lifetime of weather experience. If you're talking to someone at least 40 years old then it meets the 3 conditions.

robbrown451 8y ago

"intuition is thinking that you know without knowing why you do." That is not a precise definition at all, in fact it is an orthogonal concept. "Thinking that you know" may be happening during intuition, but to claim that that is what intuition actually IS is just wrong. Intuition is the thought, not the thought about the thought. A more precise definition might be something like "knowing -- rightly or wrongly -- without knowing how you know."

apo 8y ago

However, he added, people who pick stocks in the stock market do not have it. “Because, the stock market is not sufficiently regular to support developing that kind of expert intuition,” he explained. In the short term, definitely. In the long term, however, I disagree. Stock markets follow highly-regular multi-year cycles. The problem seems to be that people forget this during the peak or trough of the moment. Interestingly, this intersects with the third requirement: And the third condition is immediate feedback. Kahneman said that “you have to know almost immediately whether you got it right or got it wrong.” Given the long intervals over which stock market cycles operate, there's little chance to get immediate feedback. So according to this analysis, most stock pickers can't gain intuition - but not for the reason stated in the article. It takes someone with: (a) a really good memory; and (b) a very long time to play.

pnw_hazor 8y ago
In one his other books DK discussed being hired by a major investment bank to research decision making processes used by their leading investment managers so they could train incoming bankers. DK discovered that the successful outcomes of the senior bankers were random rather than based on skill or experience. His report was not well received.

wolco 8y ago

I believe he is confusing intuition woth deductive logic. My intuituion tells me that the gpa is lower then what the group would accept or he wouldn't use it as an example. Is that intuition, no.

ska 8y ago
Is that intuition, no. Correct, that does not meet the definition of intuition he has proposed.

beat 8y ago

This reminds me of one of my little sayings... "Common sense is just a first approximation of reality". So yeah, common sense is more likely right than not, but it is not reliable. If you need a reliable answer, you need to go deeper than common sense. Of course, intuition is somewhat different, in that intuition can be wrong more often than right. See Hans Rosling's findings in Factfulness to grok that, and start to understand just how dumb you actually are.

tw1010 8y ago

What does regularity mean, more formally? The phenomenon needs to have a probability distribution that looks something other than (uniform?) random?

pilooch 8y ago

Sounds much like conditions to a successful solving of a problem when modeled with machine learning. Have enough data, immediate (as opposed to delayed) feedback, and enough structure in the data. That neural networks in our brains might be learning an embedding or two :)

projectramo 8y ago

Daniel Kahneman claims that (1) regularity, (2) practice and (3) immediate feedback are the keys to trusting intuition. If this is true, I should be able to intuit when I get a lot of upvotes on Hacker news. This comment will do okay, I predict. (1-5 votes) But if I had added a joke, it would have done very well. (10+ votes) Now that I added that last insight, it will do even better than okay. (3-7 votes). I'll report back in a day.

ssambros 8y ago
So, what's the joke? I want to see you succeed.
- projectramo 8y ago
  Sorry to mislead you. I hadn't thought of a joke, but if I had thought of a joke and put it in, my posts get a lot more upvotes. It might be my natural humor, or it might be people reading HN like a laugh however corny. I don't get feedback on why people vote, and am not allowed to ask.
projectramo 8y ago
I will just edit this comment to report on the number of votes: original vote plus: 6 upvotes - 15 minutes edit: 7 upvotes - 1 hour
projectramo 8y ago
3 days, 7 points (6 votes)! Kahneman is right!

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Benjammer 8y ago

Elizer Yudkowski extrapolates quite a bit on these ideas in his book Inadequate Equilibria[0]. [0]https://equilibriabook.com/toc/ https://equilibriabook.com/toc/

blahblah3 8y ago

The third criteria of immediate feedback seems too stringent. In chess, feedback is often not immediate. If one were to run a reinforcement learning algorithm on chess with no human coded rewards, the only objective feedback would come at the end of the game (win, loss, draw). Certainly the more immediate the feedback the better though.

Benjammer 8y ago
I think it's more important that the input produces an immediate and readily observable change to the state of the world, not necessarily that you must have perfect information in the feedback as well that shows the exact utility of your previous action. For example, in the stock market it's not even clear to me what the total scope of effects is, immediate or not, that any single action I take as a private investor will have on the market. Before I even can start to learn about the effectiveness of the changes that my actions produce, I am hamstrung by an inability to see an immediate, comprehensive effect to each action.

placebo 8y ago

Those are very reasonable points to explain the way correct subconscious prediction of success works. I wonder though whether this definition doesn't run the risk of creating a closed system of thought, i.e one where you can always refute opposing evidence from within the system without being aware that the system is making you incapable of seeing something else. Specifically, any genuine cases of intuition not due to Kahneman's reasoning (if such exist), would never be seen and always attributed to survivor bias (as long as they don't become a statistical anomaly). It's probably difficult to build a case against this reasoning, as it seems quite logical - my first thought as a candidate for a counterexample was claims of "love at first sight". Sure, many of those might end in divorce but does that mean that all the successes are just due to being on the right side of statistics or is there something more going on?

gesman 8y ago

http://www.presentlove.com/using-intuition-for-trading-stock-options-markets/ http://www.presentlove.com/using-intuition-for-trading-stock...

mrxd 8y ago

Maybe it's just me, but I find Kahneman frustrating to read and this article really demonstrates the problem: he defines a concept and then gives examples which don't meet the definition. He defines intuition as thinking you know without knowing how you know. OK, great. Now the example: guessing someone's GPA based on the fact that they started reading early. Like most people, I guessed it would be on the high side. Kahneman calls this "intuition that is generated automatically with high confidence." And that's… just wrong. I have very little confidence in my guess, and it certainly isn't generated automatically. It's based on a belief—which turns out to be wrong—that early reading has some relationship with college GPA. So maybe in this example, he is using the dictionary definition of "intuition", which is basically non-conscious reasoning. He thinks this shows the problem with intuition, but again, that's just wrong. I didn't get the answer wrong because I failed to reason consciously. It's because my belief about the relationship between early reading and GPA was wrong. If I take his advice and don't trust my intuition, and carefully and logically reason my way to the answer, guess what? I'm still wrong because my information is wrong. His explanation of when to trust your intuition is similarly flawed. He basically says you can trust your intuition when you have good information. Well yeah. That's a generic statement that goes for almost any method of drawing conclusions about the world, and doesn't help us understand when intuition is useful or not useful.

Shank 8y ago
I think at least some of it comes from the fact that Kahneman didn't write the article. The article is composed from both his speech that was referenced and from the book that he wrote, and kind of marries them together in a weird way. I find articles like this extremely thin because they usually synthesize points with very thin lines. Original authors will have hundreds of repeated examples and data sets, of which Kahneman is one of them. He certainly didn't win the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for nothing -- he has serious data to back up his research. If I had to summarize Thinking, Fast & Slow up in one sentence: human intuition shouldn't be trusted when it comes to statistics problems, because humans aren't naturally statistical thinkers. All of the research in the behavioral economics category shows this pattern very well. GPA distribution among populations is statistically quantifiable. Due to human cognitive biases, however, it appears to be a problem that has an obvious answer by intuition, and that answer is wrong. The specific three qualities that are outlined as giving way to intuition boil down to having a large body of evidence and a very tight feedback loop, which statistics does not have but things like emotion reading do have. If you get the emotions of your significant other wrong you'll immediately see the repercussions. Casually misjudging someone on the street because of statistics will never see you being corrected. But really, I think you should just read the book. This article doesn't even come close to doing behavioral economics justice.

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throwaway487549 8y ago

Intuition is, so to speak, an attempt to match against evolved brain structures which reflects some constraints of the environment in which it has been evolved. Babies could read faces. This is exactly what I am talking about. Just this.