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The value of the two are intricately linked but ultimately not comparable. Is money as valuable as a marketable skill? Is getting somewhere quickly as valuabl
by eof 16y ago
The value of the two are intricately linked but ultimately not comparable.
Is money as valuable as a marketable skill? Is getting somewhere quickly as valuable as a vehicle?
The intuition of a person who doesn't value rational thinking is going to be worthless in an empirical field. The gut feeling of someone who can't show they are right is not likely to be correct.
Intuition is just the fast-read cache of pre-computed notions. If a problem looks similar but not exactly like a dozen or so others that you have solved in the past, you take a sort of snapshot of all that past work and distill it into an intuitive grasp of the problem.
If you see a problem unlike any you have ever encountered, you are unlikely to have an intuitive idea of the solution. Sometimes people will pull past-solved problems out of their fast-read cache and apply them to unrelated problems in an irrational way; sometimes people will feel their intuition guiding them in a certain way and rationally realize they are projecting subconsciously an unrelated situation onto the problem.
So intuition is only as valuable as its rational basis. Intuition is much more efficient, much like using a rainbow table to crack a password; the table is only as effective as its precomputed hashes; it will never crack a password that hasn't been precomputed. However, compared to a traditional brute-force approach, it's orders of magnitudes more efficient. A brute-force approach however, with enough time will crack any password.
- waru 16y agoWell, the powerful thing about intuition is that you actually can intuit something totally new. Of course it draws on past experiences, but it can connect past experiences and solutions in new ways, to create a brand new solution. So, I think intuition is not as simple as being a faster way of pulling out an old solution. I, for one, often struggle to explain to others why my gut feeling is right, but it often is.
- eof 16y agoNew, yes.. but just 'out of the blue'.. I doubt it. A life long plumber is not going to suddenly intuit a better algorithm for full text search; but a dataminer in the accounting world might. I agree that it can connect past experiences and solutions in new ways; that's obviously what it does, but my point is those past experiences and solutions have to exist already; it's literally what they are drawing from. If your brain categorized failures as 'solutions' due to irrational thinking, whatever you intuit from those 'solutions' is going to be a failure as well. Struggling to explain why your gut feeling 'is right' when it pops into your head is normal and completely separate than being absolutely unable to make a good argument for it when people offer contradictory solutions. Personally, when my intuition is ahead of my reasoning, yet I have a strong personal belief my intuition 'is right' I will often later, in a spontaneous way rationally link it all together in a sort of "ohh thats why it's like that."