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That’s a great point about the term “intuitive”. Our intuition is based on our own experience, so it is necessarily different for each of us. But we can at le
by blevin 7y ago
That’s a great point about the term “intuitive”. Our intuition is based on our own experience, so it is necessarily different for each of us. But we can at least unite around shared experience, our cultural heritage and language. User interface idioms (double tap to zoom), videogame tropes (there is a button you hold to run), or typical standard library calls (here is how to fmt a string) all correspond to communities that know them. The beauty of learning lisp, forth, ML, prolog, verilog is not only that you grow your intuition but also that they help you better reflect on the boundaries of your knowledge and its finite extent. So much disagreement online is simply because we come from non-overlapping communities that use the same words to describe different bound experiences.
- kazinator 7y agoStuff you had to learn, like all the examples you gave, isn't "intuition". Intuition refers to some sort of understanding that arrives without reasoning or evidence. Very little is actually intuitive. Someone once said that the only intuitive user interface is the nipple. But babies have to learn how to latch on; if it's so intuitive, why do we have breastfeeding clinics? Humor may be intuitive. Why does a three-month-old chuckle when someone sneezes? Nobody taught them that it's supposed to be funny, or what funny is.