This might be good advice for fiction, but I would expect most non-fiction writers to be familiar with how terribly your intuition or instinct actually matches

This might be good advice for fiction, but I would expect most non-fiction writers to be familiar with how terribly your intuition or instinct actually matches the real world. For example, the natural intuition about something which has literally never happened is that it won't happen. Intuition gave us the gambler's fallacy (my own father thought he was getting better odds every week of playing the same lottery numbers), Monty Hall (check out the Mythbusters episode if you think that intuition has been defeated), xenophobia, and so on. You have to consciously fight these natural tendencies at every turn to produce reasonable non-fiction.