3 ms·
A good piece of advice I've heard is that our goal should be to tune our intuitions so they can be reliable. Gut feelings are sometimes wrong and thus shouldn't
by bumby 4y ago
A good piece of advice I've heard is that our goal should be to tune our intuitions so they can be reliable. Gut feelings are sometimes wrong and thus shouldn't be binding, but if we can improve their accuracy they can be extremely, extremely helpful.
Is there evidence that we can train our intuitions? I'm reminded of the expert art assessor in Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink" who immediately knew a sculpture was a forgery by gut instinct. (I know Gladwell's writing isn't often held in high regard, but it's a good illustration for my question). Surely, we aren't inborn with the ability to assess art validity, implying it's a trainable 'instinct'.
- borroka 4y agoDon't we also recognize a horse by "gut instinct" or intuition? It is not that the jot down notes to make up our mind between a horse and a zebra. What we instantaneously identify does not come from nowhere, it is that our pattern recognition happens below our conscience. And this move from conscious to other-than-conscious happens for any simple or complex skill, when the latter is of course properly practiced, which means, most often, a lot. Is the example provided by Gladwell different from the instance of "something is off" that many of us had when we got to our home and something, a plant, a chair, or something barely noticeable like a medal, had been moved elsewhere, and we could not explain why our "off" button went off? If many among us had spent a lot of time dealing with art and forged art we would have acquired, conditioned on our "talent", similar "gut feelings" with respect to original and forged art.