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It's not better than proper research, but when proper research doesn't exist it's all we have

• josephg 3y ago
  Your “gut” instincts can also be a remarkably effective tool in the right situations. You have to feed it enough data and are careful of systematic biases, but your instincts can be brilliant. I had an incredible moment in a job interview: for context, I’ve been programming for about 30 years and 10 of those years have involved a lot of JavaScript. I was given a timed debugging problem to test my skills: “Here is some JS code with failing tests. Go fix the bugs.” Before I even ran the tests I scrolled through the code to get a sense of it. My instincts tweaked on one section. “This code smells. I don’t trust it.” I said. On second glance - “Oh yeah this is totally buggy”. Sure enough, I was right. The interviewer was blown away. There’s no way I could do that consciously. Science is great for a lot of things, but when we don’t have science, we could do a lot worse than trusting our intuition.