I'm sorry, I'm doing that HN thing again where one reacts to the title. I think there's definitely merit to not analyze your gut feelings. With that said, I wou

I'm sorry, I'm doing that HN thing again where one reacts to the title. I think there's definitely merit to not analyze your gut feelings. With that said, I would have a framework on when it is appropriate to trust them at least. I once wrote a literature review essay assignment [1] on when to trust your intuition and why meditation can help you to feel your intuition better. It was for a class called cognition and emotion at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. I remember specifically to write about this as it was slightly outside of the scope of the class. The professor green lit it because it was about cognition, emotion and we did have a lecture on how intuition worked in the brain. That assignment has been life changing for me. Before it, I didn't really know much about how to train my intuition. Afterwards, I had an idea. The assignment has been a long time ago, but what has remained in my mind is that: 1. Your intuition can only be trusted when you're an expert on something - or at least have some experience. 2. The experience needs to have enough volume and enough regularity. Think chess, but poker is fine too. With poker you just need more examples but ultimately there's regularity in the game. It's just more fuzzy. However, the literature showed that getting expertise/experience in something like clinical psychology can be way tougher as a clinical psychologist sees a low amount of patients (not thousands but dozens) and many clinical diagnoses are fuzzy in unpredictable ways as we have little clue with many conditions how things are caused or if we're even talking about the same thing inside a particular condition (e.g. many misdiagnoses happen). 3. Experience is narrow. You think you're a people person? Sure, but if you've only been a people person in the US, it won't transfer well to other cultures. Your intuition will fool you. There's a relearning period needed there. 4. You can strengthen to feel your intuition by enhancing your interoceptive awareness. This can be done by mindfulness meditation. Yea, that's it? I think? It's in part based on the work of Kahneman and Klein. Not the pop psychology books but their actual academic work. It's also based on some neuroscience that other researchers did. I vaguely remember something about beginner and expert Shogi players (Japanese chess). [1] https://melvinroest.github.io/articles/intuition.pdf https://melvinroest.github.io/articles/intuition.pdf