A Thought on Intuition

Intuition is something we rely on all the time. In the case of knowing a craft, intuitive knowledge is necessary for proficiency. It’s something that isn’t really taught either. Putting in the reps is the only way to become good. 

Part of intuition relies on seeing patterns that can’t be easily expressed. We hope to understand what causes the effects we experience, because we want life to make sense. It’s only when things don’t match up (aka a problem) where we begin to make conjectures about what created the effect. It’s easy to make false connections though, which is why intuition can be problematic. 

In more extreme instances intuition can be detrimental to others and, therefore, be immoral. Bigotry, for example, is based on false correlations. It is necessary then that we remain critical of intuition.

The only way to know if our intuition (implicit knowledge) is accurate is to make it explicit. The line of demarcation between the implicit and explicit is our ability to falsify conjectures regarding causations. The more common name for this process is science.