Today I’d like to talk about one of the most important and useful skills in my life: intuition.
After reading this tweet:
(“BENEATH ALL GOOD AND EVIL LIES A FUNDAMENTAL ETERNAL AND INDESTRUCTIBLE GOODNESS THAT HAS NO OPPOSITE”)
I thought to myself: I have no idea about what lies underneath all good and evil, how can somebody be so sure?
I started reflecting on how I know stuff, on what I think beliefs actually are, and I came up with a distinction of two kinds of beliefs:
- beliefs based on own experiences – I call these grounded beliefs
- beliefs based on inter/extrapolated grounded beliefs, or intuitions
What I mean by that is that we form all kinds of beliefs and some of them are based on what we really experienced, and others are our brains filling in the blanks in between. Both are a kind of belief, both are useful, because we get a more complete idea about the world compared to if we held only grounded beliefs.
All beliefs have associated confidence – how strongly we believe something is true. For example if I’m walking back home from lunch and I see a person with my own eyes standing at the corner, I strongly believe there is a person standing at the corner. Let’s say with 99% probability.
But if I’m walking at night and the street lamp is broken and I see a dark figure at the corner, I might not be completely sure there is a person standing there, maybe it’s just a shadow. Let’s say I’m 73% confident there is a person standing there.
The same holds for intuitions. I can form new beliefs based on grounded beliefs. Maybe I have an intuition that the person wants to rob me, because they are kind of hiding in the dark and there is no obvious reason why they should be just standing there (they are not waiting for a taxi, or using their phone for example). This intuition is based on a couple of grounded beliefs, which themselves have confidence lower than 100%. So the intuition should reflect the confidence of the underlying grounded beliefs, plus there should be some additional uncertainty because the belief is not grounded, but derived from other beliefs.
Of course, all of this reasoning is happening on a subconscious level. But I find it quite important to reflect on beliefs and intuitions I have and update them.
Should you trust your intuition?
There was a period in my life when I was aware of having intuitions about many things, but I didn’t trust them at all, because I was trying to be really evidence-based. In other words, I trusted only my grounded beliefs, but I gave a really low confidence to my intuitions.
In retrospect I think it was wrong. Now I find intuitions very important and helpful, as they form a more complete, yet uncertain, picture of the world and they guide me even in the absence of a higher-certainty source of information.
Not trusting own intuitions is one failure mode, but trusting your intuitions blindly is also suboptimal. As is often the case, something in between works the best. But how to find it?
How to calibrate your intuition?
The simple advice would be: try, fail, and update. Often. Intuitions are the kind of thing that needs to be trained on lots of experience.
The little bit more involved advice would go something like: if you generally don’t really trust your intuitions, start with intuitions that can be tested in a cheap way. And try following them. Either you will get rewarded and you can happily increase your confidence in this particular intuition and little bit also in your intuitions in general. Or you will fail in which case you’ll get some useful datapoint. You can then reflect on what about this particular intuition was wrong and what you can learn to locate other intuitions that are wrong in a similar way.
If you already rely on your intuitions a lot, you know how valuable they can be. Look for ways how to make them even more useful! Identify which intuitions are correct, and which might be overconfident. Try sharing them more with others and get some feedback. If you are right about them, you can bring tremendous value to other people! If not, it’s an easy way to learn. Other than that, try following your intuitions and if it fails, be honest with yourself. Reflect on why it actually didn’t work and update appropriately.
In case you were wondering, I don’t judge the author of the tweet in any way – maybe they do have direct experience or good reasons for having strong intuitions about the claim (I’d love to hear about them!). But I don’t. And reflecting on this difference was super interesting for me!