Daniel Kahneman on when to trust intuitive judgment
Maybe it&#x27;s just me, but I find Kahneman frustrating to read and this article really demonstrates the problem: he defines a concept and then gives examples which don&#x27;t meet the definition.<p>He defines intuition as thinking you know without knowing how you know. OK, great. Now the example: guessing someone&#x27;s GPA based on the fact that they started reading early. Like most people, I guessed it would be on the high side. Kahneman calls this &quot;intuition that is generated automatically with high confidence.&quot; And that&#x27;s… just wrong.<p>I have very little confidence in my guess, and it certainly isn&#x27;t generated automatically. It&#x27;s based on a belief—which turns out to be wrong—that early reading has some relationship with college GPA.<p>So maybe in this example, he is using the dictionary definition of &quot;intuition&quot;, which is basically non-conscious reasoning. He thinks this shows the problem with intuition, but again, that&#x27;s just wrong.<p>I didn&#x27;t get the answer wrong because I failed to reason consciously. It&#x27;s because my belief about the relationship between early reading and GPA was wrong. If I take his advice and don&#x27;t trust my intuition, and carefully and logically reason my way to the answer, guess what? I&#x27;m still wrong because my information is wrong.<p>His explanation of when to trust your intuition is similarly flawed. He basically says you can trust your intuition when you have good information. Well yeah. That&#x27;s a generic statement that goes for almost any method of drawing conclusions about the world, and doesn&#x27;t help us understand when intuition is useful or not useful.