Expert Intuition: When Can We Trust It?
Chapter summary from Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
Not all intuition is equal. Some intuitions are genuine expertise: fast recognition built from long practice. Others are confident guesses dressed as skill.
Reliable intuition requires two conditions: a sufficiently regular environment and the chance to learn it through repeated feedback. Without patterns and feedback, confidence drifts free of accuracy.
This is why some professions produce sharp intuition and others produce illusions. When outcomes are noisy or delayed, learning is distorted and “experience” becomes repetition without correction.
The slow system can ask a blunt diagnostic question: “When I trust a hunch here, how often is it right?” But many fields do not provide clear answers.
Respect intuition when it has earned its speed. Distrust it when the world is irregular, feedback is weak, and certainty is mainly a performance.
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