Ask HN: Do you think intuition is as valuable as rational thinking?

Please don't apologize for trying things. :)

To answer your question. I have personally been more right than wrong when i have followed a gut feeling. I also act when i go with it more often than when i dont. When i am 'rational' i often DO NOT act because rationality tends to lead to pessimism. Atleast with me.

Intuition + rational thinking = valuable/powerful

Rational thinking can sometimes be like a wall...

Intuition will sometimes lead to ludicrous solutions...

Guess you have to use rationality to filter out the ridiculous ideas you can come up with intuitively...

"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.

We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."

Albert Einstein

Intuition and rational thinking are most powerful when you get them to agree. If I reason my way to a conclusion that doesn't feel right, that's a good indication that I missed something or discounted some aspect that I shouldn't have. And if I have a gut feeling, I won't act on it until I can rationalize it.*

* Of course, rationalizing a gut feeling is far from objective. But at least it makes you think things through.

Logic is great for answering life's questions; intuition is great for knowing which questions to ask.

Intuition is very often a direct result of experience--- I still remember my math professors all chanting various mantras about training my 'mathematical intuition' and over the years, I'd have to agree with them. I don't think in terms on one versus the other, if you are not using both, something is wrong. Easy to understand if you don't have any intuition, but if you do and you ignore it for the sake of 'rationality', I'm not sure that would in fact be rational! We get our ideas from a lot of different places, some more off the wall than others--- once we have them we can examine them and proceed or discard based on some presumably rational evaluation. Is intuition as valuable as rational thinking? You betcha!

I've found that there is a trend in software development to throw out both reason and intuition, and rely upon a form of retarded "test driven" empiricism. You can't possibly be smart or experienced enough to KNOW how your for loop is going to work, it has to be thoroughly tested. The same goes for product development. We can't possibly come up with an idea that people might want, without first taking a few polls where we ask them what they want...

They are two different tools for different scenarios. Intuition is only valuable when you are experienced in something. Rational thinking, however, can be applied to areas where you have no or little experience.

Say, if a person doesn't know programming, his 'intuition' in programming would just be wild guesses and unlikely to be useful. However, he can still gather facts on programming and think rationally on it, no matter how slow and painful.

So in your original context of your post, I would suggest that we should only use intuition when we have extensive experience in that market or working with the target users. Otherwise, stay close with rationality.

It is by logic we prove, it is by intuition that we invent. - Henri Poincaré

Is intuition as valuable as rational thinking?

At first glance, yes.

I've definitely found intuition to be valuable, in the sense that my own intuition has been correct more often than otherwise. But intuition is basically the result of my unconscious reasoning based on lots of past experience, so it absolutely has to be trained--it's worthless without that background.

However, if I've made an important choice intuitively and it turns out right, I absolutely dig back into it and try to discover why it was the right choice in a rational fashion. Understanding that choice rationally lets me learn how to apply what I learned later, and sometimes helps me see second- and third-order effects which I can't see intuitively.

I think intuition is the only way to proceed, actually.

-- But let me clarify! I want to directly attack those who you refer to thinking that "if you can't explain or prove something rationally then it's not of any value". I don't think anyone is a constant calculator like that. It's important to learn because we're building computers that operate that way, but it doesn't appear that strict rationality (whatever that is) is our true operating mode.

So if you want to get the gains of rationality, the best you can do is use rational structure to train and shape your intuition. If you're skilled at the math required then you can use it to empower your intuition -- but never replace it.

I say this with strong fear of thought paralysis. Those who spend too long rationalizing every thing seem likely to trap themselves in local minima, to argue endlessly over two similar choices while missing out benefit of either.

I like to think about MCMC algorithms, actually. They're guaranteed to converge to the most liable posterior beliefs, but do so by jumping randomly. Each step forward is technically blind and hopeful, but by keeping a goal in mind and learning from every jump you improve, even considering the immense ignorance that Markov methods maintain.

Intuition can do better.

i found out that most times my intuition is right, even when rationally thinking about something would come up with a different decision.

but i guess this strongly depends on your intuition :)

The value of the two are intricately linked but ultimately not comparable.

Is money as valuable as a marketable skill? Is getting somewhere quickly as valuable as a vehicle?

The intuition of a person who doesn't value rational thinking is going to be worthless in an empirical field. The gut feeling of someone who can't show they are right is not likely to be correct.

Intuition is just the fast-read cache of pre-computed notions. If a problem looks similar but not exactly like a dozen or so others that you have solved in the past, you take a sort of snapshot of all that past work and distill it into an intuitive grasp of the problem.

If you see a problem unlike any you have ever encountered, you are unlikely to have an intuitive idea of the solution. Sometimes people will pull past-solved problems out of their fast-read cache and apply them to unrelated problems in an irrational way; sometimes people will feel their intuition guiding them in a certain way and rationally realize they are projecting subconsciously an unrelated situation onto the problem.

So intuition is only as valuable as its rational basis. Intuition is much more efficient, much like using a rainbow table to crack a password; the table is only as effective as its precomputed hashes; it will never crack a password that hasn't been precomputed. However, compared to a traditional brute-force approach, it's orders of magnitudes more efficient. A brute-force approach however, with enough time will crack any password.

I think the hard part about working off of intuition is communicating it to others. I often find myself working backwards to justify out my intuition, and I think it comes across as me just making stuff up.

Intuition, for me, is just natural rationality that has been 'learned'.

Each approach has liabilities that should be recognized. Intuitive decisions might "feel right" but there are so many cognitive biases that can make something intuitively appealing but surprisingly wrong. Analytical, rational approaches are likewise poor at developing creative solutions but is good at removing bias from reasoning by clearly stating every step.

People who believe that they make all their decisions rationally are delusional.

I say this with confidence because there is a large amount of research showing that people make decisions with a good deal of input- if not entirely- from the non-conscious parts of their brain. In fact, there are some people that argue that our conscious brains don't make decisions at all, they merely rationalize it post facto. (This goes too far, for me)

The classic example of this are the split brain studies, where they would show one half of a person's brain a sign that said "stand up." The patient would stand up. Then they would ask the other half of the brain (the one that was capable of speaking; in most humans, only one half of the brain can) why they stood up, and they would be completely convinced it was because they wanted to get a drink or water, or go to the bathroom.

That said, I'm pretty much the most gung-ho person on reason I know. The reason for this is that, like someone mentioned on a blog post on here, intuition is not transferable. If someone wants to convince me of anything at all, they're going to have to make reasoned arguments, not emotional ones.

Intuition represents all the reasoning that your brain does but which you aren't able to put into words. In many cases, that includes important information and heuristics which you would be ill advised to ignore. However, that also includes information and heuristics that may be incorrect; so if your intuition disagrees with your explicit reasoning, you should debug both to figure out which one's wrong and how.

I'm not sure I see the distinction. If following your intuition leads to better results than a more explicitly analytical method, then obviously the rational thing to do is to place more weight on your intuition. If "rationality" systematically underperforms an "irrational" approach, then your definitions are exactly backwards.

An intuitive decision making skill worth having is always based in reason.

We might not base those intuitive decisions on clear cut reasons (that guarantee results, 100%), but we base them on past experiences and observed phenomena (that increase the likelihood of the result, sometime even to 100%.)

If you are asking about an intuitive decision that is not based on any of the above, then your question is really, "Should I make random decisions?" Sure, just because something has a minute chance doesn't mean it won't happen. It might just work.

Emotions seem to be essential to decision-making. People with brain injuries preventing them from having emotions find many things impossible to decide. [1]

But however much we rely on emotions and intuition in our own thinking, they're not easy to communicate, especially to skeptics. Those of us with a scientific and skeptical mindset try not to accept irrational arguments from other people. [2]

So, in some sense, an idea without a rational justification isn't worth very much (yet), because you can't convince most people that it's correct. But it still might have a lot of potential! And if we're talking about hacking then there are other forms of persuasion (code and demos).

[1] http://changingminds.org/explanations/emotions/emotion_decis...

[2] This is especially true of mathematics where rational arguments (that is, proofs) are valued far above any other kind of argument.

I think it depends on the kind of person you are. Use what you have.

I'm the type that will routinely head off to a restaurant with only vague information about where it is or what its name is.

"It's probably down here, this seems like a street that would have mexican restaurants on it..."

"I've been there once before, and I remember it was on a block that was on the edge of a hill that sloped off toward the morning sun..."

It seems crazy, but the reason I end up doing this is because it works a surprising amount of the time. I end up getting there, somehow.

With work, I find that I end up relying on intuition the same way. The downside is that until I'm familiar with the problem space, I tend to be more unsure of myself than my rational peers. The upside is that once I learn the space, I can move more quickly with less information than they do.

Edit: Like others said below, the other downside is that this can sometimes lead to surprisingly bad results, especially in new and unfamiliar areas. I've been trying to exercise my logic muscles more recently to help with this.