Intuition

This is "intuition mountain." [1]
It is my attempt at a pictorial metaphor for the importance of intuition for scientific progress, and for decision-making in general.

You may know of the dichotomy between algorithmic, mechanistic science and intuition. [2]

Other names for this dichotomy include rational / romantic, thinking / feeling, logical / emotional. [3] [4]

In today's world, mechanistic science has the upper hand. Science has given us so much. So what good is intuition? It lets us see where science cannot. Take a look at this mountain viewed through the lenses of science and intuition. It's a metaphor for an equation that you are maximizing.

The central part of the mountain is drawn with a clear black line - here science explains the world in full detail. But the neighboring mountains are drawn with fuzzy dotted lines. There, science has not explored, so we rely upon intuition to get an idea of what is there, because intuition's lens casts a wider view.

Intuition lets us know that we, the anthill of humanity, should explore the snow-capped mountain on the right. Science? If it acted alone, it would probably lead us to explore the mountain on the left.

In addition to scientific exploration and progress, decision-making in general can be viewed through these two lenses. Ever make a gut decision? Impulsive decision-making is often looked down upon in our country, but there's more to it than we often realize.

Takeaway: we typically maximize locally, where algorithmic science delineates for us. But if we use our intuition, we can maximize more universally.


[1] The name is a bit of a misnomer, because only the left and right mountains are "intuitive." The central mountain is "scientific."

[2] The dichotomy's prevalence in our lives came to the forefront of my thinking when I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which was published in 1974. Pirsig speaks of chem lab in college, and how easy it was for him to produce thousands of hypotheses, but how difficult it was for him to decide which hypothesis to test. For a precursor to Pirsig's discussion of the miscommunication between the two sides of the dichotomy, see the 1959 lecture "The Two Cultures" by C.P. Snow, who, in a sign of the times, argued that the humanities have much to learn from science.

[3] Kahneman breaks our thought processes into two types as follows. Perception and intuition are fast, parallel, automatic, effortless, associative, slow-learning, emotional. Reasoning is slow, serial, controlled, effortful, rule-governed, flexible, and neutral. Kahneman, Daniel. "Maps of Bounded Rationality: Psychology for Behavioral Economics." The American Economic Review, Vol. 93, No. 5. (2003), pp. 1449-1475.

[4] BusinessWeek calls the split male / female.