Here’s what I think: intuition is mainly a set of patterns, evaluations, anticipations and predictions that we learn from experience. Intuition differs in effectiveness across people and tasks because:
- Focus: We have experience in different domains. One person spends their time cooking, another training in martial arts.
- Wideness: Most have experience in more than one domain, and there can be cross-domain synergies as well. Perhaps the martial artist cook has an advantage.
- Time: Some have more hours in a single domain than others. The cook who cooks daily will usually have better cooking intuition than the occasional cook.
- Diversity: Some have more diverse experience in one domain. The cook who makes a different meal daily has an advantage.
- Feedback: Some of us get more feedback on consequences than others — feedback accelerates the speed at which your intuition improves. Martial arts stagnates without a resisting opponent. A cook needs to taste their creations.
- Aptitude: There may be some aptitude differences in how quickly our intuition gets trained. It’s not a fully level playing field.
- Mistakes: Some people are more likely to notice mistakes of intuition, and then are more motivated to analyze them, learn from them, and adapt.
- Attention: Some people simply pay greater attention to what happens around them, and to the details of experience — which makes it easier for them to notice what’s happening and pick up on patterns that others may miss.
- Models: Some people are also better at learning (or forming their own) mental models, then noticing where they can be used, and applying them. This almost looks like intuition and serves a similar purpose in many cases, but may or may not be considered part of it.
It seems that many factors go into the quality of our intuition! As a consequence, some people have much more reliable intuitions than others (in any given domain).
This piece was first written on October 5, 2020, and first appeared on my website on August 17, 2026.
Comments