The many forms of belief

October 11, 2020

What does it mean to believe? We often say things like "I believe..." and "they think that..." But what do we really mean by a "belief"? It's notoriously tricky to define. For starters, we sometimes think of beliefs in binaries (true vs. false) and other times in probabilities (a 90% chance of coming true). We sometimes would be willing to bet on our beliefs ("I'll bet you $100 that New York City is not the capital of New York State"), and other times we wouldn't be willing to bet (e.g...

Why Do Some People Have Better Intuition?

October 5, 2020

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: ...