Is intuition real? (created 2010-02-25).

This page is moving to a new website.

Someone asked if intuition is real. My hunch is that intuition is may be real, but it is grossly overrated. Most of the reports about the value of intuition are anecdotal. If there is any empirical data out there, it tends to show that people who make judgments based on their gut instinct tend to do poorly on average because their memory is selective. A very accessible book that makes this point far better than I could is How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life by Thomas Gilovich I would argue that developing critical thinking skills is a far more useful application of your time than developing your intuition.